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
• 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
• 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