CyberWire Daily - Blockchains that bind us. [Special Editions]

Episode Date: March 28, 2018

The past few month have been all abuzz with excitement about cryptocurrencies and the blockchain. The price of Bitcoin took a rocket ride toward the stars, and stories were coming fast and furious about how the blockchain was going to tranform and revolutionize just about everything.  Jonathan Katz is a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland and director of the Maryland cybersecurity center. As we’ll hear in this CyberWire special edition, he’s been following blockchain technology and cryptocurrency from its humble beginnings, and he’s our guide to understanding how it all works. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The past several months have been all abuzz with excitement about cryptocurrencies and the blockchain. The price of Bitcoin took a rocket ride toward the stars, but seems to have settled down for now. And stories were coming fast and furious about how the blockchain was going to transform and revolutionize... everything. I'm not too proud to admit that my understanding of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology is incomplete at best. I've got a general understanding of what's going on and how it all works, but I can't help shaking this feeling that there are details I'm still fuzzy on. And I'm guessing I'm not alone there.

Lucky for us, our CyberWire partners at the University of Maryland know a thing or two about this stuff and are willing to take the time to help us understand. Jonathan Katz is a professor of computer science at the University of Maryland and director of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center. As we'll hear in this CyberWire special edition, he's been following blockchain technology and cryptocurrency from its humble beginnings, and he's our guide to understanding how it all works. Stay with us. So Bitcoin actually was introduced in a white paper that was written by this pseudonymous person

who went by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto. And interestingly enough, actually, it was a white paper sent to a cyberpunk or a crypto mailing list that I was on. So I have actually an archived copy of the original email from the person calling themselves Nakamoto with a link to their white paper saying, hey, here's this great idea. Let me tell you all about it. And it's actually funny because I can look back now at the archive again and see the responses of people to this white paper. And, you know, people found it very interesting and suggestive and imaginative, but they were skeptical that it would ever take off. So you can see that even as early as 2008, people were A, speculating about the demise of Bitcoin and B, being proven wrong.

were A, speculating about the demise of Bitcoin, and B, being proven wrong. But it wasn't actually until a couple of years after that that I think more than a handful of people were using it. And it wasn't until even a few years after that that it kind of really hit the mainstream. And I'm trying to think back myself kind of when I first became conscious or really aware of Bitcoin. And that was probably in about 2012, 2013. And that's when you really started to hear about people who actually own Bitcoin. You would hear about people who were enthusiasts who were mining Bitcoin. And then a little bit after that, it started to hit the popular press.

So was this white paper, was it simultaneously describing blockchain and Bitcoin sort of hand in hand? Yeah, actually it was. And I'm glad you brought that point forward, because I think one of the things that's important to understand is that the original white paper really had two independent contributions, I would say. One of them was this idea of a blockchain and a particular way to implement the blockchain that is sometimes called Nakamoto consensus. And then what you can do on top of the blockchain and suggesting or proposing the idea of a cryptocurrency on top of that blockchain, which is Bitcoin. So there were really two independent ideas there. And as you know, you know, the idea of cryptocurrency has taken on a life of its own, but the idea of blockchain has also taken on a life of its own. And there are many different

applications you can imagine on top of a blockchain besides only cryptocurrency. So the software behind running this, I'm trying to think of the transition from a white paper to an actual system that's up and running. What was that process like? Yeah, so this is interesting because the network of Bitcoin miners had to really bootstrap itself. When the white paper came out, there was only one miner essentially, which was Nakamoto himself. And then I think it spread to a small circle of his friends, you know, under 10 people at the time who were doing Bitcoin mining. And then just, you know, friend to friend and word of mouth and, you know, post to these mailing lists like the

one I talked about, slowly got more people to join. And then it just snowballed. But it's really interesting to think about the time when there were only, you know, 10 or 20 or 30 miners in the Bitcoin network. And number one, you know, the fact that you could have mined Bitcoin relatively easily, it would have been a lot more likely for you as a miner to get Bitcoin than it is nowadays when it's essentially impossible for a private person without investing a lot of money in hardware to mine any Bitcoin. But also the utility is obviously much lower because if only 30 people in the world are using Bitcoin, then those are the only 30 people you can spend your Bitcoins with. And so take us through that. I mean, at some point, people start exchanging real money

