by David Gerard
e.g., Stephen Tual, later of The DAO. Gian Volpicelli. “Smart Contracts Sound Boring, But They’re More Disruptive Than Bitcoin”. Motherboard, 16 February 2015.
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Vitalik Buterin. “Thinking About Smart Contract Security”. Ethereum Blog, 19 June 2016.
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Matt Levine. “Crossing the Rubicon and Gagging Shkreli”. Bloomberg, 5 July 2017.
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Maxim Lott. “New tech promises government-proof prediction markets”. Fox News Tech, 20 August 2015.
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Szabo used this example in his original Smart Contracts paper, and reiterated it in “Formalizing and Securing Relationships on Public Networks”. First Monday 2 (9), 1 September 1997. ISSN 13960466.
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Nick Szabo. “The dawn of trustworthy computing”. Unenumerated (blog), 11 December 2014.
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For instance, the famous Shellshock exploit was in completely open and widely-used code, but wasn’t noticed until 25 years after the bug had been introduced.
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The Underhanded C Contest.
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The Underhanded Solidity Coding Contest, for deceptive smart contracts, with judges including Christian Reitwiessner, creator of Solidity.
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Christian Reitwiessner. “Security Alert – Solidity – Variables can be overwritten in storage”. Ethereum Blog, 1 November 2016.
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King of the Ether: “An Ethereum contract, living on the blockchain, that will make you a King or Queen, might grant you riches, and will immortalize your name.” (archive)
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Nick Szabo. “A Formal Language for Analyzing Contracts”. 2002. (archive)
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Nicola Atzei, Massimo Bartoletti, Tiziana Cimoli. “A survey of attacks on Ethereum smart contracts”. 6th International Conference on Principles of Security and Trust (POST), European Joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software, April 2017.
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Muneeb Ali. “Solarstorm: A security exploit with Ethereum’s Solidity language, not just the DAO”. Blockstack Blog, 21 June 2016.
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Zikai Alex Wen and Andrew Miller. “Scanning Live Ethereum Contracts for the ‘Unchecked-Send’ Bug”. Hacking Distributed (blog), 16 June 2016. “Upon inspection, not one of the Solidity programs that passed our heuristic check actually applied the recommended best-practice of testing the callstack directly.”
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Peter Vessenes. “Ethereum Contracts Are Going To Be Candy For Hackers”. Blockchain, Bitcoin and Business (blog), 18 May 2016.
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Martin Holst Swende. “Ethereum contract security: An Ethereum Roulette”. 14 August 2015.
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Ethererik. “GovernMental’s 1100 ETH jackpot payout is stuck because it uses too much gas”. Reddit /r/ethereum, 26 April 2016.
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“Post-Mortem Investigation (Feb 2016)”. King of the Ether. (archive)
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“Hi! My name is Rubixi. I’m a new Ethereum Doubler. Now my new home – Rubixi.tk”. Bitcointalk.org Bitcoin Forum > Alternate cryptocurrencies > Marketplace (Altcoins) > Service Announcements (Altcoins), 11 April 2016. (archive)
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Vitalik Buterin. “Live example of ‘underhanded solidity’ coding on mainnet”. Reddit /r/ethereum, 10 April 2016.
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brockchainbrockshize. Comment on “Attacker has withdrawn all ETC from DarkDAO on the unforked chain”. Reddit /r/ethereum, 25 July 2016.
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The DAO front page, archive of 22 June 2016. Yes, that’s after the hack.
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Dino Mark, Vlad Zamfir, Emin Gün Sirer. “A Call for a Temporary Moratorium on The DAO”. Hacking, Distributed (blog), 27 May 2016.
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Peter Vessenes. “More Ethereum Attacks: Race-To-Empty is the Real Deal”. Blockchain, Bitcoin and Business (blog), 9 June 2016.
