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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 488 posts.
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A Dive into the Math Behind Bitcoin Schnorr Signatures
Get up close and personal with Schnorr and his now patent-free linear signature algorithm.
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Helium
A major reason that cryptocurrencies have become such a problem is that mainstream journalists normally just regurgitate the hype they are f...
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The China ICO Ban
Regulators in China imposed a blanket ban on ICOs over the long weekend. A number of people have reached out to me via email and Twitter asking me what I think about this. I think regulation of ICOs is inevitable and a good thing if done right (ie lightly). The SEC’s comments on ICOs back […]
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Finally, a Private Stock Exchange
Today was a big day. In 2013 we raised our seed round on the pitch of “building the Nasdaq for private markets.” Eight years later we call…
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Bitcoin as a Battery
One of my favorite things about crypto is that, every so often, your conception of what it is changes. Bitcoin at first was “weird internet money” and then it was “a protocol” and then it was “digital gold”. Ethereum is “ICOs”, or maybe “DeFi”, or maybe “Web3”, or maybe all three, or maybe something...
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I Am Parting with My Crypto Library
The time has come for me to find a new home for my (paper) cryptography library. It’s about 150 linear feet of books, conference proceedings, journals, and monographs—mostly from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. My preference is that it goes to an educational institution, but will consider a corporate or personal home if…
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What Is a Bitcoin, Really?
When I first started learning about Bitcoin, I found plenty of information, but nothing that directly answered the most burning question: When you buy bitcoins… what is it …
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Interview with Vitalik Buterin on ETH2, Scaling Plans, NFTs, etc.
Please enjoy this transcript of my conversation with Vitalik Buterin and Naval Ravikant. Vitalik Buterin (@VitalikButerin) is the creator of Ethereum. He first discovered blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies through Bitcoin in 2011 and was immediately excited by the technology and its potential. He co-founded…
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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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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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Bitcoin mining the hard way: the algorithms, protocols, and bytes
This article explains Bitcoin mining in details, right down to the hex data and network traffic. If you've ever wondered what really happe...
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But, aren't you folks web2?
And if you are, then why don't you convert to web3?
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FTX – The fraud was in the code
The jury got a taste of code review as they examined a falsified "insurance fund" and the infamous FTX → Alameda Research "backdoor".
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Cryptography behind the top cryptocurrencies
This table is based on research at Nash for work expanding our MPC protocol to secure wallets on new blockchains. We took a snapshot of rankings by market cap in early February 2021. In summary, 74 coins use ECDSA and the secp256k1 curve, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and 48 ERC20 tokens. 10 coins use EdDSA and…
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Who and what is Coinhive?
Multiple security firms recently identified cryptocurrency mining service Coinhive as the top malicious threat to Web users, thanks to the tendency for Coinhive’s computer code to be used on hacked Web sites to steal the processing power of its visitors’ devices. This post looks at how Coinhive vaulted to the top of…
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Zero-knowledge proofs, Zcash, and Ethereum
Part 3 of a series on “Privacy on the Blockchain”.
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There aren't that many uses for blockchains
Criteria for judging when a blockchain is applicable
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Web3 is not Decentralisation – it’s a Ploy to put Crypto Bros in Charge
People are right to be concerned about the centralisation of power on the Web — but we embrace blockchain at our peril