for Bitcoin. Yeah, so I think originally it was just for fun. I think friends would exchange Bitcoin among themselves. There's an early example. I don't remember from what year this is now, but there's an early example of people just using it for fun to buy pizza. What would now, in retrospect, be an exorbitantly high price, given how much the price of Bitcoin has increased over that decade. But, you know, like I said, people were using it for fun. And then it wasn't until, I don't remember exactly, but maybe around 2014, when the first significantly large companies began accepting Bitcoin for payment over the internet. But until then, really, it was just this thing for fun that people were hoping, maybe speculating, that it would take off, but really had no utility

at that point except for spending money among your friends. But then once companies began to adopt it and once exchanges grew up around it, then it became possible to translate Bitcoin into, I was going to translate Bitcoin into, you know, I was going to say real currency, but who knows what real currency is these days. But anyway, you could exchange it for US dollars at any rate. So let's dig in some and explain how the blockchain works. If you were sitting around your Thanksgiving Day table and a family member who's not a computer scientist said,

so Jonathan, I'm hearing a lot about this blockchain thing. How would you explain it to them? So first of all, I want to make clear that the ideas or the problem that blockchain is solving are not new and they go back actually to the 1970s. And let me just give a little bit of context. So there's this classical problem called consensus. And at a high level, the basic issue is that you have a network of computers, say three, five, 10 computers. They're all maintaining copies of some data and new data is constantly coming in, maybe to one of those computers or maybe to all those computers. But they want to make sure that even as new data is getting added to the system,

they all maintain a consistent copy. So you can imagine just as an example, right, a bank has data on all the money in all their accounts, and they wouldn't store it on just one computer because then if that computer dies or gets broken or stolen, all that data is lost. So they're going to replicate that data among three machines, let's say, but they want to make sure that at all points in time, all those machines have a consistent state, a consistent view of all the money in everyone's account.

So that's the question that people considered, beginning really with Leslie Lamport in the late 1970s and showing some feasibility results, some impossibility results, actually, but quite interesting. impossibility results, actually, but quite interesting. And the research had kind of come to a natural stopping point around the late 1990s, I would say, maybe early 2000s. There were some further improvements, giving practical consensus protocols. And the real revolution with blockchain is that it's a mechanism for achieving consensus. And the big difference between blockchain and prior work is that prior work had always assumed that you's a mechanism for achieving consensus. And the big difference between blockchain and prior work is that prior work had always assumed that you had a network of computers that were being provisioned by some entity.

So, you know, to go back to the bank example, you had these three computers and they were all being managed by a bank, meaning that the bank could tell them exactly, you know, what software they should run. The bank could monitor them and if any of them were behaving incorrectly, it could reboot them. And it was a closed system so that the computers all

knew they were talking only to each other, and they wouldn't accept any connections from the outside. And the big difference with blockchain, the big conceptual leap, was that he designed it to be an open system, what's now called a permissionless blockchain uh meaning that anybody could join anyone around the world could join and classical consensus protocols completely fell in this case because what would happen is that they would get overwhelmed by attackers right so if i have my network of three computers but then i allow a hundred random people to join well then if an attacker wants to attack my network he'll just you know spin up a hundred different machines and join my network and completely overwhelm me.

And so that was a problem that was really believed to be inherent. And so for that reason, all the classical work was in closed systems where you know exactly who the parties are in advance. But Nakamoto showed that by using these proofs of work, you could limit the effect that any attacker could have. So in particular, one of the problems that classical consensus protocols face is that even if you have only one attacker, they can spin up 100 virtual machines or 100 real machines and join your network as 100 different individuals. And Nakamoto's insight, based on some prior work, was that if you require people essentially to do these proofs of work, then an attacker who only had, let's say, one physical machine could still try to spin up 100 virtual machines on their physical machine, but the amount of work that they would be able to do

is not going to be increasing. And so even though they have 100 virtual machines, the amount of work per virtual machine is now 1,100th of the amount of work that the physical computer can do. And this was a way essentially to rate limit the number of malicious parties that could join the network at any time. And what Nakamoto did was to design this protocol that would be resilient as long as a majority of the computational power in the network were controlled by honest people. And so has that held up? Well, yeah, to a large extent it has. There's some debate about what the exact threshold is, whether or not it can tolerate any minority

of attackers controlling a minority of computational power, or whether you actually need the honest parties to control something like two-thirds or some other fraction of the computational power in the network. It depends a little bit about what assumptions you're making and various other things. But yeah, basically it looks like it has worked. And there have been, since that time, some formal analyses of the blockchain of the Nakamoto consensus protocol showing, in fact, that it is secure against some fraction of adversarial behavior. And so explain to me, I mean, is this truly open now? I mean, if I wanted to, could I go get the software, which I understand is open source, yes,

