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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 850 posts.
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“YOLO” is not a valid hash construction
Among the cryptographic missteps we see at Trail of Bits, “let’s build our own tool out of a hash function” is one of the most common. Clients have a problem along the lines of “we need to hash a bunch of different values together” or “we need a MAC” or “we need […]
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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
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Using Benford’s Law to Detect Bitcoin Manipulation
Economist Gary Smith sends along this post with the above title and the subtitle, “Market prices are not invariably equal to intrinsic values.” Here’s Smith:
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Avoiding a pointless blockchain project
Blockchains are overhyped. There, I said it. From Sibos to Money20/20 to cover stories of The Economist and Euromoney , everyone seems to be climbing aboard the blockchain wagon. And no doubt like others in the space, we’re seeing a rapidly increasing number of companies building proofs of concept on our platform…
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Open sourcing crypto-arbitrage bot in Python – back to the dawn of crypto hype
TLDR; Crypto-arbitrage bot code is released here - https://github.com/kruglov-dmitry/crypto_crawler. I can’t develop in c++ fast enough, not yet within golang sect, so have to use python. It was painfully educative fun. Chronicles of one crypto-arbitrage bot Some time ago friend of mine, innocent in terms of exposure…
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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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Coinlist
Some interesting developments that we have been working on came public yesterday. Protocol Labs, a company that builds blockchain-based protocols laid out its ambitious roadmap and finally got around to announcing the seed investment USV and others made in it last year. My partner Brad Burnham wrote a blog post on…
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Cryptographic vulnerabilities in IOTA
Last month, Ethan Heilman, Tadge Dryja, Madars Virza, and I took a look at IOTA, currently the 8th largest cryptocurrency with a $1.9B…
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90% of crypto's Illinois primary spending failed to achieve its objective
The cryptocurrency industry super PACs dumped $14.2 million into the Illinois primaries. 90% of that – $12.8 million – was wasted, in that it went to opposing Democratic candidates who won their primaries (Stratton in the Senate race, Ford in H-07) or supporting their opponents. The PACs' only victories in the state…
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An Economic Analysis of Ethereum
Originally published: January 2021 The anonymous founder of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, solved the hard problems associated with digital scarcity with a white paper in 2008, and launched Bitcoin in 2009. After that invention, numerous other projects came in its wake. There are now over 8,000 separate digital assets…
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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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Bitcoin transaction malleability: looking at the bytes
"Malleability" of Bitcoin transactions has recently become a major issue. This article looks at how transactions are modified, at the byte...
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Ethereum: A Turing-Complete Cryptocurrency
A full overview of what Ethereum is, how it works, what it does and how to start using or building on it. Explained in simple terms.
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Bitcoin is Not Anonymous
An Analysis of Anonymity in the Bitcoin System2011135 points53 commentscited by 3Crypto & Blockchain details
TL;DR Bitcoin is not inherently anonymous. It may be possible to conduct transactions is such a way so as to obscure your identity, but, ...
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Leaf-Node Weakness in Bitcoin Merkle Tree Design
This document describes a weakness in Bitcoin Design that reduces the security of SPV proofs and therefore SPV Wallets. The weakness was discovered by me on August 2017, but during the responsable…
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Elliptic Curve Cryptography: A Gentle Introduction – Part II
In the previous post , we have seen how elliptic curves over the real numbers can be used to define a group. Specifically, we have defined a rule for point addition : given three aligned points, their sum is zero ($P + Q + R = 0$). We have derived a geometric method and an algebraic method for computing point…
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On Web3 Infrastructure
In recent months, there has been a resurgence in the usage of the term “web3”: a nebulous term that (like it or hate it) has suddenly become a banner for much of the innovation happening in the space of blockchain and distributed ledger technology. The term has been around for a while (since 2014 when Gavin Wood…
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