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Author Neha Narula is the research director of the Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab. According to Narula, the MIT Digital Currency Initiative will build a strong research team to create practical blockchain solutions. In addition, they will convene experts in various fields to jointly explore relevant solutions. Many of us work in technology because we believe it is the best lever to change the world. For example, the Internet and its underlying protocols have changed our lives beyond measure. With the advent of free and open source software such as Linux, low-cost communication and global collaboration became possible. This technology allows me to publish this blog post seconds later and anyone around the world can read it and, perhaps more importantly, comment on it. But the potential of the Internet has yet to be tapped. Instead of an interoperable data structure, we have islands of data that we cannot freely access. Solving this problem is critical, and surprisingly, I think cryptocurrencies offer the best opportunity. That’s why I’m excited to join the MIT Digital Currency Initiative as a research lead. Recently, TED gave me the opportunity to share how cryptocurrencies work and why I think they’re so important to them: I got into Bitcoin last summer after completing my PhD at MIT (and before that, I was a software engineer at Google). I had friends who had been excited about Bitcoin for a long time, but it wasn’t until last year that I realized that Bitcoin is the world’s largest consensus algorithm [1] and I began to understand its potential impact. I realized that there needs to be a way for parties that don’t trust each other to come to agreement. I think an open, interoperable, censorship-resistant [2] platform for data protocols could help solve a lot of real-world problems: enabling micropayments for content providers, helping with digital identification for asylum seekers, and cheap remittance services for the unbanked. While these solutions are still a long way off, even just scratching the surface of these problems might be worth exploring. I think the world is clearly ready for more open, interoperable systems, and that doing so could solve a wide variety of problems. MIT has a long history of supporting the development of technologies that bring freedom and privacy to users and have practical functions. At the MIT Digital Currency Initiative, we hope to leverage MIT’s talent base and bring together talent to co-create the required trust paradigm. This has proven to be a very challenging area, and a large part of the community has given up on the pursuit of truly open, decentralized nature. We hope to serve as a balance point and participate in the research of the path forward. This field is particularly interesting because it involves a variety of academic disciplines. Accelerating the future of open, interoperable systems requires crossing many different fields, including distributed systems, cryptography, game theory, security, programming language design, databases, finance, behavioral economics, law, and more. This is exciting, but it also makes our work more difficult. Over the past year, the team has been mainly learning about cryptocurrency and striving to become part of the cryptocurrency and blockchain community. Gradually, we have formed some opinions. Next, we will build a strong research team to create practical solutions. Currently, the projects our team is developing include: Use new cryptographic primitives for computational privacy and auditability. Creating decentralized monetary policy through techniques such as decaying assets and in-protocol inflation; Examine news delivery algorithms for skew and consider anti-censorship mechanisms for publications published on the Web. Securitizing smart assets to enable new models for financing the developing world Explore new methods of cryptocurrency mining to ensure fairer and more open access to the system.
We hope to continue our existing research and expand it: we have a course on cryptocurrency, and we hold weekly workshops and bring together researchers in the Boston area. We fund a distinguished program to bring renowned experts in the field to MIT to give presentations and participate in workshops. We co-hosted a W3C workshop to discuss relevant standards with the community. We support international conferences such as Scaling Bitcoin, and we are also funding open source protocol developers to help them maintain their independence. We also want to expand the community and make the cryptocurrency community more inclusive, so that more women and minorities can participate. To help with this, we sponsor students to attend important conferences such as Consensus and Scaling Bitcoin, and last month we held a week-long cryptocurrency bootcamp with students from all over the country. You can learn more about our activities on our new website. We will continue to conduct research and bring together researchers. This week, we brought together members of the medical industry to discuss life sciences and medical research. We will bring together experts in monetary policy to discuss a new financial architecture. I can’t wait to see what next year brings. [1] Calling Bitcoin a consensus protocol is almost certainly misleading, because “consensus” has a very specific meaning in distributed algorithms, and Bitcoin’s properties don’t fit the model that this definition requires. This probably means that the model needs to be broadened. