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Sabotaging Bitcoin
Source I find myself in the unusual position of defending Bitcoin from its critics, if only reluctantly. In 2024 Soroush Farokhnia & Amir...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 23 posts.
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What is an elliptic curve? (2019)
The informal definition of an elliptic curve is simple. The formal definition is more involved.
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Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr
P2P and federated protocols converge toward becoming Nostr, but with extra steps
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Perpetual futures, explained
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.
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Understanding ECDSA
Exploring blockchain, math, and smart contracts through a security lens.
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Zero knowlege proof of compositeness
Testing whether a number is composite as an example of a zero knowledge proof. How ZKPs are used more generally.
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Bitcoin's big secret: How cryptocurrency became law enforcement's secret weapon
WIRED's Andy Greenberg discusses a revelation that turned his decades-long reporting on its head: Bitcoin became a criminal's worst nightmare.
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The cryptography behind electronic passports
This blog post describes how electronic passports work, the threats within their threat model, and how they protect against those threats using cryptography. It also discusses the implications of using electronic passports for novel applications, such as zero-knowledge identity proofs.
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Key IOCs for Pegasus and Predator Spyware Removed with iOS 26 Update
iVerify brings operating system-level telemetry, behavioral baselining, and AI-driven threat hunting to hundreds of thousands of mobile devices
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Nostr and ATProto (2024)
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…
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A quiet change to RSA
Over the course of years, RSA implementations gradually replaced Euler's totient function with Carmichael's totient function.
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PayPal to support Ethereum and Bitcoin
Send and receive money as easily as sending a text, across apps, borders, and currencies.
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Fully homomorphic encryption and the dawn of a private internet
This article is archived on mirror.xyz , and attracted discussion on Hacker News Generated by this notebooklm Gene Spafford "Using encryption on the…
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Opening up ‘Zero-Knowledge Proof’ technology
Today, we open sourced our Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) libraries, fulfilling a promise and building on our partnership with Sparkasse to support EU age assurance.
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Why quadratic funding is not optimal
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…
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The Polymarket users betting on when Jesus will return
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…
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The cryptography behind passkeys
This post will examine the cryptography behind passkeys, the guarantees they do or do not give, and interesting cryptographic things you can do with them, such as generating cryptographic keys and storing certificates.
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$70M in 60 Seconds: How Insider Info Helped Someone 28x Their Money
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.
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The “strategic reserve” exposes crypto as the scam it always was
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…
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The $1.5B Bybit Hack
The $1.5B Bybit Hack demonstrates how the Era of Operational Security Failures has arrived, and most cryptocurrency companies are not prepared for its implications.
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No Bitcoin ETFs at Vanguard (2024)
Vanguard's thought leaders share timely insights about international financial markets, investor behavior, and the investment industry.