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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 127 posts.
“Crypto drainer” template facilitates theft
Crypto Drainers are phishing pages that lure victims into signing malicious transactions that allow the attacker to siphon their crypto and NFTs.
Do Kwon in more trouble
He Sent $80 Million a Month to Secret Wallets Before Terra Luna Crashed
Is “acceptably non-dystopian” self-sovereign identity even possible?
In the recent paper about "soulbound" tokens, Vitalik Buterin et al. write that they aim to build technology that is "acceptably non-dystopian". Do any of today's self-sovereign identity projects fit that bill?
In defense of cryptocurrency
Last week a group of technologists, including Bruce Schneier, sent a letter to Congress outlining their concerns around cryptocurrency and urging Congress to regulate the space. Now let me be the f…
Algorithmic stablecoins are provably impossible without continuous funding
Financial theory demonstrates that the concept is fundamentally flawed
Dark Moon: The Inevitable Collapse of Luna
Luna/UST went from a collective market capitalization of ~$50 billion to now down 99%. The collapse of the Luna/UST Ponzi scheme occurred even faster than anyone expected, but this implosion was perfectly predictable.
The Bitcoin Investment Thesis Is Broken
Informed Tip of the Week: Take a look at our recent series of posts covering Informed’s premise and our business model. We will be adding additional content over the next few weeks. At the beginning of the year, I wrote about most of the obvious bubbles out there and how Continue Reading
Keep the web free, say no to Web3 (2021)
A look at what is wrong with Web3.
Web3 is expensive P2P
Web3 claims to be the only way to save us from commercial entities defining what we can see and what not. Yet, it does exactly this: It results in commercialized entities defining what we can see and what not. More on the blockchain ecosystem in this overview and especially in the simple, hum
The problem with Bitcoin miners
Disclosure: I hold short positions in companies mentioned in this article. This is not financial advice.
Germany: Crypto held for more than a year will not get taxed
Germany: crypto held for more than a year will not get taxed. The Federal Ministry of Finance has published a document defining tax policies.
Earn $200K by fuzzing for a weekend: Part 1
By applying well-known fuzzing techniques to a popular target, I found several bugs that in total yielded over $200K in bounties. In this article I will demonstrate how powerful fuzzing can be when applied to software which has not yet faced sufficient testing.
Mullvad VPN now accepts Monero payments
Mullvad is now accepting payments in the Monero cryptocurrency.
Lets talk about blockchains
A blockchain, put simply, is a way of building distributed consensus in a trustless system. It allows multiple entities (i.e. computers) to collaborate and do computations without needing to trust in either a central authority or in each other, as every computation must be verified before it is accepted. There are…
Blockchain Is Dangerous Nonsense
I’ve been concerned about the excesses of the blockchain industry and their spread into all parts of society for some time now. Here I’ve summarized my thoughts regarding the subject.
Crypto, the Left and Technofeudalism
Rare is the person who could expertly comment – in a single interview! – on the rise of NFTs and their origins in the virtual worlds of gaming, the logic of the emerging regime of techno-feudalism, and the folly of El Salvador’s Bitcoin-heavy negotiating tactics with the IMF. Luckily, we have found this person in […]
How SHA-256 Works Step-by-Step
SHA-2 (Secure Hash Algorithm 2), of which SHA-256 is a part, is one of the most popular hash algorithms around. A cryptographic hash, also often referred to as a "digest", "fingerprint" or "signature", is an almost perfectly unique string of characters that is generated from a separate piece of input text. SHA-256…
On anti-crypto toxicity
Crypto is known for its toxicity towards outsiders. Similar attitudes are emerging from some who oppose crypto.
Terrible things I'd do with your money
In some of Daniel Kahnemann's books and any other business advice-type articles, you always seem to read the same argument: The thing important people all over the world would like to see is incr
Elliptic Curve Cryptography: A Basic Introduction
Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is a modern public-key encryption technique famous for being smaller, faster, and more efficient than incumbents. Bitcoin, for example, uses ECC as its asymmetric cryptosystem because it is so lightweight. The mathematical entity that makes all of this possible is the elliptic curve…
Ethereum Has Issues
I first wrote about the problem of bots front-running transactions a year and a half ago in The Order Flow , citing Dan Robinson and Georgio...