and just spin up my own computer and jump on in? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Anybody can join. And you can actually join as a miner. You can try to mine Bitcoin on your own. And or you can join as just somebody who owns Bitcoin and spends Bitcoin and follows what's going on in the Bitcoin network without actually doing any of the mining. But yeah, definitely, it's still open. Anybody can join at any time. So let's explain what the mining is. How does that work? So the mining was another ingenious aspect of Bitcoin. So this now you get into the cryptocurrency layer on top of blockchain. And the basic idea was to incentivize people

to maintain the consistency of the blockchain. So remember, the goal of the blockchain is to make sure that everybody in the system has a consistent view of all the accounts, really, of who owns what coins and how many coins there are in the system. And as part of doing that, the nodes were required to check various calculations done by other nodes. And Nakamoto had the idea to incentivize people to do that by building into the sequence of checks and maintenance of the blockchain a process by which in the course of doing that, you would get some payoff in terms of Bitcoin that you mine. So, you know, basically at a very high level, the idea is you run this massive amount of work, which I'm leaving unspecified now, but you do some massive amounts of work in the process of which you're ensuring consistency of the blockchain. And after you do some certain amount of work, you get paid off by creating some new Bitcoin that belonged to you.

But that amount of work has increased over time, yes? That's right. So another aspect of Bitcoin is that the rate at which Bitcoin are created is held constant. And so as the amount of computational power in the network grows, meaning as the number of miners in the network grows, the computational effort needed to generate new Bitcoin increases. So over time, as the network has expanded exponentially, the amount of time required to mine new Bitcoin has also increased exponentially.

So we've heard stories about how this means that Bitcoin is taking increasingly large amounts of electricity to mine new coins. That's right. And I think people are worried about that, both in terms of how much longer it can continue to grow and also in terms of the environmental impact of all of this, because essentially all the work that's being done to mine Bitcoin has no external positive impact. It's only being used to, A, ensure the consistency of the Bitcoin network and B, to mine new Bitcoin. And yeah, there are these reports now that the total amount

of computational effort expended as part of the Bitcoin network is even exceeding that of certain countries. And so I don't know how much longer that can continue. It'll just be interesting to see. What I will say is that people are thinking about alternate mechanisms that might be used besides these proofs of work that might either involve other resources like storage or that might involve other mechanisms altogether that wouldn't require this wasted computational effort on behalf of the entire network. So Bitcoin is obviously the most well-known sort of textbook example of cryptocurrency, but there are many other types. Can you take us through what are some of the differences in what other types of cryptocurrency have been spun up?

Well, the first thing I would say is that you're exactly right, that there are literally hundreds of other cryptocurrencies that have sprung up. And essentially, anybody, anybody at all can make their own cryptocurrency. And you can do it easily just by copying the Bitcoin protocol and giving it your own name, or changing some parameters of the protocol, and then giving it your own name. But of course, those are not really very interesting. What's interesting are the cryptocurrencies that differ in some particular way from Bitcoin. And let me just mention two of them that I think are particularly interesting and that expand the scope of Bitcoin in two

different directions. So one of those, another maybe well-known one is called Ethereum. Ethereum uses a similar blockchain substrate as Bitcoin does. But then what it layers on top of that is something that kind of goes beyond what Bitcoin offers. So Bitcoin can be viewed at the highest level as a protocol that allows you to transfer value from one account to another, right? So I can send half a Bitcoin from me to you. And that's basically the only operation it supports. Ethereum, on the other hand, allows you to implement a general purpose computer. So what that means essentially is that I can write some arbitrary program and I can have it executing on the virtual computer that is Ethereum that's composed of all these different miners running the Ethereum protocol. to what people have heard of these smart contracts,

by which I mean that I can write a program that embeds in it a contract that, for example, says, you know, if party A does something, then I will pay them a dollar or, you know, one Ether. And if party B does something else, and if they do it first, maybe, then they get the Ether. And you can write these arbitrarily complex contracts that will then be executed on the Ethereum virtual machine. And they're called self-enforcing because the point is that they get executed no matter what.

