The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 488 posts.
The theft last week of an estimated $100 million in crypto using a hardware backdoor planted in Ledger wallets points to a sophisticated and systematic attack aimed at subverting crypto wallets sold by legitimate resellers in Asia and Europe
Personal blog of Stephen Diehl - Software engineer writing about technology, programming, and the future
The FCC is proposing to require KYC for anyone who uses a phone. We can act now to stop further erosion of our privacy.
Neha Narula
The cryptocurrency industry super PACs dumped $14.2 million into the Illinois primaries. 90% of that – $12.8 million – was wasted, in that it went to opposing Democratic candidates who won their primaries (Stratton in the Senate race, Ford in H-07) or supporting their opponents. The PACs' only victories in the state…
Two recently-hyped developments in AI engineering have been Geoff Huntley’s “Ralph Wiggum loop” and Steve Yegge’s “Gas Town”. Huntley and Yegge are both…
Source I find myself in the unusual position of defending Bitcoin from its critics, if only reluctantly. In 2024 Soroush Farokhnia & Amir...
The informal definition of an elliptic curve is simple. The formal definition is more involved.
P2P and federated protocols converge toward becoming Nostr, but with extra steps
Crypto’s most popular product offers capital efficiency for professionals, leveraged exposure for the masses, rich yields for market makers — and a poorly understood failure mode.
Exploring blockchain, math, and smart contracts through a security lens.
Testing whether a number is composite as an example of a zero knowledge proof. How ZKPs are used more generally.
This post could’ve been titled “Nostr vs ATProto”, but that really isn’t what I wanted to do here. While I will be comparing and contrasting them a lot, and that’s kind of even the point of writing this, I didn’t want to really pit the two against each other at all, and especially not with the title. I also want to…
Over the course of years, RSA implementations gradually replaced Euler's totient function with Carmichael's totient function.
This article is archived on mirror.xyz , and attracted discussion on Hacker News Generated by this notebooklm Gene Spafford "Using encryption on the…
Introduction Quadratic funding has received a lot of attention recently as a mechanism for funding public goods. The Gitcoin grants program alone has distributed over $59M through QF funding rounds as of January 20241.\nQF is appealing because it is theoretically optimal under certain assumptions2. The problem is that…
Thanks to Jesse Richardson for discussion. Polymarket asks: will Jesus Christ return in 2025? In the three days since the market opened, traders have wagered over $100,000 on this question. The mar…
On April 9, 2025, someone risked $2.5 million on SPY call options—and walked away with $70+ million in under an hour. The trade was placed at 1:01 pm. At 1:30 pm, Trump announced tariff pauses. The market exploded upward. These options that cost 85 cents were suddenly worth more than $25.
Today, President Trump announced that the US Government would begin using taxpayer dollars to systematically buy up a variety of cryptocurrencies. Crypto prices shot up on the news. This is revealing, as crypto boosters have argued for years that cryptocurrency has legitimate economic value as a payment system outside…
An investigation into how malicious nodes run by Chainalysis made their way into defaults of popular Monero wallets.
Bluenoroff or APT38, more commonly referred to as Lazarus Group is a threat group which has been tied to the North Korean government since as early as 2009 primarily being financially motivated utilizing malware custom built for each target.
Learn to write and modify Zero Knowledge Proofs from scratch. You'll build a digital signature scheme using hash-based commitments, gaining practical ZKP programming skills and intuition along the way. By the end, you'll have all the tools you need to implement things like group signatures.
You receive a message. Now either you will be victim or not. Your knowledge, attention and moral compass will decide where you will end up.
In April 2024, I found and reported two critical bugs to Sei Network concerning their layer-1 blockchain. One of these issues impacted the chain’s availability, and the other its integrity. The Sei Foundation awarded me $75,000 and $2,000,000 respectively for these reports.
On March 13, the Dencun hard fork activated, enabling one of the long-awaited features of Ethereum: proto-danksharding (aka EIP-4844 , aka blobs). Initially, the fork reduced the transaction fees of rollups by a factor of over 100, as blobs were nearly free. In the last day, we finally saw blobs spike up in volume and…
