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“Posing as a money launderer for Bitcoin seems like a great mechanism to find the dealers: There are so many paths for the dark net dealers to get drugs. There are much fewer paths for them to get cash,” Nicholas Weaver, a senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley, told Motherboard in an online chat.

"A lot of security people have flecks of dirt accumulated over the years," says Nicholas Weaver, senior researcher networking and security at the University of California, Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute.

Why secure email may be an illusion
May 22, 2018 | Steven Nelson, Washington Examiner

It's a wake-up call that some experts believe is overdue. “If you want confidential communications, you can't use email period,” said Nicholas Weaver, a computer science professor at the University of California at Berkeley, though he believes few people can exploit the vulnerabilities.

Bitcoin Could Be a Problem for U.S. Security Clearances
May 22, 2018 | Daniel Flatley, Bloomberg

But Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, said the Pentagon is right to scrutinize clearance applicants who own cryptocurrencies, even those who are buying and holding them as investments, known as "HODL’ers."

Suspect Identified in C.I.A. Leak Was Charged, but Not for the Breach
May 15, 2018 | Scott Shane and Adam Goldman, New York Times

Despite the scale of the breach, Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, Calif., said WikiLeaks had exaggerated the danger to civil liberties from the C.I.A. hacking tools, which he said were actually designed to target small numbers of high-priority targets.

Nicholas Weaver, a senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, told Motherboard in a Twitter message "This once again shows that data is like an oil spill: the contamination gets everywhere. The notion that a chain of 3+ companies, including one specifically intended for marketing, is able to resell access to everyone's real-time location with pretty high precision is disturbing but it shouldn't be surprising."

“I don't see it as any riskier than any of the other gazillion databases from a technical front,” Weaver told me via email. “Rather, it seems more likely to cause damage from a social front by needlessly and cruelly denying benefits due to innocent mistakes such as a transposed digit or forgotten social security number.”

A ‘Cryptocurrency’ Without a Blockchain Is Eating My City
April 18, 2018 | Jordan Pearson, Motherboard

This raises a pertinent question: If BTZ is working fine without a blockchain, why does it need one? "That this is private record keeping only makes the system better [than if it had a blockchain], since that at least is efficient,” Nicholas Weaver, a senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, California, wrote me in an email.

Others are still not convinced. Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley, told Vox this week that bitcoin’s price remains too volatile for it to be considered a worthwhile currency. “In order to make a cryptocurrency work, you need stability,” he said in the interview, published Wednesday. “The value has to hold. So, what you need is an entity that will take, say, dollars, and give you cryptodollars one-for-one and vice versa. But we know what these institutions are; they’re called banks.”

Why Bitcoin is bull****, explained by an expert
April 11, 2018 | Sean Illing, Vox

To get some answers, I reached out to Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley. Weaver teaches a course on blockchains and seems to think the technology is, at best, misguided and, at worst, a fraud. So I asked him to lay out his case in the simplest possible terms.

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