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Coindesk's 'Bitcoin at 10[years old]': From Fearing Bitcoin To Fixing Its Worst Problem: Tadge Dryja

A celebration of 10 years of Bitcoin features DCI's Tadge Dryja story:

““I thought I would go to jail.”

That’s why Tadge Dryja, one of two principal researchers who would go on to envision lightning – what has become arguably the most important innovation in the quest to bring bitcoin to the masses – kept his passion for the technology to himself when he first heard about it in 2011.”

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Introducing DCI's New Podcast: Grey Mirror

In this episode: Tadge Dryja, a research scientist at DCI who co-invented the Lightning Network. We chat about his current research (uTreeXO, a dynamic accumulator for Bitcoin state) and discuss non-fork ways to bootstrap upgrades to a network (a bridge node for uTreeXO).

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Utreexo: A dynamic accumulator for Bitcoin state - A description of research by Thaddeus Dryja

One of the earliest-seen and most persistent problems with Bitcoin has been scalability.  Bitcoin takes the idea of "be your own bank" quite literally, with every computer on the bitcoin network storing every account of every user who owns money in the system.  In Bitcoin, this is stored as a collection of "Unspent transaction outputs", or "utxo"s, which are somewhat unintuitive, but provide privacy and efficiency benefits over the alternative "account" based model used in traditional finance.

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Cellular structure for a digital fiat currency

This paper by DCI Reserach Scientist Robleh Ali sets out a structure for a digital fiat currency system. The primary benefit of the cellular structure is that it lowers barriers to entry for payments by using trustless intermediation between cells in the system. The larger purpose of this structure is to create an open foundation for a decentralized financial system in which competition can thrive but which cannot be captured by private interests.

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Does Your Supply Chain Need a Blockchain?

Many new digital technologies at various stages of development hold promise for manufacturers and the supply chain. The challenge for management teams is knowing which technologies to invest in—and when. Case in point: blockchain technology. Once seemingly at the far end of the time horizon, blockchains are suddenly poised for rapid growth. Why? Because they offer a solution to the growing problem of how to manage increasingly complicated networks of manufacturers and suppliers at a time when transparency, speed, and agility are critical.

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The problem with ICOs is that they’re called ICOs
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The problem with ICOs is that they’re called ICOs

The MIT Technology review interviews Robleh Ali, former manager of digital currency for the Bank of England, now research scientist at the MIT Digital Currency Initiative, on why initial coin offerings are dangerous and how to make them more useful.

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This is how Bitcoin works
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This is how Bitcoin works

Neha Narula, director of the MIT Digital Currency Initiative, helps PBS NewsHour understand how Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies work. Watch the video below or read the transcript interview with Neha, "This is how Bitcoin works."

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In blockchain we trust
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In blockchain we trust

The dot-com bubble of the 1990s is popularly viewed as a period of crazy excess that ended with hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth being destroyed. What’s less often discussed is how all the cheap capital of the boom years helped fund the infrastructure upon which the most important internet innovations would be built after the bubble burst.

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