Emin Gun Sirer
Emin Gun Sirer is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Cornell, where his research focuses on operating systems and distributed systems.
Emin Gun Sirer is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Cornell, where his research focuses on operating systems and distributed systems.
All coin and product reviews by expert Emin Gun Sirer.
I have often said that Ethereum is doing it right throughout the DAO fork, and Bitcoin devs, with their fetishistic dependence on "the longest chain," their inability to change ancient code, and their obvious conflicts of interest, are on weak ground.
Full review2017-12-18
Stellar seems designed for value transfer. It's not the architecture I'd use for data-intensive supply chain applications.
Full review2018-07-30
Hilarious. #6 cryptocurrency NEO is just a 7-node system uber the control of a single party, and the code isn't designed to handle even a single, benign failure.... Chances of NEO NOT being broken right now: 0%.
Full review2018-03-04
IOTA has some promising ideas. Its community needs to learn to be better team players though.
Full review2018-04-26
I've yet to see a clever application of AI and blockchains, save for Numerai.
Full review2018-04-18
Total train wreck on Verge involving a 51% attack and a botched fork.
Full review2018-04-05
Cardano is a particular consensus protocol, built around a PoS sybil control mechanism. It is not well-understood enough for people to trust it yet.
Full review2018-07-12
A coin that gets created as a result of human time spent on browsing would be great. Worth taking a look at the Basic Attention Token, which requires browser support, but does essentially this.
Full review2018-02-24
Say whatever you like, EOS achieves higher dramas per second than any other chain.
Full review2018-07-08
Dash is the re-branded dark? Darkcoin was cool. but still, would appreciate pointer to scalability tech.
Full review2015-10-15
There are some nutcases out there who are worried about Zcash's trusted setup ceremony, which involved six independent sources of randomness, of which only one had to be correct for the setup to succeed.
Full review2018-06-10
There is nothing about Bitcoin that makes it a good store of value. That line of narrative is incredibly dangerous. It has been used to sell Bitcoin to the masses who donβt understand where that value is going to come from.
Full review2018-06-12
Looks like Siacoin devs soft forked their coin to gain a competitive advantage over a miner manufacturer.
This seems wrong from every perspective: it harms coin security and seems unethical.
Full review2018-01-24
Ethereum Classic experienced a 51% attack, with very large reorgs. There are also rumors of double spends.
A deep reorg is a rewrite of the blockchain, a rewriting of history. As such, it marks complete failure of immutability.
Since immutability is ETC's main claim to fame, this is technically a catastrophic failure.
Full review2019-01-07
Bancor can be gamed by miners, and, even if the miners are naive or benevolent, will always trail the real market. It provides no efficiency guarantee during this discovery process, and will likely waste its reserves on market price discovery. You should think twice before you layer a coin on top of Bancor.
Full review2017-06-19
BSV conclusively showed that a single block can take more than 20 minutes to propagate. It also had a clear case of a miner mining two different blocks at the same height. They are the laughingstock of cryptocurrencies, a coin borne of fraud, social media images and endless bullshit.
Full review2018-11-26
PSA: Bitcoin Gold is a gimmick to create confusion around Bitcoin Cash. Beware of anyone peddling it.
Full review2017-11-06
Satoshi invented a whole family of consensus protocols, [while tthe XRP team] reused a [consensus] protocol so well known, it's called "classical." Satoshi was aware of [the liveness and safety] trade-off, [and] he actively rejected it because classical protocols are too fragile.
Full review2020-01-03
There was never any reason or justification for Telegram to issue its own currency.
Full review2019-10-11
I've been a fan of Monero as well for some time. The turning point was a conversation with the leading expert on the topic, Sarah Meiklejohn, who convinced me that Monero's anonymity may be comparable to Zcash in practice.
Full review2019-11-19
BCH plans to divert 12.5% of its new block rewards (specifically, coinbase) to funding its developers. Further, the miners will orphan blocks that do not comply with this plan.....There are three unpalatable aspects to this proposal.
First, it's coercive on miners. Practically, the orphaning is a way to force Calvin Ayre to pay. There isn't a single person who cares about Calvin, probably not even his mother, assuming she's alive and has seen his pictures from the Caribbean.
The orphaning will not practically impact any other miners' decisions about which chain to mine on. They will follow their income, and we already discussed how the plan cleverly shifts costs to BTC as long as there's a price/hashrate difference between the tokens.
The second, and substantive, problem is the way the proposal came out of nowhere. Springing such a proposal, with orphaning built in, on a community with no prior discussion was terrible PR and community management.....
Third and final problem is that there are many underspecified aspects to the proposal. Specifically, who will manage the collected funds and how will they be distributed? This is exactly when some much needed community discussion would have been useful.
Full review2020-01-23
With [this] discovery, Grin and Beam are no longer privacy coins. They also have other drawbacks (e g. need to be online to receive payments, high inflation) compared to nonprivacy coins like Bitcoin.
Always demand proofs of correctness from systems you plan to use. Be wary of k-anonymity systems, where k is picked by the system. Always ask multiple experts about new protocols; do not follow social media hype.
Full review2019-11-18
With [this] discovery, Grin and Beam are no longer privacy coins. They also have other drawbacks (e g. need to be online to receive payments, high inflation) compared to nonprivacy coins like Bitcoin.
Always demand proofs of correctness from systems you plan to use. Be wary of k-anonymity systems, where k is picked by the system. Always ask multiple experts about new protocols; do not follow social media hype.
Full review2019-11-18
Libra has a few value propositions:
A. HotStuff consensus protocol invented by my student and colleagues
B. Underlying basket of goods
C. The MOVE virtual machine for smart contracts
D. Facebook's reach.
Avalanche outdoes Libra on A.
Saga outdoes Libra on B.
Solana matches Libra on C by supporting MOVE.
D is both an asset and a liability. It is why the Libra folks are getting dragged in front of Congress and why Europe is considering anti-Libra legislation.
Full review2019-12-10
Steemit was one of the first altcoins. Its design was overly complicated. There was zero technical breakthrough that would address the commonly known problems with DPoS.
It was just an appcoin, with a token whose structure was so complex, almost purposefully so to defy analysis. Everyone at the time cautioned others about the design of this system. Its failure today is indicative of just two trends, and no more.
First, we are now beginning to see failures of weak, fragile blockchains, based on obsolete protocols. Many of these systems were based on ideas from the 1980s. Academics worked on these systems, their weaknesses were well known, and Satoshi knew about them in 2009. He and everyone else rejected them, because they are inherently fragile.
There are many other vulnerable coins out there, based on the same ideas. Worse, there are protocols that people are pushing for future systems that have not been deployed yet but are based on the same highly-limited, highly-centralized infrastructure.
The common thread is that these are early systems, with no technical foundation, based on "design by gut feel" by hobbyists, subject to essentially no scrutiny.
Full review2020-03-02