Dr. Bindner's Bitcoin Presentation
Announcements
- CS bonfire Friday 27th. 7pm at Beck’s house
Topic
Bindner talked about Bitcoin.
- Mentioned that passwords for sensitive information should not be the same as other websites.
- One weak link can compromise a system
- Doesn’t necessarily effect you, but can effect others
- Hash Cash
- Attempt to stop spam
- Update SMTP
- Can allow a mail server to question the sender server if it suspects spam
- This makes spam cost more electricity and time in hopes spam decreases
- Never caught on
- Public key encryption
- Has personal private key and a public key
- Private key
- decrypt
- sign messages
- Public key
- encryption
- verify signature
- Digicash
- Required bank
- Didn’t know who money was from until someone tried to spend the money twice
- Died when bank bought out tech and killed it
- Competed with credit cards
- Crypto currencies
- Simply signing messages saying you are paying someone doesn’t work
- You can sign a message to multiple people
- There must be a way for everyone to know when a payment is made
- Blockchain is a way to go
- Simply signing messages saying you are paying someone doesn’t work
- Blockchain
- When you make a transaction, you set an amount of money you will pay someone if they find a block in the chain
- You want the money or fee to be high enough that miners will want to include it in their blocks
- It takes lots of time and money to mine these blocks
- This makes it far to expensive to forge blocks
- After a few blocks, a transaction is cemented into the block chain
- When you make a transaction, you set an amount of money you will pay someone if they find a block in the chain
- Why care about digital currency
- Don’t really care as much in US because we have credit cards and similar devices
- It is very expensive and difficult to get money in and out of the US
- Digital currency can make this cheaper
- In unstable countries, it is easy to smuggle digital currency out by remembering a set of words or a passcode for a digital wallet