In an interview at The Internet Engineering Task Force 93, former CIA employee and NSA contractor Edward Snowden spoke about privacy and security.Interestingly, Snowden focused his talk on Bitcoin and its flaws and weaknesses.Snowden began by briefly introducing the 51% attack concept, and stated that the Bitcoin network could be vulnerable to attacks and manipulation if “a pool has over 50% of the computing power to demonstrate adequate proof of work to add entries to the blockchain ledger.” Snowden commented, “Obviously, Bitcoin by itself is flawed.The protocol has a lot of weaknesses and transaction sides and a lot of weaknesses that structurally make it vulnerable to people who are trying to own 50 percent of the network and so on and so forth.” He continued and said, “Focusing too much on bitcoin, I think is a mistake.The real solution is again, how do we get to a point where you don’t have to have a direct link between your identity all of the time?You have tokens that authenticate each person and when you want to be able to interact with people as your persona in your true name, you can do so.” Implementation of Proof of Work Despite his concern for the digital currency, Snowden believes the concept of tokenization and proof of work could be implemented to create “some very interesting things,” which “people can basically pay for access other than direct transfers of currency that originated with an association to their true name.” Snowden suggested a similar concept of Tor, where bitcoin transactions are “tumbled” and changed once it is sent, like DASH’s Darksend.

Darksend mixes a pool of transactions and its addresses randomly, making the transactions completely anonymous and untraceable.bitcoin metadataThe anonymity of DASH allows users to have multiple “persona” – “a common persona, an anonymous persona, a shared persona” to send transactions that cannot be tracked by the NSA or any government agencies.bitcoin trader macSnowden explained, “A lot of these are difficult problems particularly when we talk about the metadata context, the signalling context.como ganar bitcoin yahooAnd there are actually some really bad proposals, I think, and this is in no offense to anybody who works on these particular problem spaces, but again, it gets back to the middlebox space.” Username * First Name Last Name Email * Password * Repeat Password * You registration completed successfully.bitcoin bits calculator

Confirmation email sent to email address provided.Email * Password *Join our Telegram Channel!litecoin added to coinbaseGet Bitcoin News stories in Telegram × Dismissviagra for bitcoinThis is an archived post.bitcoin qt latest versionYou won't be able to vote or comment.dogecoin accepted hereSnowden tweets private key hash, then deletes it, why?bitcoin index nyse(self.Bitcoin)submitted by If you missed it, Edward snowden tweetet "ffdae96f8dd292374a966ec8b57d9cc680ce1d23cb7072c522efe32a1a7e34b0" some days ago.At first i was meh, lets try using it as a private key hash and guess nothing comes up like always... but it came up with two addresses that show transactions.

some time after the tweet!?... and by two addresses i mean the compressed and the uncompressed one yield a used address.Namely: https://blockchain.info/de/address/1EnDZkT8Thep9sfbAy5gwg23EHhZw7tYwg and https://blockchain.info/de/address/1L3Zqv68zsXxNs53r25dKcUgjDe1119Rhj i am not that much into conspiracies but for the later one i think the transaction sum of 0.000911 BTC could be indeed a call for help.Strangely it seems to have a fast reply, like from a bot running somewhere and watching said address... the other one looks more like manually operated have any clue?also one of the source addresses looks like part of an online wallet?!?or maybe an interesting way to request/send a keep alive between former spies?π Rendered by PID 15227 on app-239 at 2017-06-24 13:13:35.247311+00:00 running 3522178 country code: SG.The National Security Agency knows Edward Snowden disclosed many of its innermost secrets when he revealed how aggressive its surveillance tactics are.What it doesn't know is just how much information the whistleblower took with him when he left.For all of its ability to track our telecommunications, the NSA seemingly has little clue exactly what documents, or even how many documents, Snowden gave to the media.

