Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 99 posts.
Despite considering myself a cryptographer, I have not found myself particularly drawn to “crypto.” I don’t think I’ve ever actually said the words “get off my lawn,” but I’m much more likely to click on Pepperidge Farm Remembers flavored memes about how “crypto” used to mean “cryptography” than ...
I previously wrote a post on proof of work (PoW) and mining . The first half generated great interest but (apparently) failed to be universally persuasive. For example, CCRG (Ethereum’s multi-million dollar funded “research” organization) consists almost entirely of academics theorizing about proof of stake (PoS) .
The Ethereum Energy Consumption Index provides the latest estimate of the total energy consumption of the Ethereum network.
This article is now available in Japanese: 紙と鉛筆でビットコインをマイニング：1日に0.67ハッシュ and Russian: Майним Bitcoin с помощью бумаги и ручки . I decided...
Encrypting data: Use AES in CTR (Counter) mode, and append an HMAC . AES is about as standard as you can get, and has done a good job of resisting cryptologic attacks over the past decade. Using CTR mode avoids the weakness of ECB mode, the complex (and bug-prone) process of padding and unpadding of partial blocks (or…
Updated for 2023, this report is a deep dive on Bitcoin's energy usage and long-term scaling approach, with data tables and case studies.
Random numbers are critical for cryptography: for encryption keys, random authentication challenges, initialization vectors, nonces, key-agreement schemes, generating prime numbers and so on. Break the random-number generator, and most of the time you break the entire security system. Which is why you should worry…
On a NIST-sponsored hash function mailing list, Jesse Walker (from Intel; also a member of the Skein team) did some back-of-the-envelope calculations to estimate how long it will be before we see a practical collision attack against SHA-1. I’m reprinting his analysis here, so it reaches a broader audience. According…
Last month, Ethan Heilman, Tadge Dryja, Madars Virza, and I took a look at IOTA, currently the 8th largest cryptocurrency with a $1.9B…
Block chain is agnostic of any 'currency' and it can (and will) be adapted to power many other use cases. This is a ground up explanation of why the particular pieces (digital signatures, proof-of-work, transaction blocks) are needed, and how they all come together to form the minimum viable block chain with all of…
This is the story of a Bitcoin trade — the most financially impactful trade I’ve ever made in my life. It’s also the story of the…
I won’t discuss anything in this post. I’m tired of discussing technical things with people with skewed opinions and monetary interest. I’ve talked enough in the Bitcointalk forum…
Update: taking this down for now until some questions about the deterministicbuilds are answered; currently I do not believe the Zcash trusted setup shouldbe...
In his 2008 white paper that first proposed bitcoin, the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto concluded with: “We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust.” He was referring to blockchain, the system behind bitcoin cryptocurrency. The circumvention of trust is a great promise, but it’s just…
Every Bitcoin transaction is stored in the distributed database known as the Bitcoin blockchain. However, people have found ways to hack ...
We’ve lost far too many hackers to suicide. What if Satoshi was one of them?
At the end of the day, this is a straight-up ICO-style index fund to speculate on NFTs.
I’ve spent more than 5 years being a Bitcoin developer. The software I’ve written has been used by millions of users, hundreds of…
Somewhere in December 2013, a number of traders including myself began noticing suspicious bot behavior on Mt. Gox. Basically, a random number between 10 and 20 bitcoin would be bought every 5-10 m…
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