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Host Rich Goldberg is joined by Dr. Nicholas Weaver of UC-Berkeley, one of the nation’s leading crypto skeptics, who tells us why all cryptocurrencies will end in disaster. He explains why all crypto should “die in a fire,” why he views cryptocurrencies as Ponzi schemes, and he shares the little-known story of Pirate@40.
Dr. Nicholas Weaver
Nicholas Weaver received a B.A. in Astrophysics and Computer Science in 1995, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2003 both from the University of California at Berkeley. Although his dissertation was on novel FPGA architectures, he also was highly interested in Computer Security, including postulating the possibility of very fast computer worms in 2001.
In 2003, he joined ICSI, first as a postdoc and then as a staff researcher. My primary research focus is on network security, notably worms, botnets, and other internet-scale attacks, and network measurement. Other areas have included both hardware acceleration and software parallelization of network intrusion detection, defenses for DNS resolvers, and tools for detecting ISP-introduced manipulations of a user’s network connection. He is also a lecturer in the Computer Science Department at UC Berkeley.
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Published in: General
Rich, as a fellow cantankerous crypto-skeptic, I very much enjoyed this guest.
I’ll listen to your next guest soon. Perhaps he can offer some plausible justification for crypto beyond its speculative value or its utility as a currency for criminal enterprises.