Like most large organizations, the NSA had tools in place to track who accessed what data and when.But Snowden, a system administrator, apparently was able to cover his tracks by deleting or modifying the log files that tracked that access.An Estonian company called Guardtime says it has a solution to that: using the same ideas that underpin the digital currency Bitcoin, the company says it can ensure no one can alter digital files, not even an organization's most senior executives or IT managers.The idea is to stop the next Snowden in his tracks by making it impossible to tamper with data, such as the NSA log files, in secret.To prevent people from spending a single bitcoin twice, all transactions are recorded in a global, distributed ledger called the blockchain.All copies of the bitcoin client software include a copy of the blockchain, and falsifying the ledger would require controlling at least half of all the copies in existence.Guardtime's Black Lantern uses the same idea applied to any chunk of data, such as an access log file or the data gathered by Internet of Things sensors.

The blockchain could then be distributed to every executive, or even every employee, to ensure no one person can alter it.It doesn't encrypt the data, but it can let you know if someone has tampered with it.Had the NSA been using Black Lantern, the agency would have been able to detect Snowden's activities early on, or at least would have much better idea of what Snowden took, says Guardtime CTO Matt Johnson, a former agent with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent and defense contractor."Itkeeps honest people honest," he says."It makes it impossible for them to lie."There'sirony in a former federal law enforcement officer pitching a bitcoin-style decentralized cryptography system as a way of securing the NSA's data.Bitcoin proponents praise the blockchain as a way for citizens to hide their online tracks from the government; but Guardtime shows how the same technology could be used as a tool for surveillance.We've already seen others repurpose bitcoin's code to create applications like Bitmessage, (an attempt to create a secure peer-to-peer messaging platform) and Namecoin (a decentralized alternative to the domain name system).

Some hackers even aspire to create autonomous distributed corporations: online services that could exist without any human owners.But Guardtime suggests these technologies are good for more than creating highly decentralized applications that replace or circumvent governments and corporations.Large organizations could use this technology to secure their assets.Guardtime isn't the only company working on this.Last year IBM published a report proposing the creation of a blockchain-driven communications system for the Internet of Things.But Guardtime's product isn't theoretical.The Estonian government is using it for a range of purposes, including protecting data archives and patient health records.And through a partnership with telecom company Ericsson, Black Lantern is being sold to private firms.Like IBM, Guardtime thinks the Internet of Things could be the killer application for the blockchain.As more and more connected devices gather data and store it in the cloud—and governments and private citizens alike create automated systems that respond to that data—ensuring data hasn't been tampered with is crucial – especially if you have to trust outside vendors or hosting providers."We

have to demonstrate the the hardware has not been tampered with," says Ericsson CTO Jason Hoffman.That could be especially important for securing safety critical systems such as connected cars, implanted medical devices and airplane control systems.It is important to understand the data itself isn't stored in the blockchain.Rather, it stores what's called a cryptographic hash, a long and unique mathematically-generated string of letters and numbers that corresponds to the original piece of data.Cryptographers can use these hashes to tell whether a file or piece of data has been changed.If you've ever downloaded a piece of open source software that displayed a bunch of random characters with a label like "SHA" or "MD5" next to the download link, you've seen this in action.These sorts of hashes are what Guardtime distributes to various machines.The upshot is that private data, such as health care records, can be monitored with the blockchain without those records ever needing to be shared.Frank Cilluffo of the George Washington University Center for Cyber and Homeland Security is intrigued.

Cilluffo says a properly implemented version of the concept could have huge security ramifications because it addresses internal, not external, attacks."This is throwing the way we think on its head," he says.The big question is whether any of this will work the way the company says it will.But the theory is sound says Matthew Green, a cryptographer and assistant research professor computer science at Johns Hopkins University.Although he isn't familiar with Guardtime's product, Green says some of the basic ideas have been explored before, including in this paper co-written by cryptographer and former WIRED columnist Bruce Schneier."Block chains and decentralized systems seem like an obvious extension to this idea," Green says.The limitations are the cost of running additional servers to host the blockchain, and the fact that you're just monitoring whether data is changed, not protecting the data itself.While Black Lantern could be used by governments to protect its secrets, it just as easily could be used as a tool to keep government accountable.Using Guardtime, a government could, in theory, give all citizens a copy of a blockchain that records changes to email log files.