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Stephen Tual. “No DAO funds at risk following the Ethereum smart contract ‘recursive call’ bug discovery”. blog.slock.it, 12 June 2016. (archive)
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Stephen Tual. “Why the DAO robber could very well return the ETH on July 14th”. Ursium (blog), 9 July 2016. (archive)
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There’s an amusing (if probably just trolling) open letter purportedly from the attacker, posted to Pastebin (archive), that makes this claim explicitly.
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Tjaden Hess, River Keefer, Emin Gün Sirer. “Ethereum’s DAO Wars Soft Fork is a Potential DoS Vector”. Hacking, Distributed (blog), 28 June 2016.
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Stephen Tual. “Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood, Alex van De Sande, Vlad Zamfir announced amongst exceptional DAO Curators”. blog.slock.it, 25 April 2016.
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Tracy Alloway. “An experiment”. 19 January 2017.
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Richard Waters. “Bitcoin 2.0 gives the dreamers focus — but only without the hype”. Financial Times, 4 December 2014.
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Earliest sighting I’ve found: JP Koning. “Why the Fed is more likely to adopt bitcoin technology than kill it off”. 14 April 2013.
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Jeremy Cuomo. “Making Blockchain Ready for Business: Increase trust, accountability, and transparency across your business networks”. IBM, 2016. The author link in the text is to a deleted Wikipedia article.
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I commend to you “Ignoring Blockchain Is Corporate Suicide: Why Blockchain is the biggest single threat to all CEOs for destroying corporate value” by Nick Ayton, in analyst newsletter Innovation Enterprise (7 July 2016) (archive). In the several years I’ve been following Bitcoin and blockchains, this is the single worst, stupidest and most incoherent piece of “Blockchain” hype I’ve seen; you definitely need to read it, to inoculate yourself against the worst excesses of this foolishness.
Ayton spends the first third of the article repeating how devastating Blockchain will be to business, the second third making technically garbled or meaningless unsubstantiated claims about the future and the last third on a list of predictions, many of which have already been shown unfeasible and three or four of which are literally out of ’80s cyberpunk science fiction, as if he read too much William Gibson as a lad and thinks Blockchain will make Mona Lisa Overdrive real – “augmented reality using VR and holographic systems will feed off sensory layers that will sit on the Ledger of Things connecting the world”, presumably visible to your new Zeiss-Ikon eyeballs.
“Someone asked me what Ethereum was… My response: ‘Imagine giving the Internet a dose of Viagra and increasing the dose each day’… The Blockchain Age is here!”
I know of one case where a non-technical manager inadvertently sent this link around their company; they quickly realised how relentlessly terrible everything about blockchains actually is – anyone who’s survived in business where sales people exist doesn’t need to be a techie to notice there’s something deeply wrong and lacking in blockchain hype – but the article had by then caught the attention of upper management. The manager found themselves in the position of designated expert and having to quell this idea, mostly by a process of translating why none of this could ever work into sober and considered business speak from the original profanity-laced screaming.
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Rodger Oates, Raghavasuresh Samudrala. “Industrialisation of Distributed Ledger Technology in Banking and Financial Services”. TechUK, 20 June 2016.
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Proofs of concept.
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A good survey of the blockchain in relation to this: Jim Greco. “Wall Street Loves the Blockchain”. Tabb Forum, 2 June 2017. (archive)
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Oliver Ralph. “Reinsurers turn to blockchain technology”. Financial Times, 16 May 2016.
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e.g., “How to find out who owns a property or a piece of land”. Land and property blog, HM Land Registry, 10 October 2013.
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Izabella Kaminska. “Tuna blockchains and Chilean Seabass”. FT Alphaville (blog), Financial Times, 6 September 2016.
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“From shore to plate: Tracking tuna on the blockchain”. Provenance, 15 July 2016.
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Matt Levine. “Executive Pay and Blood Trouble”. Bloomberg View, 11 July 2016.