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are clearly very useful, and we need tools to analyze them. [2] One of the most fascinating properties of Bitcoin is its censorship resistance. This is coupled with security because while anyone can participate in the protocol, it is very expensive to disrupt the network. No one can dictate who can or cannot be part of the network. If you want to process a transaction, you can install some software on your computer and it will do the job. The past six years and a market cap of $10 billion have proven its censorship resistance. It is a huge target for attackers, but no one has yet been able to disrupt it in its entirety. Of course, we should not be too complacent. Bitcoin's model makes it very expensive to attack, but there may still be vulnerabilities in the protocol, or someone willing to spend enough money to attack it, but we have not yet encountered them. Notes (↵ returns to text) Note: The author Neha Narula is the research director of the Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab. According to Narula, the MIT Digital Currency Initiative will build a strong research team to create practical blockchain solutions. In addition, they will convene experts in various fields to jointly explore relevant solutions. Many of us work in technology because we believe it is the best lever to change the world. For example, the Internet and its underlying protocols have changed our lives beyond measure. With the advent of free and open source software such as Linux, low-cost communication and global collaboration became possible. This technology allows me to publish this blog post seconds later and anyone around the world can read it and, perhaps more importantly, comment on it. But the potential of the Internet has yet to be tapped. Instead of an interoperable data structure, we have islands of data that we cannot freely access. Solving this problem is critical, and surprisingly, I think cryptocurrencies offer the best opportunity. That’s why I’m excited to join the MIT Digital Currency Initiative as a research lead. Recently, TED gave me the opportunity to share how cryptocurrencies work and why I think they’re so important to them: I got into Bitcoin last summer after finishing my PhD at MIT (before that I was a software engineer at Google). I had friends who were very excited about Bitcoin a long time ago, but it wasn't until last year that I realized that Bitcoin is the world's largest consensus algorithm {{1}} and I began to understand its potential impact. I realized that there needs to be a way for parties that don't trust each other to reach an agreement. I think an open, interoperable, censorship-resistant {{2}} platform for data protocols could help solve a lot of problems, and these are real problems: supporting micropayments for content providers, helping with digital identification for asylum seekers, and cheap remittance services for the unbanked. Although these solutions are still a long way off, even just making some traces of these problems might be worth exploring. It's clear that I think the world is not only ready to accept building more open, interoperable systems, but doing so could solve a variety of problems. MIT has a long history of supporting the development of technologies that provide freedom and privacy to users and have practical functions. At the MIT Digital Currency Initiative, we hope to leverage MIT’s talent base and bring together talent to co-create the required trust paradigm. This has proven to be a very challenging area, and a large part of the community has given up on the pursuit of truly open, decentralized nature. We hope to serve as a balance point and participate in the research of the path forward. This field is particularly interesting because it involves a variety of academic disciplines. Accelerating the future of open, interoperable systems requires crossing many different fields, including distributed systems, cryptography, game theory, security, programming language design, databases, finance, behavioral economics, law, and more. This is exciting, but it also makes our work more difficult. Over the past year, the team has been mainly learning about cryptocurrency and striving to become part of the cryptocurrency and blockchain community. Gradually, we have formed some opinions. Next, we will build a strong research team to create practical solutions. Currently, the projects our team is developing include: We hope to continue our existing research and expand it: we have a course on cryptocurrency, and we hold weekly workshops and bring together researchers in the Boston area. We fund a distinguished program to bring renowned experts in the field to MIT to give presentations and participate in workshops. We co-hosted a W3C workshop to discuss relevant standards with the community. We support international conferences such as Scaling Bitcoin, and we are also funding open source protocol developers to help them maintain their independence. We also want to expand the community and make the cryptocurrency community more inclusive, so that more women and minorities can participate. To help with this, we sponsor students to attend important conferences such as Consensus and Scaling Bitcoin, and last month we held a week-long cryptocurrency bootcamp with students from all over the country. You can learn more about our activities on our new website. We will continue to conduct research and bring together researchers. This week, we brought together members of the medical industry to discuss life sciences and medical research. We will bring together experts in monetary policy to discuss a new financial architecture. I can’t wait to see what next year brings. [1] Calling Bitcoin a consensus protocol is almost certainly misleading, because “consensus” has a very specific meaning in distributed algorithms, and Bitcoin’s properties don’t fit the model that this definition requires. This probably means that the model needs to be broadened. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are clearly very useful, and we need tools to analyze them. [2] One of the most fascinating features of Bitcoin is its censorship resistance. This is combined with security because although anyone can participate in the protocol, it is very expensive to disrupt the network. No one can dictate who can or cannot be part of the network. If you want to process a transaction, you can install some software on your computer and it will do the job. The past six years and a market capitalization of $10 billion have proven its censorship resistance. It is a huge target for attackers, but no one has yet been able to disrupt it in its entirety. Of course, we should not be too complacent. Bitcoin's model makes it very expensive to attack it, but there may still be vulnerabilities in its protocol, or there may be people willing to spend enough money to attack it. We just haven't encountered a strike yet. Use new cryptographic primitives for computational privacy and auditability. Creating decentralized monetary policy through techniques such as decaying assets and in-protocol inflation; Examine news delivery algorithms for skew and consider anti-censorship mechanisms for publications published on the Web. Securitizing smart assets to enable new models for financing the developing world Explore new methods of cryptocurrency mining to ensure fairer and more open access to the system.
