The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 850 posts.
This a response to Moxie Marlinspike’s “My First Impression of Web3” Both gave me a feeling for how the space works. To be clear, there is nothing particularly “distributed” about the apps themselves: they’re just normal react websites. The “distributedness” refers to where the state and the logic/
Web3 has been a very fashionable term this year, mostly for the alt-finance cartoon characters and tech world’s ultrasophisticated twitter-thread authors.
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 dig into what's genuinely impressive about crypto (distributed trust, abuse prevention, true cloud computing) and what's deeply problematic: boundary interactions, governance concentration, transaction cost tradeoffs, and unclear incentives. My conclusion: crypto may only be useful for financial engineering, and…
Social recovery wallets introduces new ways to authenticated with our own owned identities.
Pyramid schemes, scientology and Tamagotchi
I've long been interested in the decentralization of computing and communication in general, and of the web in particular. The trend of communication and information becoming more and more centralized in large corporations is worrying and worth fighting against, particularly from the perspective of systemic risk. I…
Lately I'm paying more attention to the crypto currency and "DeFi" spaces, again. One discussion that comes up regularly: are miners to blame for the high GPU prices? To add some facts to this discussion, I’ve done a small analysis of GPU and crypto currency prices to determine if they are related.
Chapter 6 – California In the Jan of 2009 when Hal and Satoshi were working on Bitcoin Alpha version, Hal encountered an error with the software and he posted the debug log to the mailing lis…
Over the last month, there has been a ton of debate and conversation about web2 vs web3 with many leading voices raising doubts about web3. Debate and doubt are healthy. And web3 enthusiasts, particularly on Twitter, remind me of missionaries trying to recruit the unwashed to their belief system. Frankly, it is all…
In Bullshit Jobs: A Theory , David Graeber makes the case that a sizable chunk of the labour economy is essentially people performing useless work, as a sort of subconscious self-preservation instinct of the economic status quo. The book cites ample anecdotal evidence that people perceive their own jobs as completely…
This is a small proof-of-concept. It relies on PGP - but you could use Keybase, GPG, or any other hard-to-use encryption program. Background Suppose you want to support an artist and give them money. That's easy. Most artists take PayPal, bank transfer, or cash. But how can you prove that you've paid an artist for a…
By now effectively all ;login:’s readers have heard the term “web3” and “dapps” bandied about as if they are some great revolution. They are not. The technical underpinnings are so terrible that it is clear they exist only to hype the underlying cryptocurrencies. The actual utility of these “decentralized” systems is…
Crypto scams were once again the largest form of crypto crime, with over $7.7 billion worth of cryptocurrency taken from victims worldwide.
How to build secure crypto wallets, analysing issues found during crypto wallet security audits.
The term “web3” seems pretty fluid and is being used as a label for a bunch of disparate ideas. Given that it’s a decentralized group describing a decentralized movement, that lack of focus isn’t exactly surprising. Almost by definition it’s going to end up being different things to different people.
With over $20b in assets under management Celsius Network is the biggest centralised lending platform in the crypto space.
It's just not. Here's a deep dive into why, exactly, I think that.
The promise of a decentralized and trustless future is forever just that: a promise, and in the future.
Decentraland joins the Blender Development Fund for a period of two years, as Patron Member.
And is that even the right question?
People are right to be concerned about the centralisation of power on the Web — but we embrace blockchain at our peril
Bank transfers have exploded as a payment method in India and may become more common in much of the world.