And once you place them in the virtual machine, in the Ethereum virtual machine, they're going to get executed no matter what. So basically, if I put a contract, let's just take a simple example. I can put a contract in there that says, if you send me proof that you delivered some goods to my house, then automatically one Ether will be transferred to you. to that contract and then have it checked, of course, by the contract and by the people running the contract, then that Ether will be automatically transferred from me to you and you don't have to worry, say, that I will renege and not pay you out. So that's one just fascinating example of how the richness of what can be supported was extended significantly from the original Bitcoin idea. Another direction is to think about cryptocurrencies but think about uh building privacy in and there are a number of notable examples here uh two that come to mind are z

cash and monero and basically the the idea there is that bitcoin is is uh even though we like to think of it as offering anonymity because uh all the names of people are really just public keys it actually is fully transparent. It's a log where every transaction is recorded and publicly available for people to view. So it actually does not offer very good anonymity at all. And people have, for the last couple of years, been thinking about how you could add anonymity to the system and enable transfers of money without revealing who's transferring money to whom, and even potentially without revealing how much money is being transferred. And so those newer systems build

anonymity in again, again, on top of the Nakamoto consensus protocol, but allowing people to transfer money completely anonymously. So in terms of what's going on cryptographically under the hood, you know, I hear stories about some of these cryptocurrency exchanges being cracked or people getting their money stolen. Can you give us some background on that? So this is also very interesting. I mean, one thing that I think needs to be pointed out here is that for most of these, I think for most of these stories, and especially all the ones related to Bitcoin, these Bitcoin thefts that you're hearing about are actually not due to flaws or vulnerabilities in the underlying Bitcoin protocol itself. They're due just to standard

security vulnerabilities at large. So just as an example, you know, the way Bitcoin, the way Bitcoin transfers work is that you have a cryptographic key and ownership of a Bitcoin basically means that you know the associated key. And when you want to spend that Bitcoin, you use that key in a particular way to cause the transaction to occur. And you have to store that key somewhere. So you can store it on your laptop, but then if you have malware in your machine, that malware can pick up a copy of that key and send it to an attacker. You can store it in the cloud, you can store it online, you can store it on one of these exchanges, for example.

But then if those exchanges get hacked, the attacker gets access to all those keys and that effectively gives it access to all the Bitcoin. It gives it the ability to spend all that Bitcoin. So really, again, it has nothing to do with the underlying protocol. It just has to do with the fact that it's all digital now, number one, and the fact that there's no kind of way to reverse transactions the way that might happen if your bank were hacked into, right?

The bank would have, you know, offline backups, perhaps, and be able to recover and have insurance to cover the event of that loss. But for Bitcoin, that simply doesn't exist. And so if you lose your secret key, you lose your Bitcoin, there's no way to recover it. And that's it. And so really, that's what's going on in all these examples. And so we've seen examples of people, a market popping up for hardware wallets. Yeah, that's right. So because of the need to store these keys securely, and because of the difficulty of doing that on just, you know, your regular laptop, people have been selling these Bitcoin wallets that claim to make it more easier to securely store your Bitcoin keys.

And for a lot of users, that would actually make a lot of sense because it does give them an easy way to manage their keys more securely than just storing them on their own local computer. Now, when some of these attacks have happened, I've heard of some of these networks saying, we're going to fork the network now. What does that mean, and what's the implications of that? So at various points in time, in Bitcoin, but also in other cryptocurrencies, there's been some debate about the best way to, let's say, run the network. So for Bitcoin, just as an example,

there was some debate about whether or not to increase the maximum number of transactions that could be allowed at any given time. And there was some group of people who wanted to increase it and some group of people who didn't want to increase it. And ultimately, when they couldn't agree, one of the groups or the group that wanted to change the protocol essentially said, okay, you know, we're going to go ahead and change the protocol. Everyone who wants to change the protocol, come along with us and and, you know, and update your protocol accordingly.

