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Topic: My Bitcoin master thesis - page 4. (Read 42837 times)

legendary
Activity: 1764
Merit: 1002
June 17, 2012, 10:22:07 AM
#6
in the very first paragraph i find something i would've stated differently:

"It relies on cryptographic algorithms in order to prevent abuse of the system."

shouldn't it say "...cryptographic and hashing algorithms..."?

i'm not an academic in this particular area so correct me if i'm wrong.
"Cryptography" is a general field encompassing encryption, digital signatures, hashing and more.

my turn to nitpick.  he used a small "c".
donator
Activity: 2058
Merit: 1054
June 17, 2012, 10:19:51 AM
#5
in the very first paragraph i find something i would've stated differently:

"It relies on cryptographic algorithms in order to prevent abuse of the system."

shouldn't it say "...cryptographic and hashing algorithms..."?

i'm not an academic in this particular area so correct me if i'm wrong.
"Cryptography" is a general field encompassing encryption, digital signatures, hashing and more.
legendary
Activity: 1764
Merit: 1002
June 17, 2012, 10:11:11 AM
#4
in the very first paragraph i find something i would've stated differently:

"It relies on cryptographic algorithms in order to prevent abuse of the system."

shouldn't it say "...cryptographic and hashing algorithms..."?

i'm not an academic in this particular area so correct me if i'm wrong.
newbie
Activity: 42
Merit: 0
June 17, 2012, 06:15:36 AM
#3
Wow, that was genuinely a really good read, and whilst it does provide great academic depth into the subject, it is also a great explanation of how the whole system works, giving new users a good understanding of it. I was thinking of heading into a PhD in Computing as i have already gained my masters in cryptology, so this subject around the security of bitcoins is fascinating to me.
donator
Activity: 2058
Merit: 1054
June 17, 2012, 05:18:41 AM
#2
Wonderful. While academically it seems the intended focus was security analysis, it is comprehensive enough to be used as a reference general introduction to Bitcoin, to those willing to take the time to study it seriously.

A few nitpicks:

1. "Bitcoin" and "satoshi", as units of currency, should only be capitalized if at the beginning of a sentence. "Dollar" isn't capitalized either. Bitcoin as the name of a project, a protocol, a software, an ecosystem and a community is of course capitalized. Also, I'd avoid using "bitcoins" in reference to the system - e.g., instead of "(b)Bitcoins offer much lower cost of transferring money" I'd say "Bitcoin offers".

2. You use http://pastehtml.com/view/awb1vg03r.html as a reference for currently used mining pool reward systems, but it's badly out of date, and even for its time it was vague at best - SMPPS pools are listed as PPS, different varieties of score-based methods are lumped together in a single category, etc.
sr. member
Activity: 444
Merit: 313
June 17, 2012, 04:45:37 AM
#1
Hello everyone,

I've been working on my master thesis for almost a year now and today I passed my exam. So, if anyone is interested in reading my dissertation, it's available here:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/3658181/PiotrPiasecki-BitcoinMasterThesis.pdf

Its topic is “Design and security analysis of Bitcoin infrastructure using application deployed on Google Apps Engine.”. It mostly considers various security strengths and weaknesses of the Bitcoin protocol, standard client, third party apps and even Bitcoin users.

I'll upload the code I developed for it some other time (it's not really that amazing).

Hope you'll enjoy the reading. I'd like to apologize for the use of polish at the start (it was a requirement), and for some boring introduction of basic things (also a requirement).

Donations welcome:
18zRT8jaHJUZe3foLcHkocV468dZ9sGiBq

EDIT 2017-03-20:

If the above link is not working, try:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/i9i5bbaaa8wlj23/PiotrPiasecki-BitcoinMasterThesis.pdf?dl=0
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