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In this podcast, hosts Vikram Ramakrishnan and Faizaan Shamsi, partners at the software consultancy QuantLayer, talk to investors and builders of the cryptocurrency arena. We discuss how industry participants think about crypto assets, how they uncover fraud in the market, and which technologies will turn the budding, nascent crypto space into the revolutionary powerhouse early market participants had hoped for.

Dec 6, 2018

This episode is all about attack vectors in crypto. We look at a 51% attack on Vertcoin, and how ASIC resistance is turning out to be a massive security bug, not a feature. We also look at Ethereum Classic and a social engineering attack on the ETCDEV team. Finally, we discuss the event-stream attack which robbed crypto wallets that used that npm library, and what that means for open source governance.

Topics:

  • ASIC resistance is a massive security bug, not a feature
  • What ASIC resistance is
  • Vertcoin is currently being 51% attacked
  • What NiceHash is
  • ETCDEV shutdown
  • What ETC is
  • Who ETCDEV is
  • Event-stream situation

Links:

Vertcoin - MIT Digital Currency Initiative - https://dci.mit.edu/video-gallery/?tag=vertcoin
About NiceHash - https://www.nicehash.com/about
About Crypto51 - https://www.crypto51.app/about.html
Vertcoin is currently being 51% attacked - https://medium.com/coinmonks/vertcoin-vtc-is-currently-being-51-attacked-53ab633c08a4
On Dec 3, Igor put out the following statement - https://twitter.com/etcdev/status/1069625401515872256/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1069625401515872256&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsbtc.com%2F2018%2F12%2F04%2Fcrypto-bear-market-strikes-ethereum-classic-etc-development-group-folds%2F
Event-stream situation
Synopsis:
 - https://github.com/dominictarr/event-stream/issues/116#issuecomment-441759047
 - https://github.com/dominictarr/event-stream/issues/116#issuecomment-441749105
Dominic Tarr’s response:
 - https://gist.github.com/dominictarr/9fd9c1024c94592bc7268d36b8d83b3a
Kate Sills - https://twitter.com/kate_sills/status/1067202990690291712