crypto mining

Linus Tech Tips tests a Chinese mining-only Nvidia card, hacked with a modified driver so it can render games and output video through an integrated GPU.

Daniel J. Bernstein and Tanja Lange survey recent highlights in post-quantum cryptography at 35C3, covering the NIST competition, network protocol experiments, and broken candidates.

Scott Arciszewski's DEF CON 26 Crypto and Privacy Village talk critiquing the JOSE standards (JWT, JWS, JWE) and showing how to design cryptographic tokens more safely.

Motherboard's 2014 visit to a secretive Bitcoin mining operation in a repurposed factory in Liaoning, China, one of six sites producing about 4,050 bitcoins a month. It shows the machines and the workers' living conditions.

A short explainer on the history and mechanics of public key cryptography and the Diffie-Hellman key exchange. It uses a mixing-paint-colors analogy to show how two parties can agree on a shared secret in public.

Andreas Antonopoulos argues that money has a fourth function beyond store of value, medium of exchange and unit of account, which is as a system of control. He covers the history of money and why it does not flow freely.

Christof Paar's university lecture introducing Galois fields and finite-field arithmetic as used in AES. It covers the mathematics behind the AES S-box.

A Real World Crypto 2017 talk by a Google engineer on using private set intersection to match ad views with in-store purchases. It describes privacy-preserving matching that avoids exposing personal transactions.

3Blue1Brown explains the math and mechanics behind Bitcoin visually: ledgers, digital signatures, proof of work and the blockchain, building up a decentralized payment system from first principles.

3Blue1Brown illustrates how enormous the 256-bit search space is, showing how infeasible it is to find a hash or key by guessing and checking.

Andreas Antonopoulos answers a Bitcoin Q&A question about energy consumption in mining. He argues that mining is arbitrage for the cheapest electricity, drives investment in renewables, and that the traditional financial system has hidden externalities.

A short Channel NewsAsia interview clip in which MasterCard's Southeast Asia president voices distrust of cryptocurrencies produced by anonymous computers in anonymous places. It is part of the Perspectives series and runs about four minutes.

James Mickens of Harvard gives a funny lecture at HBS's Future Assembly arguing that blockchains are a very bad idea. He covers their trust, legal and practical shortcomings for real-world problems.

Numberphile interviews cryptographer Ron Rivest about end-to-end verifiable voting. He explains how homomorphic encryption and receipts let a voter confirm their ballot was counted without being able to prove how they voted to anyone else.

David Kriesel's 36C3 talk, in an English translation, analyzes a year of scraped Deutsche Bahn data covering every stop of every long-distance train in Germany. It explores delays and how punctuality is actually measured.

A two-minute clip of Andreas Antonopoulos explaining why a 51% attack on Bitcoin would not destroy it and what such an attack would cost. It is a succinct take on mining security.

Brian Warner, author of magic-wormhole, presents the tool at PyCon 2016. He explains how a few secret words let two computers securely transfer files, covering the cryptography (NaCl, SPAKE2) and library use.

PBS Infinite Series explains how Shor's algorithm lets a quantum computer break RSA encryption, building on earlier episodes about cryptography and the math of quantum computers. It works through the idea step by step.

David Kriesel's 36C3 talk, in German, analyzes a year of scraped data on every stop of every long-distance train in Germany. It shows how Deutsche Bahn delay statistics hide cancellations and delays.

Steve Yegge's OSCON Data 2011 talk imagines what you could do with Google-scale storage and compute a decade later. He argues smart people should work on hard problems such as biology rather than cat pictures, and the talk ends with a moment many took as him quitting Google.

A 2013 lecture in which Vitalik Buterin explains what quantum computers are and what they can and cannot do. He then discusses what they could mean for Bitcoin's cryptography.

Kim Nilsson presents his investigation into how Mt. Gox was hacked and mismanaged, tracing the finances and the missing bitcoins. It was given at the 2017 Breaking Bitcoin meetup.

Numberphile's Dr James Grime explains the flaw in the Enigma machine, namely that a letter could never be encrypted to itself, and how that helped the Allies break the code. It touches on the Bombe and Alan Turing.

MinutePhysics explains Shor's algorithm, showing how a quantum computer factors large integers by finding the period of a number modulo N. It walks through the modular arithmetic and number theory that give the exponential speedup over classical factoring, and why this threatens encryption.

A short Art of the Problem clip explaining Diffie-Hellman key exchange, using a paint mixing analogy for one-way functions and touching on modular arithmetic and discrete logarithms.

Tom Scott visits Cloudflare's San Francisco office to show the wall of lava lamps whose camera feed is used as a source of entropy for random number generation. It is a short explainer on how this helps secure internet encryption.

In a CNBC interview with Becky Quick, Warren Buffett explains why he sees bitcoin as an asset that produces nothing. He contrasts it with productive assets such as a farm.

Rick Falkvinge responds to viewer feedback on his earlier Lightning Network video and raises a flaw he says was not previously discussed. The main thread is the network's unsolved routing problem.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on coal examines the industry, its executives and its treatment of miners, and includes the coverage of Robert Murray that led to a lawsuit.

Dr Mike Pound explains the suspected backdoor in the Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator and how elliptic curve constants could let someone predict its output.

Ian Miers' Devcon4 talk on failures in on-chain privacy for Bitcoin and Ethereum. It covers attacks on transparent and decoy-based schemes, including how Monero-style privacy can be eroded over repeated transactions.

A short 2013 video in which Roger Ver says Mt. Gox's withdrawal delays are not caused by a lack of liquidity. Mt. Gox collapsed months later, and the description carries a later update and apology.

A 2017 video arguing that banks and Blockstream steered Bitcoin toward the Lightning Network. It is partisan commentary from the Bitcoin Cash side of the scaling dispute.

A one-minute joke video titled as a warning against buying Bitcoin, giving a humorous summary of price crashes. It has no description.

ContraPoints' 35-minute video essay on incels, examining the community, its worldview and how people get radicalized. It is delivered with theatrical style and an empathetic tone.

AvE tears down the Juicero cold-press juicer, examining its heavily machined parts, electronics and the pricey juice packs. He pokes fun at the product and venture-funded culture along the way.

Bob Beck of OpenBSD describes the first month of LibreSSL, the fork aimed at cleaning up OpenSSL, including oddities found in the code base and why it was cleaned rather than audited cryptographically.

A recording of physicist Albert Bartlett's well-known lecture on the arithmetic of exponential growth, applied to population and energy use. He argues that steady percentage growth in a finite world cannot continue and sneaks up suddenly.

AvE tears down a roughly $500 Dyson hair dryer, examining how its motor, airflow and electronics fit into a small body. He runs tests along the way and ultimately decides whether the engineering justifies the price.

Moxie Marlinspike's DEF CON 18 talk argues that privacy threats have shifted from centralized state databases like TIA to corporate data collection by companies like Google, despite wins in strong cryptography and decentralization.