The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 488 posts.
This is an explanation of the key function on Proof-of-Work in the Bitcoin blockchain. It focuses on the one feature of Proof-of-Work that is essential and shows that other features often talked about such as security are secondary side-effects, useful, but not essential. This explanation rests on illustrating a few…
A friend asked me at breakfast this week “what gets you excited in crypto these days?” I answered “Dapps.” If the second half of 2016 and all of 2017 was about raising capital to fund development efforts (and speculating on all of that), then it sure feels like 2018 is the year we start getting […]
Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future. Its failure to achieve adoption to date is because systems built…
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…
In this post, I’m going to discuss a vulnerability I discovered in Ledger hardware wallets. The vulnerability arose due to Ledger’s use of a custom architecture to work around many of the limitations of their Secure Element.
Adil Moujahid, Bridging Tech and Art
The Post has been moved here
You have just made a Bitcoin transaction and you are eager to see if it appears in the next block. You know that the expected time between Bitcoin blocks is 10 minutes. You check the log of your Bitcoin node. It has been 7 minutes since the previous block. You recall that blocks occurrences in Bitcoin are a Poisson…
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) .
IOTA is a cryptocurrency targeting the internet of things. It purports to be scalable, decentralized, and feeless. Unfortunately it is none of those things.
I’ve spent the last 15 months researching the implications and possibilities of blockchains and related “distributed trust technologies” from a business and societal point of view…
I have recently received a job offer to work on a blockchain implementation. While the offer was very generous, I had to turn it down. In this post I want to collect the thoughts that went into my decision process leading to this conclusion.
Perspective can be a useful thing. Cryptocurrencies have had a bad 24 hours. Last night Amy and I watched The Big Short for the second time. If you’ve never seen
Background This is a follow-up from an earlier post, “Stablecoins are doomed to fail,” from December 10th. I’ll keep this one short. Long have I been a critic of the “stable…
Coinbase and Overstock.com just fixed a serious glitch that allowed Overstock customers to buy any item at a tiny fraction of the listed price. Potentially more punishing, the flaw let anyone paying with bitcoin reap many times the authorized bitcoin refund amount on any canceled Overstock orders.
Fees keep going up. And every time they go up, more of the money stored on the blockchain becomes worthless.
(Sequel here: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future.)
In 2013, I bought a few Bitcoins from a dude in a coffee shop, paying with hundred-dollar bills. Later that year I sold enough to get my money back . Then I forgot about them, Bitcoin’s price gyrations occasionally registering in a corner of my mind. But earlier this month I decided to find out if the remainder could…
Public discussion and media coverage of Bitcoin assumes certain things about Bitcoin: • Bitcoin has a price, that you could expect to buy or sell it around. • Bitcoin is like buying a share in a co…
