Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 850 posts.
By Henry Birge-Lee, Liang Wang, Grace Cimaszewski, Jennifer Rexford and Prateek Mittal On Thursday, Feb. 3, 2022, attackers stole approximately $2 million worth of cryptocurrency from users of the Korean crypto exchange KLAYswap. This theft, which was detailed in a Korean-language blog post by the security firm S2W…
Every year, professional and amateur shareholders have the opportunity to partake in Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting where legendary investors Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger field questions on Berkshire’s business and investment decisions. Typically, the annual event is...
IOTA is a cryptocurrency targeting the internet of things. It purports to be scalable, decentralized, and feeless. Unfortunately it is none of those things.
Most people think bitcoin is anonymous. In fact, new technologies trace BTC transactions, attempting to identify bitcoin users.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post with 10 things that amazed me about bitcoin (here). I just can’t stop thinking about the idea that I brought up in the final point of that post, specific…
Encrypting data: Use AES in CTR (Counter) mode, and append an HMAC . AES is about as standard as you can get, and has done a good job of resisting cryptologic attacks over the past decade. Using CTR mode avoids the weakness of ECB mode, the complex (and bug-prone) process of padding and unpadding of partial blocks (or…
Kraken Security Labs has devised a way to extract seeds from both cryptocurrency hardware wallets offered from industry leader Trezor, the Trezor One and Trezor Model T. The attack requires just 15 minutes of physical access to the device. This is the first time that the detailed steps for a current attack against…
The consensus problem is a fundamental problem in multi-agent systems which requires a group of processes (or agents) to reliably and timely agree on a single data value. Although extensively discussed in the context of distributed computing it’s not exclusive to this field, also being present in our society in a…
The Internet Archive jumped into bitcoin in 2011 after many people asked to donate bitcoins-- a non-techy set up our wallet (good sign), and we got about $2,000 worth of donations that first year. In 2012 we got about $6,000 worth-- interesting. I think of it as the local currency of the Internet. I figured
We’re fortunate that millions of people all over the world support the work of the Wikimedia Foundation through donations. It has always been important to the Foundation to make sure donating is as…
Introduction Quadratic funding has received a lot of attention recently as a mechanism for funding public goods. The Gitcoin grants program alone has distributed over $59M through QF funding rounds as of January 20241.\nQF is appealing because it is theoretically optimal under certain assumptions2. The problem is that…
Bitcoin was designed by Satoshi Nakamoto, and the primary client is developed by a bunch of folks at bitcoin.org . Do you care who these people are? In theory, you shouldn’t: all they do is develop an open source client for an open source protocol. Anyone else can develop their own client (and some people have) and no…
Bitcoin has already undergone several forks. A fork defines a moment in time when a specific digital currency gets split into two different currencies. A couple months ago, a Bitcoin fork created Bitcoin Cash (BCH). Another fork just created Bitcoin Gold last week. Segwit 2x will follow next month.
Once a month users post a chart on `r/ethereum` predicting the blockchain size of Ethereum will soon exceed 1 TB. I want to clean up with some stories around the Ethereum-blockchain size in this article and try to explain why this chart is technically correct, but not the full picture...
Bitcoin is designed to support a wide variety of transaction types. Although currently the majority of transactions are standard payments to address it is possible to build more complex protocols.
Two years ago, when we began taking on blockchain security engagements, there were no tools engineered for the work. No static analyzers, fuzzers, or reverse engineering tools for Ethereum. So, we invested significant time and expertise to create what we needed, adapt what we already had, and refine the work…
