Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 850 posts.

Crypto & Blockchain
Any year
348

How SHA-256 Works Step-by-Step

SHA-2 (Secure Hash Algorithm 2), of which SHA-256 is a part, is one of the most popular hash algorithms around. A cryptographic hash, also often referred to as a "digest", "fingerprint" or "signature", is an almost perfectly unique string of characters that is generated from a separate piece of input text. SHA-256…

357

Selling Bitcoins in Cana­da

In 2013, I bought a few Bitcoins from a dude in a coffee shop, paying with hundred-dollar bills. Later that year I sold enough to get my money back . Then I forgot about them, Bitcoin’s price gyrations occasionally registering in a corner of my mind. But earlier this month I decided to find out if the remainder could…

360

Crypto for kids

When, in the spring of 2030, he almost incidentally invented the most terrible biological weapon known to humanity it took him about three seconds to realize that should his invention fall into the hands of one of the superpowers -- or into the hands of any common idiot, really -- it could well mean the end of the…