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The only useful past work on this I’ve found: “Distributed Ledger Technology & Cybersecurity: Improving information security in the financial sector”. European Union Agency for Network and Information Security, 18 January 2017. My only qualms are that it uses as references Zero Hedge and Breitbart News.
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Vitalik Buterin. “On Public and Private Blockchains”. Ethereum Blog, 7 August 2015.
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Izabella Kaminska. “Exposing the ‘If we call it a blockchain, perhaps it won’t be deemed a cartel?’ tactic”. FT Alphaville (blog), Financial Times, 11 May 2015.
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Izabella Kaminska. “Introducing the ‘mutualised database’”. FT Alphaville (blog), Financial Times, 6 October 2016.
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Izabella Kaminska. “Blockchains? Where we’re going, we don’t need blockchains”. FT Alphaville (blog), Financial Times, 26 August 2016.
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“Bitcoin Venture Capital”. CoinDesk, 9 February 2017. (archive of that version)
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e.g., David Kaaret. “Is Your Firm Ready for Blockchain-Based Trade Processing?”. MarkLogic blog, 5 December 2016. (archive)
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James Eyers. “ASX builds blockchain for Australian equities”. Sydney Morning Herald, 22 January 2016.
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Jackie Range. “New Australian Securities Exchange chief defends blockchain plans”. Financial Times, 5 September 2016.
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Chanticleer. “Blockchain option for ASX clearing in limbo”. Australian Financial Review, 12 January 2017.
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Clive Boulton. “Banks find blockchain hard to put into practice [also supply chain]”. Hyperledger-Requirements-WG (mailing list), 12 September 2016. (archive)
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Viraj Kamat. “Questions on the Next Consensus Architecture”. Hyperledger technical-discuss (mailing list), 1 September 2016. (archive)
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Kadhim Shubber. “Banks find blockchain hard to put into practice”. Financial Times, 12 September 2016.
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Richard Lumb, Accenture. “Downside of Bitcoin: A Ledger That Can’t Be Corrected”. Dealbook (blog), New York Times, 9 September 2016.
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Morgan Grey. “Azure Blockchain as a Service Update #5”. Microsoft Azure blog, 29 February 2016. (archive)
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Pete Rizzo. “Linux, IBM Share Bold Vision for Hyperledger Project, a Blockchain Fabric for Business”. CoinDesk, 11 February 2016.
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“Projects”. Hyperledger.org.
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Digital Asset. “Moving Hyperledger to the Linux Foundation”. 2016.
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Intel Corporation. “Sawtooth Lake: Docs: Introduction”. 2016. (archive)
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Chain Core Docs. “Operating a blockchain”.
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Visa Inc. “Visa B2B Connect: New kid on the blockchain: Visa and Chain to bring improved international B2B payments to market”. October 2016.
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Richard Gendal Brown. “Introducing R3 Corda™: A Distributed Ledger Designed for Financial Services”. R3 Blog, 5 April 2016. “Notice some of the key things: firstly, we are not building a blockchain.” (archive)
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“Distributed ledger technology: Blackett review”. Government Office for Science, 19 January 2016.
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GO-Science. “Block chain technology”. YouTube, 19 January 2016.
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Mike Masnick. “How ASCAP Takes Money From Successful Indie Artists And Gives It To Giant Rock Stars”. TechDirt, 26 March 2012.
[←401]
Olivia Brown. “ASCAP’s Live Performance Royalties No Longer Reserved For Top Touring Acts”. Future of Music Coalition, 9 October 2012.
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Ben Sisario. “Going to the Ends of the Earth to Get the Most Out of Music”. New York Times, 8 June 2015.
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Wikipedia: Sony BMG copy protection rootkit scandal.
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“Fair Music: Transparency and Payment Flows in the Music Industry”. Rethink Music, Berklee Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship, July 2015.
