Tatsuaki Okamoto explains why his “electronic cash” patent might have presented an obstacle to Hal Finney in his ambition to create his own electronic currency. Six key patents Sometime before Dec. 6, 2004, Hal Finney did a search in a patent database on “blind-signature based cash systems”. On his site he posted a list of six such patents: “This might be useful for those considering implementing electronic cash.” Four of the patents are authored by David Chaum, the other two by Okamoto and his colleague at Nippon Telegraph Kazuo Ohta. Ecash patents by Dr. Okamoto & his Nippon Telegraph colleague …

One of the world’s top cryptographers believes that Satoshi Nakamoto chose Bitcoin’s (BTC) elliptic curve either for its efficiency or because it may offer a secret backdoor. Elliptic curve is worth billions A Bitcoin public key is created by applying elliptic-curve cryptography to the private key. One can easily create a public key from the private key, but it is impossible to go in the reverse direction. Unless, of course, Bitcoin’s elliptic curve is compromised. Many crypto experts have noticed that Bitcoin’s choice of secp256k1 elliptic curve was unusual for its time, as it was not yet well researched. Cointelegraph …

Scientists in China were able to exchange an encryption key at a distance of 1,120 kilometers, this exceeds the previous best attempt by 1,000 kilometers. Crypto experts discuss whether this could have practical implications for the industry. Hackerproof cryptography? Quantum computers are scarecrows for the crypto industry for years, with some speculating that the advances in this technology will make all existing cryptography obsolete. This time quantum entanglement was used to exchange a secret key that could be used to encrypt and decrypt messages. One could imagine if this technology becomes a commodity it could make crypto hacking obsolete as …

In a Cointelegraph interview, Charles Hoskinson said that in his opinion, recursive snarks could be a solution for the Bitcoin’s (BTC) scalability problems. Intellectual dishonesty Hoskinson believes that there was a lot of intellectual dishonesty in the block size debate, which eventually led to the creation of Bitcoin Cash (BCH). Discussing the main argument of the Bitcoin core supporters that the increase in block size would have led to the greater centralization of the network, Hoskinson said: “Just an insane argument. And this is the intellectual dishonesty of that argument. So that's like saying: ‘network capacity, CPUs and hard disks …

In an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph, renowned cryptographer Jean-Jacques Quisquater discusses building the internet’s first blockchain in the 1990s and being cited in the Bitcoin Whitepaper. In 1989, Quisquater began working on transitioning media from analog to digital systems for Philips Research Lab in Brussels, where he had been working for 19 years. “The goal was to take a current (analog) situation in real life, and find out how to handle it in digital systems,” said Quisquater. We did that for analog signatures, time, location ... and we discovered many problems, some still to be solved correctly, but we took …

Video conferencing app Zoom, the undisputed titan in an era of social distancing, has acquired end-to-end encryption start-up Keybase. The acquisition, announced May 7, follows multiple privacy and security-related scandals — including the rise of video conference gatecrashing (“zoombombing”), controversial data sharing with Facebook, false claims that video calls were encrypted, and revelations that nefarious actors were peddling half a million Zoom accounts on the darknet. Under the terms of the new deal, Keybase will become a subsidiary of Zoom and its team will lead security engineering work to develop an end-to-end encryption feature available for paying customers. Founded in …

The Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA), a multinational bank headquartered in Spain, has announced a partnership with Madrid-based research center IMDEA Software Institution to explore zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) alongside other “advanced cryptographic techniques.” Both entities will freely utilize each other's technologies and research to drive innovation as quickly as possible. BBVA plans to offer products based on cryptography The partnership will see the institutions research a number of applications for cryptography in the context of the financial sector, including ways to ensure that data shared within a network is not vulnerable to exposure to third parties. A May 4 press …

The Algorand (ALGO) project has developed a new cryptographic primitive called Pointproofs. The team believes they are a significant improvement to the Merkle proofs used in many blockchain systems. Cointelegraph spoke with Sergey Gorbunov, Algorand’s head of cryptography, to learn more about the paper that he and his team published on April 19. A major development for stateless blockchains Smart contract blockchains like Algorand and Ethereum (ETH) rely on sharing a common state, which is the sum of all account balances and smart contract variables that define the blockchain. A major issue with this approach is that the state tends …

Currently, one of the most rigorously examined corners of the surging cryptography space, secure multiparty computation, or sMPC, is widely considered a viable solution to many practical situations in the real world. The concept has some promising implications ranging from privacy to scalability and efficiency, and it’s lasting impact lay outside the purview of only blockchain technology. However, many crypto and blockchain platforms are among the early pioneers in actively applying the technology to finance, advertising, insurance and other industries. “The beauty of multi-party protocols is that they use a rich body of tools and sub-protocols, some of which have …

Back in the 2000s, when I worked for PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), I was the director of technology and innovation. Part of that role was not only helping the company and some of our clients with tech innovation projects, but it was looking out five years, 10 years, 15 years and thinking about what technology was emerging and what it might mean for our industry. And so, all along the way, I’ve had a real interest in identifying things that are interesting that maybe a lot of people weren’t paying attention to yet. One was the role of speech recognition. I was …

Key management providers, examples While many exchanges or custodians still operate a multisig cold wallet approach, there are now several key management providers on the market. Unbound Tech is the first to offer a virtual HSM, called Crypto Asset Security Platform, or CASP, using secure MPC. It distributes private keys and transaction approval, validation and signing, among multiple approvers — including offline participation and bots. The company is backed by investors including Citi and Goldman Sachs. CASP is also the first MPC-based virtual HSM to receive FIPS 140-2 Level 2 accreditation, the benchmark for validating the effectiveness of cryptographic hardware. …

The Aztec privacy network has officially launched on the Ethereum blockchain on Feb. 1. Using Zcash-based technology, it introduces confidential tokens where all amounts are cryptographically hidden. The network is currently in limited deployment as it only supports zkDai, a private version of Maker’s stablecoin. Other zero knowledge tokens are set to be released in the coming weeks, while full access to custom token creation will be granted in two months, the company says. The Aztec protocol, just like Zcash (ZEC), uses Zk-SNARKs to validate encrypted transactions. When generating a transfer, a proof of correctness is generated as the amount …