Author Neha Narula is the research director of the Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab. According to Narula, the MIT Digital Currency Initiative will build a strong research team to create practical blockchain solutions. In addition, they will convene experts in various fields to jointly explore relevant solutions. Many of us work in technology because we believe it is the best lever to change the world. For example, the Internet and its underlying protocols have changed our lives beyond measure. With the advent of free and open source software such as Linux, low-cost communication and global collaboration became possible. This technology allows me to publish this blog post seconds later and anyone around the world can read it and, perhaps more importantly, comment on it. But the potential of the Internet has yet to be tapped. Instead of an interoperable data structure, we have islands of data that we cannot freely access. Solving this problem is critical, and surprisingly, I think cryptocurrencies offer the best opportunity. That’s why I’m excited to join the MIT Digital Currency Initiative as a research lead. Recently, TED gave me the opportunity to share how cryptocurrencies work and why I think they’re so important to them: I got into Bitcoin last summer after completing my PhD at MIT (and before that, I was a software engineer at Google). I had friends who had been excited about Bitcoin for a long time, but it wasn’t until last year that I realized that Bitcoin is the world’s largest consensus algorithm [1] and I began to understand its potential impact. I realized that there needs to be a way for parties that don’t trust each other to come to agreement. I think an open, interoperable, censorship-resistant {{2}} platform for data protocols could help solve a lot of problems, and these are real problems: supporting micropayments for content providers, helping with digital identification for asylum seekers, and cheap remittance services for the unbanked. Although these solutions are still a long way off, even just making some traces of these problems might be worth exploring. It's clear that I think the world is not only ready to accept building more open, interoperable systems, but doing so could solve a variety of problems. MIT has a long history of supporting the development of technologies that bring freedom and privacy to users and have practical functions. At the MIT Digital Currency Initiative, we hope to leverage MIT’s talent base and bring together talent to co-create the required trust paradigm. This has proven to be a very challenging area, and a large part of the community has given up on the pursuit of truly open, decentralized nature. We hope to serve as a balance point and participate in the research of the path forward. This field is particularly interesting because it involves a variety of academic disciplines. Accelerating the future of open, interoperable systems requires crossing many different fields, including distributed systems, cryptography, game theory, security, programming language design, databases, finance, behavioral economics, law, and more. This is exciting, but it also makes our work more difficult. Over the past year, the team has been mainly learning about cryptocurrency and striving to become part of the cryptocurrency and blockchain community. Gradually, we have formed some opinions. Next, we will build a strong research team to create practical solutions. Currently, the projects our team is developing include: We hope to continue our existing research and expand it: we have a course on cryptocurrency, and we hold weekly workshops and bring together researchers in the Boston area. We fund a distinguished program to bring renowned experts in the field to MIT to give presentations and participate in workshops. We co-hosted a W3C workshop to discuss relevant standards with the community. We support international conferences such as Scaling Bitcoin, and we are also funding open source protocol developers to help them maintain their independence. We also want to expand the community and make the cryptocurrency community more inclusive, so that more women and minorities can participate. To help with this, we sponsor students to attend important conferences such as Consensus and Scaling Bitcoin, and last month we held a week-long cryptocurrency bootcamp with students from all over the country. You can learn more about our activities on our new website. We will continue to conduct research and bring together researchers. This week, we brought together members of the medical industry to discuss life sciences and medical research. We will bring together experts in monetary policy to discuss a new financial architecture. I can’t wait to see what next year brings. [1] Calling Bitcoin a consensus protocol is almost certainly misleading, because “consensus” has a very specific meaning in distributed algorithms, and Bitcoin’s properties don’t fit the model that this definition requires. This probably means that the model needs to be broadened. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are clearly very useful, and we need tools to analyze them. [2] One of the most fascinating features of Bitcoin is its censorship resistance. This is combined with security because although anyone can participate in the protocol, it is very expensive to disrupt the network. No one can dictate who can or cannot be part of the network. If you want to process a transaction, you can install some software on your computer and it will do the job. The past six years and a market capitalization of $10 billion have proven its censorship resistance. It is a huge target for attackers, but no one has yet been able to disrupt it in its entirety. Of course, we should not be too complacent. Bitcoin's model makes it very expensive to attack it, but there may still be vulnerabilities in its protocol, or there may be people willing to spend enough money to attack it. We just haven't encountered a strike yet. Use new cryptographic primitives for computational privacy and auditability. Creating decentralized monetary policy through techniques such as decaying assets and in-protocol inflation; Examine news delivery algorithms for skew and consider anti-censorship mechanisms for publications published on the Web. Securitizing smart assets to enable new models for financing the developing world Explore new methods of cryptocurrency mining to ensure fairer and more open access to the system.
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