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The most common way to be sim swapped is when someone contacts your wireless carrier and is able to convince the call center representative that they in fact are “you”. They use your personal data that's often exposed in hacks, data breaches, or information you publicly share on social networks, hence at worst dark or deep web. When the call center employee is convinced, they ask for switching the sim card linked to your phone number, and replace it with their sim card. Once your phone number is converted to a new sim card, all of your incoming calls and text messages will be diverted to the newly switched sim card that is in illicit hands.

WBTC is a product of BitGo, one of the oldest players in the industry. Kiarash Mosayeri, Product Manager at BitGo, explains what the WBTC product is all about, and how it is connected to other E...

It all started from this paper that we received from a team known as Team Rocket, who had been working on novel consensus protocol.My students and I were already exploring lighter weight protocols than Nakamoto and Classical consensus to find unique approaches nobody had explored before, but that could still provide the same guarantees as Bitcoin. We reviewed the paper draft from Team Rocket, and quickly realized that we were on to a big breakthrough.Avalanche didn’t rely on proof-of-work or mining, but used probabilistic consensus based on sub-sampling. It could be secure and predictable like Bitcoin, but didn’t suffer the centralization or performance trade-off inherent in Classical consensus approaches.