Now, in cryptocurrency’s summer of discontent, comes a study that says the underlying technology for digital money is vulnerable to tampering.
Blockchain, the public ledgers used on computers worldwide to keep track of bitcoin and its ilk, is often hailed as a great way to ensure transactions are private. The point is to keep control of digital denominations out of the hands of government or other central authorities, such as banks.
But blockchain is subject to other forms of centralization, according to the study for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, done by a research firm called Trail of Bits. The report finds “unintended centralities” in these purportedly decentralized systems that could let in outside hackers or other tampering.
Three internet service providers handle 60% of all bitcoin traffic, the report declares. It warns that bitcoin “traffic is unencrypted—any third party on the network route between nodes (e.g., ISPs, Wi-Fi access point operators, or...
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