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In 2022, Web3 went just great
Come, reminisce with me.
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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Bitcoin's fungibility graveyard
Where the pipe-dream of Bitcoin’s real-world fungibility goes to die.
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Len Sassaman and Satoshi: A cypherpunk history
We’ve lost far too many hackers to suicide. What if Satoshi was one of them?
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Bitcoin mining on a vintage Xerox Alto: very slow at 1.5 hashes/second
I've been restoring a Xerox Alto minicomputer from the 1970s and figured it would be interesting to see if it could mine bitcoins. I coded u...
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Ethereum Proof-of-Stake
Explaining Ethereum's consensus mechanism after The Merge
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I Looked into 34 Top Real-World Blockchain Projects So You Don’t Have To
I looked at 34 projects listed by the top Google result for “real-world blockchain projects”. 33 of these are either dead, pivoted away from Blockchain, use Blockchain in a (sometimes dangerously) bad way, or are have no real-world utility.
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Reading the Silk Road configuration
Many of us believe it wasn't the FBI who discovered the hidden Silk Road server, but the NSA (or other intelligence organization). We believ...
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On anti-crypto toxicity
Crypto is known for its toxicity towards outsiders. Similar attitudes are emerging from some who oppose crypto.
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Dogecoin and the Appeal of Small Numbers
Dogecoin is a unique phenomenon in the fascinating world of cryptocurrencies. It’s barely six weeks old, and as I write this post its network has more computing power than any other cryptocurrency except for Bitcoin. It made headlines this weekend when its community raised enough money to send the Jamaican bobsled…
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Why Web3?
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…
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Shorting Tether
The trials and tribulations of betting against crypto's biggest stablecoin.
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Annotated: Sam Bankman-Fried's “FTX Pre-Mortem Overview”
Annotating Sam Bankman-Fried's attempts to explain the FTX collapse.
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SHA-3 to Be Announced
NIST is about to announce the new hash algorithm that will become SHA-3. This is the result of a six-year competition, and my own Skein is one of the five remaining finalists (out of an initial 64). It’s probably too late for me to affect the final decision, but I am hoping for “no award.” It’s not that the new hash…
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A peek under Bitcoin’s hood: Writing a client that can create a transaction
Sam Lewis is a Melbourne based geek who develops cool bits of code. He likes data, embedded stuff and AFL.
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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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Tarsnap now accepts Bitcoin
There is a significant commonality between Tarsnap and Bitcoin — both rely crucially on strong cryptography, and anecdotally it seems that many Bitcoin users rely on Tarsnap to back up their "wallets" (I have no concrete data since I can't tell what data people are backing up ) — so it's not surprising that many…
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Thoughts on Bitcoin
Maybe bitcoin will be the world reserve currency, maybe it will totally fail, or maybe it will survive in some niche capacity. I don’t know how to weight the probabilities (although I think in the...
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The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?
Last week, I flew from London to Tel Aviv. The man sitting to my right was a road warrior, just this side of a late-night bender in London. He was rocking an ostentatious pair of
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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?
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Elliptic Curve Cryptography: a gentle introduction
Those of you who know what public-key cryptography is may have already heard of ECC , ECDH or ECDSA . The first is an acronym for Elliptic Curve Cryptography, the others are names for algorithms based on it.
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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.
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It can all go to zero
Perspective can be a useful thing. Cryptocurrencies have had a bad 24 hours. Last night Amy and I watched The Big Short for the second time. If you’ve never seen