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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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Why I have zero faith in crypto venture capitalists
Mostly the reason I have zero faith in crypto venture capitalists as an institution is that their primary value add is marketing, their due diligence is a joke, and they are functionally equivalent…
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Worldcoin: A solution in search of its problem
Worldcoin doesn't seem to know what problem it's trying to solve, but they want to scan your eyeballs anyway.
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The Strange Story of Dual_EC_DRBG – suspected NSA backdoor (2007)
Random numbers are critical for cryptography: for encryption keys, random authentication challenges, initialization vectors, nonces, key-agreement schemes, generating prime numbers and so on. Break the random-number generator, and most of the time you break the entire security system. Which is why you should worry…
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Proof-Of-Work is a Decentralized Clock
This is an explanation of the key function on Proof-of-Work in the Bitcoin blockchain. It focuses on the one feature of Proof-of-Work that is essential and shows that other features often talked about such as security are secondary side-effects, useful, but not essential. This explanation rests on illustrating a few…
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Breaking the Ledger Security Model
In this post, I’m going to discuss a vulnerability I discovered in Ledger hardware wallets. The vulnerability arose due to Ledger’s use of a custom architecture to work around many of the limitations of their Secure Element.
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Sei pays out $2M bug bounty
In April 2024, I found and reported two critical bugs to Sei Network concerning their layer-1 blockchain. One of these issues impacted the chain’s availability, and the other its integrity. The Sei Foundation awarded me $75,000 and $2,000,000 respectively for these reports.
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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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Bitcoins the hard way: Using the raw Bitcoin protocol
All the recent media attention on Bitcoin inspired me to learn how Bitcoin really works, right down to the bytes flowing through the netwo...
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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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Carta to exit secondary trading business
No. Not anymore. Because we have the data, if we are trading secondaries, people will always worry that we are using the data, even if we…
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Bitcoin is not a store of value
Before we begin, I’m not just some crypto FUDster.
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Exodus Bitcoin Wallet: $490k swindle
Edit: There’s a short follow-up to this post: Exodus Bitcoin Wallet: Follow up. tl;dr: A Bitcoin investor was recently scammed out of 9 Bitcoin (worth around $490K) in a fake “Exodus wallet” desktop application for Linux, published in the Canonical Snap Store. This isn’t the first time, and if nothing changes, it…
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Bitcoin is more like ham radio than the early internet
People in the bitcoin community often make fun of me as a nocoiner . That is, I don't have any bitcoins and am vocal about that fact. (Ne...
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Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin
I’ve been writing about the Bitcoin blocksize debate here at AVC (the only place I write and I’m hard core about that) for the past year. It’s a big deal. At the core of the debate is whether the Bitcoin blockchain should be a settlement layer that supports a number of new blockchains that can […]
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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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In Response to My first impressions of Web3
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/
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Bitcoin mining on an Apollo Guidance Computer
We've been restoring an Apollo Guidance Computer 1 . Now that we have the world's only working AGC, I decided to write some code for it. Try...
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Ethereum Services Are Centralized
EDIT: I would have fleshed this out more had I known it would be so widely circulated, but to address some common criticisms:
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Smart contracts on Bitcoin
While Bitcoin is the gold standard in crypto, Ethereum has been the innovator, bringing new ideas, particularly smart contracts, to the table. Smart contracts allow developers to easily build things on a blockchain and we have seen a proliferation of new things built on the Ethereum blockchain as a result. But what if…
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Fictional Cryptocurrencies
I said they were fictional! Stop trying to invest in them!
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Metakovan, the mystery Beeple art buyer, and his NFT/DeFi scheme
At the end of the day, this is a straight-up ICO-style index fund to speculate on NFTs.
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