Two And A Half Coins
By david wong
About: David Wong is an engineer at O(1) Labs working on the Mina cryptocurrency. Prior to that, he was the security lead for the Diem (also known as Libra) cryptocurrency at Novi, Facebook. And before that a security consultant at the Cryptography Services practice of NCC Group. David is also the author of Real-World Cryptography.
Two And A Half CoinsSep 07, 2022
Bitcoin transactions: The Bitcoin script and UTXOs
In the 5th episode of this series I interview Arik Sosman (our very first guest!) in order to learn more about Bitcoin transactions. Specifically, how the Bitcoin scripting language works, and what UTXOs are!
You can find out more about Arik by following him on twitter: https://twitter.com/arikaleph?lang=en
51% attacks on proof-of-work chains and Merkle trees!
In this fourth episode I stick with Bitcoin to talk about 51% attacks and double spending in more details. In the second part of the podcast I explain what type of data structure merkle trees are, and why they are used in pretty much all cryptocurrencies.
More on Bitcoin: How does mining work? What are hash functions? And what is Proof of Work?
In this third episode we'll dig more into the tech of Bitcoin. But for that, we'll need to talk briefly about cryptographic hash functions and how they work. Once done, we'll talk about mining, proof of work, chains of blocks, and mining pools!
Bitcoin from scratch: The Bitcoin client, public keys and signatures, and the miners
In the previous episode we briefly talked about what cryptocurrencies fundamentally are, and what problems they attempt to solve. In this episode we'll dig int our very first cryptocurrency: Bitcoin. This will be a high-level overview that will cover what the software looks like, what cryptographic signatures are, and who are these miners who process transactions.
Cryptocurrencies from scratch: databases, the banking world, and distributed systems
This is the first episode of a series on cryptocurrencies. In this series I will tell you about cryptocurrencies from scratch. This first episode is quite non-technical and should be easy to understand for most folks. I will explain what databases are, how banks around the world move money around, and what cryptocurrencies fundamentally offer.
In the next episode I will dig more into the first ever cryptocurrency: Bitcoin.