Elliptic curve cryptography is becoming more and more popular.One of its main supporters is the cryptocurrency system Bitcoin which uses an elliptic curve scheme for their digital signatures.Smaller key size, a more efficient implementation than the RSA system, and a similar level of security make elliptic curve cryptography an interesting alternative to RSA.Signatures based on elliptic curves are, mathematically speaking, currently very safe.There are, however, well-known attack strategies available, most prominently Pollard’s rho method, which one should take into account when choosing an elliptic curve.The SEC Group’s curve secp256k1, which is currently used in Bitcoin and Ethereum, has no known mathematical vulnerabilities, although it is more vulnerable to small design flaws than others.A private key has already been successfully extracted with a side-channeling attack and an invalid-curve attack might also be possible.Those who want a deeper exploration of the security level of the signature scheme used in Bitcoin and Ethereum can read our full survey, complete with references to other articles here.

This article was posted on Monday, 13:12, UTC.The popular video-calling service Skype is currently unavailable.Users around the world are unable to make calls.A spokesperson from Skype says the problem is with the status settings of the service.// -- Discuss and ask questions in our community on Workplace.Don't have an account?Send Jonas Borchgrevink an email -- // Skype-users are reporting problems when using Skype – people in their contact lists appear to be offline despite the fact that they are online on their systems.This means that users cannot make internet calls to their own contacts.The problem was first reported around 9.15 am UK time./8LoqqL0hh7 — Skype Support (@SkypeSupport) September 21, 2015 Skype’s spokesperson made a statement over the issue on Skype’s website, saying that there is apparently an issue with the status settings of Skype.As a result, people appear to be offline while in reality they are online.It also means that users will be unable to change their status settings till this problem is fixed.

Users can, therefore, not make any internet calls.Skype apologized to its customers on their website as well as social media platforms like Twitter, with the company saying that the issue has been identified and they are working on a quick fix.We’re working on a fix for this issue and hope to have an update for you soon.Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused while we get this resolved.While the internet call feature is temporarily unavailable due to the problem in the status settings of Skype, the instant messaging feature is unaffected.litecoin riskAlthough this gives users some respite, it did not stop them from venting their frustration on social media.bitcoin btc meaningbeen like 4 hours since my skype was last working jesus — Luke (@b1BL1c4L) September 21, 2015 Featured image from Twin Design / Shutterstock.bitcoin core raspberry pi 2

Important: Never invest money you can't afford to lose.Always do your own research and due diligence before placing a trade.Read our Terms & Conditions here.> > > Project Bletchley - Ethereum Consortium Blockchain in Azure Marketplace The next phase of our support of blockchain on Microsoft Azure is the release of the Ethereum Consortium Blockchain Network solution template to the Azure Marketplace that simplifies the infrastructure and protocol configuration substantially.bitcoin mining on i5This template deploys and configu Download Ratings Downloaded Favorites Add to favorites Category Windows Azure Sub-category Virtual Machines Updated License TechNet terms of use Share Report abuse to Microsoft Description Q and A (12) Sign in to ask a question Answer the question | Hide 3 Lakshmi Naarayanan J Sid Krishna Lakshmi Naarayanan J Answer the question | Hide 2 JorgeAlvaradoCH Microsoft Azure Blockchain Team Answer the question | Hide 2 JeffGorv Microsoft Azure Blockchain Team Answer the question | Hide 2 Karin_BC Karin_BC Answer the question | Hide 3 sparcusa Blockchain Tech Labs Microsoft Azure Blockchain Team Answer the question | Hide 2 JeffGorv Microsoft Azure Blockchain Team Answer the question | Hide 2 Vien Nguyen Blockchain Tech Labs Answer the question | Hide 1 sparcusa Answer the question | Hide 1 Vincent Riffier Answer the question | Hide 2 Microsoft Azure Blockchain Team Microsoft Azure Blockchain Team « First < Prev 1 2 Next > Last »bitcoin faucet open source

There's a lot of buzz around terms like "smart contracts" at the moment, evidenced by the amount of people crowded into a dedicated session on the topic yesterday at London's Fintech Week 2015.Adi Ben-Ari, founder Applied Blockchain, who was giving the smart contracts presentation, consults with companies about use cases they might have for private blockchains.He told IBTimes: "There's a lot of hype, there's a lot of talk, there's a lot of people feeling threatened by blockchain and think they need to be doing something."Sobitcoin micro loanwe do get a lot of people coming to us who have maybe not fully understood the underlying workings of blockchains."Welitecoin chinesewill be the first ones to come back and say, well actually, you are better off doing that with an Oracle database, IBM integration, whatever it is.uk bitcoin legislation

It's not necessarily a problem that really in practical terms a blockchain will solve."Thiscould include accountants, people in the banking world - where we don't think it's a good idea is when it's all inside an organisation and effectively it's centralised, when you break it down it's a centralised solution."Ifyou are looking at cloud solutions where you are going to put something all in the middle then you probably don't need a blockchain to do it."Ben-Arisaid his company is very familiar with the different blockchain platforms that are out there.risk of litecoinAs far as automated digital contracts goes, Ethereum has offered developers "another world", he said.Ethereum is a public blockchain like Bitcoin but its code base has been developed from scratch to allow much more data rich and complex operations.Comparing Bitcoin to Ethereum, the analogy of a pocket calculator to a general purpose computer has been used.The public blockchain of Ethereum and its native currency ether has no relevance to Ben-Ari's business model, which concerns private chains, where permission must be granted to participants who know one another's identity.He said: "There are certain things we like about Ethereum and specifically the smart contract virtual machine, and that's what we work around; actually some of the rest of it, isn't really optimal for the type of solutions we do, but it's still the best that's out there from what we have seen."So

we are not trying to tie or solutions to Ethereum - we are decoupling them as much as we can."Weare saying we will build a solution and when the next iteration, the next set of blockchains come along, this is what we think will be there.And we think the Ethereum virtual machine or something similar, is here to stay."Wehave an underlying assumption that you are going to have an Ethereum-type smart contract facility on blockchain.Smart contracts are digital contracts enforced on the blockchain.An obvious use case is financial contracts involving assets and collateral that can be enforced on the blockchain – a small subset of contracts that are not really dependent on legal jurisdiction.Ben-Ari pointed out that Ethereum allows developers to create their own rules and data in the blockchain itself."Insteadof just dealing with an asset or currency, you can go where ever your imagination takes you, you can put whatever data you want in there, in theory as much as you want, so it could be like a database which you are now sharing between parties."On

top of that you can then put permissions around it.So you can say, this party can do this to the data and the other party can't see it, or they can only come in at a later stage, you can build a workflow, so you can have a series of events."Youcreate the contract, another party can come along and view it and sign it, and only then can you go and do something else on it.To our mind, that hasn't even been tapped into yet."Ben-Arisaid there is also interest from outside the world of finance where startups and people trying to solve problems across organisations, bringing organisations together."Whetherit's things like supply chain or things in the consumer space, there is a common thread, and that is different organisations doing important transactions, which may or may not be financial, where it is more efficient for them not to have a third party in the middle to manage those."Thereis trust in that they know who is participating in the blockchain, but there isn't trust at the transaction level.