But people who didn't want to change are not going to change. And so what ends up happening is that you end up with with two people, two groups of people, rather, who are both starting at the same point, right, the original Bitcoin network, but then forking off onto two paths where one of them is going to continue running the original Bitcoin protocol and the other one is going to run a new version an updated version of the bitcoin protocol and those are going to be incompatible with each other so what that means is that let's see so i'd say at time step zero everyone's running the same protocol and then at time step one you have one group uh choosing to remain with the protocol one group

choosing to deviate they can both look back and at any prior Bitcoins that were mined prior to time zero and still use those in their network. But any coins mined from time period one on are only going to be usable on that particular side of the path that they took. And so basically, that's kind of bad from the point of view of the overall ecosystem, because in the best case, right, it splits everybody in half. And now rather than having, you know, 1000 people mining on Bitcoin, you have 500 people mining on the left and 500 people mining on the right. And it's better, obviously, when you have more people, you know, working on the same thing. But nevertheless, these forks have happened various times, and they can lead to some,

you know, short term instability instability and also potentially long-term decline. So I just saw that in the last couple of months, actually, one of the Bitcoin forks basically died out, lost interest over time, and then people decided just to kill it off and switch to the other fork of Bitcoin. Yeah, it seems like a symptom of, I guess, the decentralized nature of the whole thing where you don't have a governing body who says, hey, you know, we're coming out with a 1.1 release now. People are sort of more in control of it. I guess the

group, all the users have their say. It's very interesting to think about this point, actually, because on the one hand, you're right, it's completely decentralized. And if all the users tomorrow decided or even a fraction of the users tomorrow decided they wanted to change the protocol, they could go off on their own and just form their own group running their own protocol. On the other hand, there is also a core group of Bitcoin developers, and they have a lot of influence. If a lot of them spoke out and said, hey, we think this is a great idea. We all agree unanimously that we want to change things, then they might actually be able to change parts of the protocol. But again, it would be up to the individual miners to agree and to actually update the software and accept

that change. So are there, for lack of a better term, are there full-time staffers working on these protocols? Well, I wouldn't say full-time. They'd have to get paid somehow, I suppose. But there are people who are definitely actively maintaining or thinking about maintaining the network and who are actively thinking about what direction the network should go in. So yeah, definitely. But again, it's also an open group. So it's not a cabal of people. It's an open group, but you can't just join instantaneously. You'd have to build up reputation. You'd have to get involved somehow at a low level before rising to the ranks, as it were, until you were accepted by the community at large. Where do you see this headed? Obviously,

we have a lot of enthusiasm. The price of Bitcoin skyrocketed at the end of last year. It seems to have settled down some. But all of this enthusiasm and speculation over what is essentially sort of an imaginary thing, a virtual thing at the very least. What's your outlook? Well, I can tell you my opinion. Obviously, it's all speculation. And what I'll tell you is that I've kind of had this opinion for a while, and I've been consistently proved wrong the last five years. But what I will say is that it seems to me, number one, you're exactly right that to a large degree, the value of Bitcoin right now seems number one, arbitrary and number two, a lot higher than what its actual value is. If you think about what its actual value should be, clearly that should depend on how

many people are using it and more importantly, how many merchants are accepting it. And given how difficult it would be right now for the average person to obtain Bitcoin and then spend it, I would say the actual adoption, the number of people using Bitcoin is much, much lower than the US dollar. The number of transactions, the value of the transactions that are going on in Bitcoin right now is much lower than the total value of all Bitcoin out there. And so it seems to me that the price of Bitcoin is overinflated. It's also not clear to me that Bitcoin will be the winning cryptocurrency. It does seem to me that, number one, the idea of Nakamoto consensus

was a brilliant idea. And that, I think, will last. I think the idea of cryptocurrencies is a solid idea. I think there are applications for it. There is a real need for it. I see this all the time whenever I change money when I travel internationally and I'm hit with these fees when I want to change money in both directions at the airport coming and going. And there's really no reason for that. And so cryptocurrencies can really fill a great role in facilitating international transactions, just for one example. So I think there is a need that they can fill. But it's not clear to me that Bitcoin will be the winning cryptocurrency, right?

We've seen several times throughout history that the initial technology, number one, is not the best, and number two, is not always the winner. And so something may well come along that will displace Bitcoin, at which point I would think that Bitcoin would essentially become worthless, or perhaps maybe have very small value as a collector's item. And that's my guess, my best guess for what will happen is that cryptocurrencies will be around 10 years from now, but the cryptocurrency of choice may not be Bitcoin itself. And what about the blockchain? I mean, we see lots of people crowing that there are going to be all sorts of uses for this.

You know, it's going to revolutionize how we organize things and track things. What's your take on that? Absolutely. There's a tremendous amount of hype, and I think a lot of the hype is unwarranted. I think that, like I said, the problem of consensus has been studied for 40 years. And the problem of consensus has been solved also for much of those 40 years. So a lot of companies that are touting the fact that they have, let's say, a private blockchain. To me, a private blockchain is just a secure distributed database, which we've had for decades. So there's nothing new there other than the term blockchain.

