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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...
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 850 posts.
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Web3: A VC-funded gig economy of securities fraud
If you look at a “Web3” offering and just think of it as a pump-and-dump onto retail investors, everything will make much more sense.
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The user experience problems of quadratic voting
In their seminal book, "Radical Markets," Eric Posner and Glen Weyl introduce quadratic voting to improve (or radicalize) democratic preference voting. They argue that by allowing voters to
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The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto
A group of cryptocurrency researchers and critics annotate the irresponsible cryptocurrency puff piece that was originally published in the New York Times.
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Crypto is an unproductive bubble
This post sparked a great conversation on Hacker News! See the comments here.Another update: Scott Alexander just (12/8/22) wrote the best counterpoint to this that I’ve read – see it here “The four most expensive words in investing are: ‘This time it’s different.’” John Templeton I’m writing this essay not so much to…
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Attackers exploit flaw in web’s security to steal $2M in cryptocurrency
By Henry Birge-Lee, Liang Wang, Grace Cimaszewski, Jennifer Rexford and Prateek Mittal On Thursday, Feb. 3, 2022, attackers stole approximately $2 million worth of cryptocurrency from users of the Korean crypto exchange KLAYswap. This theft, which was detailed in a Korean-language blog post by the security firm S2W…
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Just Say No to Central Bank Digital Currencies
A Central Bank Digital Currency would enable a totalitarian nightmare
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IPFS Backed by Decentralized Storage
Filebase now supports IPFS! Learn more about our latest network integration and how you can pin data onto IPFS in seconds, at a fraction of the cost of existing services.
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Explanation of Bitcoin’s Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm
Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) has grown to be very popular in public-key cryptographic systems, most popularly used in Bitcoin. ECC is…
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I was wrong, we need crypto
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…
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Plausibly deniable encryption (2020)
It is safe to assume that in any useful cryptosystem C k there exists at least one person with access to the key k . An adversary with sufficient leverage can bypass the computational cost of a conventional attack by exerting their influence on this person.
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Cryptocurrency off-ramps, and the shift towards centralization
The 'off-ramps' from crypto—that is, the firms who will exchange your cryptocurrencies back into traditional currencies—are increasingly taking the position that is so common in discussions about privacy: 'if you're not doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?'
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David Rosenthal on cryptocurrencies
I was asked at short notice to fill in for a speaker in Stanford's EE380 course who had to cancel. Below the fold is a hastily updated vers...
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Attacking an Ethereum L2 with Unbridled Optimism
On 2/2/2022, I reported a critical security issue to Optimism—an "L2 scaling solution" for Ethereum—that would allow an attacker to replicate money on any chain using their "OVM 2.0" fork of go-ethereum (which they call l2geth).
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Boston Fed releases report, source code of digital currency prototype study
The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Digital Currency Initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today released the findings of their initial technological research into a central bank digital currency, or CBDC. The published research describes a theoretical high-performance and resilient…
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Web3 doesn’t care about privacy
In web2, we are beholden to centralized entities that monopolize and profit off of our data. Web3 promises to release us from these shackles by enabling everyone to access data living on the blockchain. While it is certainly appealing that institutions no longer have the power to hold our data hostage, it is still…
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Bitcoin's fungibility graveyard
Where the pipe-dream of Bitcoin’s real-world fungibility goes to die.
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Crypto, the left, and techno-feudalism
The Crypto Syllabus
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Facebook’s Libra is still dead – Diem to be sold off for spare parts
Maybe Libra was just very stupid. Because it was a blockchain project started by bitcoiners. Maybe it was always just dumb as hell.
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Surprises in the Bitcoin blockchain and how they are stored (2014)
Every Bitcoin transaction is stored in the distributed database known as the Bitcoin blockchain. However, people have found ways to hack ...
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Abuse and Harassment on the Blockchain
In the frenzy to attract venture capital funding and draw new users and investors into blockchain technologies, 'how will this technology be used to harass and abuse people?' is going unasked. While blockchain proponents speak about a 'future of the web' based around public ledgers, anonymity, and immutability, those…
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An anatomy of Bitcoin price manipulation
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It’s not still the early days of blockchain
When I speak about the inefficiency of popular blockchains, or mention that we seem to be hurtling towards a 'web3' so centralized it challenges big tech's firm grasp on today's web, or point out that somehow no one has managed to find a positive use for blockchains that wouldn't be better served by one of the many…
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Rewriting my toy blockchain in Rust
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.
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Blockchain-based systems are not what they say they are
If you go out seeking to learn why blockchains and the systems built atop them are apparently the future of our web, you’ll begin to see some common themes. These fall apart under further scrutiny.
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Re: Moxie on Web3
On decentralization, servers and cryptography
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On Web3 Infrastructure
In recent months, there has been a resurgence in the usage of the term “web3”: a nebulous term that (like it or hate it) has suddenly become a banner for much of the innovation happening in the space of blockchain and distributed ledger technology. The term has been around for a while (since 2014 when Gavin Wood…