Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 99 posts.
The new Snowden revelations are explosive. Basically, the NSA is able to decrypt most of the Internet. They’re doing it primarily by cheating, not by mathematics. It’s joint reporting between the Guardian, the New York Times, and ProPublica. I have been working with Glenn Greenwald on the Snowden documents, and I have…
These past days, I have done a lot of thinking about bitcoin that ended up with me investing all of the money I had...
I’ve spent the past few weeks working on1 an old2 project of mine,OpenTimestamps, and it’s ready for a public alpha release. It’s timestampinginfrastructure ...
Have you heard of the Bitcoin Lightning Network? It is a proposal that claims that:
The hedge fund's finances appear to rest on the same scheme that destroyed Celsius Network. Will it work out any differently for Sam Bankman-Fried?
Yesterday at the CogX conference, I sat in a room listening to companies pitch their blockchain based startups. Because I hate myself. One in particular caught my attention. On the surface it seems to solve an important economic problem - art forgery and provenance. By putting your artwork on the "BitCoin Blockchain"…
A long time ago I hit upon the idea of bit gold. The problem, in a nutshell, is that our money currently depends on trust in a third party ...
Digital, but still a barbarous relic.
Wow, what the heck is going on with Bitcoin? When I started this post, the value of a single bitcoin had surged upwards of $250. It’s corrected a bit since then (down $100 or so), but it̵…
First things first: Why use a composition of encryption and MAC instead of a single primitive which achieves both? Because people are very good at writing bad code. In my experience on the FreeBSD security team, writing dozens of security advisories, there are three types of code which are especially prone to have…
Keeping track of things in the informational realm requires keeping track of time.
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I recently became interested in identifying the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. I started from the Bitcoin whitepaper [0] published in late 2008, and proceeded to run reverse tex…
All the recent media attention on Bitcoin inspired me to learn how Bitcoin really works, right down to the bytes flowing through the netwo...
Musings of a Computer Scientist.
Those of you who know what public-key cryptography is may have already heard of ECC , ECDH or ECDSA . The first is an acronym for Elliptic Curve Cryptography, the others are names for algorithms based on it.
There’s an agenda there, and it’s a bad one.
Multiple security firms recently identified cryptocurrency mining service Coinhive as the top malicious threat to Web users, thanks to the tendency for Coinhive’s computer code to be used on hacked Web sites to steal the processing power of its visitors’ devices. This post looks at how Coinhive vaulted to the top of…
A horror story.
that expectation is sustained by such profits being paid to those who choose to cash out. However,
Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future. Its failure to achieve adoption to date is because systems built…
Where the pipe-dream of Bitcoin’s real-world fungibility goes to die.
To say I've been skeptical about Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto universe would be an understatement of epic proportions. Since the early 2010s, some of my most ferocious Twitter battles have been against the HODL army with the laser eyes. There's just so much to oppose: Bitcoin's grotesque energy consumption, the…
