david wong

Hey! I'm David, cofounder of zkSecurity and the author of the Real-World Cryptography book. I was previously a crypto architect at O(1) Labs (working on the Mina cryptocurrency), before that I was the security lead for Diem (formerly Libra) at Novi (Facebook), and a security consultant for the Cryptography Services of NCC Group. This is my blog about cryptography and security and other related topics that I find interesting.

Manually making a transaction in bitcoins posted February 2014

Ken Shirriff has posted an amazing post on his blog on how he managed to manually make (meaning, he didn't use the official bitcoin application) a transaction in the bitcoin ecosystem.

I'm reading through it as I'm typing this, and it's really well explained, you get to see exactly what he does in Python and there are pictures!

you can read it here

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How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username posted January 2014

So this guy owned @N on twitter and got extorted his account by a phishing attack. The story is well written and you should read it here : https://medium.com/p/24eb09e026dd

but for a tl;dr the attacker called his paypal account to ask them for his credit card's last 4 digits. Then he called godaddy to ask them to reset the password. They only asked him for the 2 first digits and the last 4s. The attacker just had to guess the 2 first digits (and he did it on the first try, he could have kept calling and trying otherwise).

Now that he had @N's domain's name, he could now see his emails. Took over @N's facebook account and started mailing him "threats".

It's pretty crazy how easy phishing is.

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Cameron Winklevoss AMA on Reddit posted December 2013

winklevoss

There's an AMA on reddit right now from one of the Winklevoss brother. If you never heard of them, they were the one who originally came up with the idea of facebook but got it stolen after trying to hire Zuckerberg to code it. They're pretty famous in the bitcoin community for having bought 11million $ of bitcoins before April's big crash. The wonderful thing is, they hold on to their bitcoin during the crash. They must be very clever people because they're now, richer than ever.

Some of the interesting stuff from that AMA :

Have he sold any bitcoin?

I have yet to sell a single bitcoin.

What's the future of bitcoins?

small bull case scenario for Bitcoin is a 400 billion USD dollar market cap, so 40,000 USD a coin, but I believe it could be much larger. When this will happen, if it happens, I don't know, but if it happens, it will probably happen much faster than anyone imagines.

How did he learn about bitcoins?

Partying on a beach in Ibiza, where else?

Other altcoins?

I have not invested in any altcoins because I don't believe that any of the "problems" or issues that they address can't be addressed by Bitcoin itself.

There is a dog coin that seems to be a big joke : www.dogecoin.org

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