Thursday, December 14, 2017

Wallet vendors securing the sandbox

Here’s What Keeps Bitcoin Developers Up at Night as the Price Hits $10,000

The recent Baltic Honeybadger 2017 conference in Riga, Latvia featured an all star panel of Bitcoin developers and security experts on the second day of the event. During this panel, the participants were asked to explain what kinds of possible issues with Bitcoin keep them up at night.In their responses, the panel of Ciphrex CEO and Bitcoin Core contributor Eric Lombrozo, Blockstream CEO Adam Back, JoinMarket developer Adam Gibson, applied cryptography consultant and sometimes Bitcoin Core contributor Peter Todd, SatoshiLabs CTO Pavol Rusnak, and Libbitcoin lead maintainer Eric Voskuil discussed the issues with the recent phenomenon of spinoff coins, a lack of understanding as to why Bitcoin is useful, and the fact that some of them sleep better today than they did in the early days of this new technology.
The problem they deal with is scaling, both i the hardware wallets, the online accounts, and the interfaces to the blockchains.    All of these problems boil down to a secure protocol and a timeout.  It is the secure protocol they worry about, the point where simple protocols need to be protected to the microprocessor core.

Start with hardware wallets. The secure element in a hardware wallet looks and acts like a spread to us.  But inside the wallet, the protected space is a data structure, per coin, in a portion of memory only accessible via a set of protected kernel call.  The protected structures include keys and accounts.

For the trading pits, like Coinbase, the same should hold true by reduction, these sites should look like endpoints of a cash transaction between two secure elements. I side the pits, every transactions an encapsulation of that, the your protected trading bot engages in cash transaction with the pit boss.

In my semantics, a cash transaction is a point to point watermarked coin transfer, with erasure of the coin at the a source guarantee.


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