The fact that companies are aware of these new techniques maybe for achieving consensus is good, but I don't see how a lot of these private blockchains are going to really change anything. Now, on the other hand, the idea of the public blockchain, where, as I said before, Now, on the other hand, the idea of the public blockchain, where, as I said before, anybody can join and it's a completely open system and it's also a transparent log that anybody can read and access, that does, this would be very useful. You'd have a consistent public and append-only view of public documents, for example, which would give anybody the ability to look for public documents and search for documents at any time, which would give anybody the ability to add documents to this public view as they wanted, and which would prevent anybody from being able to modify things that were put there in the past. And I can imagine that that would be very useful. I'm not sure if there's a money-making opportunity there, though I'm sure I could be proved wrong,

but it does seem like it would be very useful for a society to have that. And I've seen, you know, I forget which country it was, but some country, I think it was... I think Estonia is working on that. Could be Estonia, but they were talking about putting real estate records, records of real estate transactions in a blockchain. Maybe it was Switzerland. And in any event, I can imagine that would be very useful because that would provide a public database

of real estate transactions. That would be untamperable. All right. Well, I think we've covered a lot here. Is there any area that I've missed? Anything you feel like we should touch on that we haven't hit on? I guess the only thing I would say is that it's great for me to see all the interest in blockchain and cryptocurrencies. I just, you know, unfortunately, that comes with a lot of this hype and a lot of overpromotion.

And there's a lot of companies jumping into the space. I think only very few of them really know what they're doing. And I think there's going to be some shakeout in the market at some point. When only the few people who actually have good ideas, have marketable ideas, and actually understand the underlying technology are going to remain. And the other people who kind of just jumped on the bandwagon are going to be, I think, eventually pushed out of the market. But nevertheless, I think it is really exciting technology. There's a lot of cool cryptography involved, which I'm very happy to see. And I think it's great to have the public be more aware of cryptography and computer security in general. And as someone who does understand this stuff,

do you have any advice for folks who don't understand this for how to protect themselves, have any advice for folks who don't understand this for how to protect themselves, how to make sure that they don't get caught up in one of the scams or, you know, lose their money? Yeah, well, I think the first thing I would say is that there's a lot of information available online. There's tons of blog posts, there's tons of videos. There's a book I can recommend on Bitcoin. It's a little bit outdated because it came out several years ago, but it's still a pretty good introduction to the underlying protocol. And if you're interested in it at all, you know, at least read that, skim it, understand at a high level what's going on so you can make better judgments about the field. in and getting caught by scams. And I think immediately of all these ICOs, where to me, it seems like these ICOs have just jumped on the bandwagon and been able to convince people to put money in with no expectation of any return and oftentimes with no underlying business model

even being present. And I think those are very dangerous. And I would be loathe even to lump those into the general world of blockchains and cryptocurrencies, even though they do fit in that space. Because all they're doing is essentially using it in name only. It's like I talked about earlier, where anybody can spin up their own cryptocurrency, but it doesn't mean it's valuable. And so people, I think, have to be very careful about that and invest in ICOs only to the extent they would invest in any other publicly traded company. And I want to make the announcement that at the end of this program, people will be able to buy the Katz Bittner cryptocurrency. It's going to be the hottest thing. Get in at $100 now and it'll go up to $1,000.

That's guaranteed. It's a sure thing. What could possibly go wrong? Between you and our expertise, and by our expertise, I mean your expertise, what could possibly go wrong, right? That's right. That's right. All right, Jonathan. Well, I think we've got it covered. As always, thanks for taking the time. Sure. This was really great. It was a lot of fun. And that's our CyberWire special edition, looking at the blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

Many thanks to Jonathan Katz from the University of Maryland for joining us. The Cyber Wire podcast is proudly produced in Maryland out of the startup studios of Data Tribe, where they're co-building the next generation of cybersecurity teams and technology. The coordinating producer for this show was Jordan Kovacs. Our show is produced by Pratt Street Media with editor John Petrick,

social media editor Jennifer Iben, technical editor Chris Russell, executive editor Peter Kilby, and I'm Dave Bittner. Thanks for listening. Thank you. ThreatLocker is a full suite of solutions designed to give you total control, stopping unauthorized applications, securing sensitive data, and ensuring your organization runs smoothly and securely. Visit ThreatLocker.com today to see how a default-deny approach can keep your company safe and compliant.