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Chris Cooke. “PRS confirms Global Repertoire Database ‘cannot’ move forward, pledges to find ‘alternative ways’”. Complete Music Update, 10 July 2014.
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e.g., Andy Edwards. “The UK music industry tried to agree a ‘transparency code’ for streaming royalties. It collapsed – here’s why”. Music Business Worldwide, 26 February 2017
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There’s a famous saying concerning mushrooms and distributing information.
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George Howard. “Imogen Heap’s Mycelia: An Artists’ Approach for a Fair Trade Music Business, Inspired by Blockchain”. Forbes (contributor blog), 17 July 2015. (archive)
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Imogen Heap. “What Blockchain Can Do for the Music Industry”. Demos Quarterly #8, Spring 2016 (archive). I’ve also had reports of discussions with the people behind the “Tiny Human” initiative, and a musical ecosystem with the functionality I describe as “spyware” is absolutely the intention. (Also, they dislike Bandcamp.)
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Screenshot of payouts as of August 2016, uploaded by me 6 November 2016.
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Screenshot of the Ujo Music purchase page for “Tiny Human” when I clicked “Download” in August 2016. “Purchasing is disabled for now, sorry.”
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e.g., Hatching Amazing. “Part 1: How we tried to buy Imogen Heap’s song on Ethereum”. 24 January 2016. (archive)
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Everett Rosenfield. “Company leaves New York, protesting ‘BitLicense’”. CNBC, 11 June 2015.
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andrewkeys. “Purchase Imogen Heap’s ‘Tiny Human’ with Ether on ConsenSys project, Ujo, the decentralized peer-to-peer music platform!” Reddit /r/ethereum, 3 October 2015.
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“Emerging from the Silence”. Ujo Music blog, 29 August 2016. (archive)
[←416]
Ben Ratliff. “Is Bandcamp the Holy Grail of Online Record Stores?” New York Times, 19 August 2016.
[←417]
Horace Dedlu. “iTunes users spending at the rate of $40/yr”. Asymco, 12 May 2013. (archive)
[←418]
Stuart Dredge. “Spotify now processes ‘nearly 1bn streams every day’”. Music Ally, 22 July 2015.
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“Music on the Blockchain”. Blockchain for Creative Industries Research Cluster, Middlesex University, July 2016.
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Petter Ericson, Peter Harris, Elizabeth Larcombe, Turo Pekari, Kelly Snook, Andrew Dubber. “#MTFLabs: Blockchain”. 23 August 2016.
[←421]
Jeremy Silver. “Blockchain or the Chaingang?” CREATe Working Paper Series, May 2016. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.51326.
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“The Blockchain: Change everything forever”. Furtherfield, October 2016. Transcript, video. Another that would greatly benefit from being narrated by Philomena Cunk.
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John Lahr. “Berklee’s Open Music Initiative”. Music Business Journal, Berklee College of Music, September 2016.
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<
br /> Gideon Gottfried. “How ‘the Blockchain’ Could Actually Change the Music Industry”. Billboard, 5 August 2015.
[←425]
Kevin Cruz. “PeerTracks: Paradigm Shift In Music World”. Bitcoin Magazine, 22 October 2014. (archive)
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Benji Rogers. “How Blockchain Can Change the Music Industry (Part 2)”. Rethink Music, Berklee Institute for Creative Enterprise, 24 February 2016.
[←427]
Rhian Jones. “Revelator gets $2.5m funding led by Exigent Capital”. Music Business Worldwide, 30 August 2016.
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“TAO Network Partners With Boogie Shack Music Group to Offer Blockchain Solution”. TAO Network (press release), 22 August 2016.
[←429]
Zach LeBeau. “Anatomy of SingularDTV’s CODE (Centrally Organized Distributed Entity)”. 9 August 2016. (archive)
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“SNGLS Creation and S-DTV CODE Smart Project Creation Conditions: Explanatory Note & Governance Terms”. SingularDTV, September 2016. (archive)
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