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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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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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ZCash (formerly Zerocash/Zerocoin) technology preview
I’m extremely happy to announce the Zcash project. Zcash (formerly “Zerocash”/“Zerocoin”) is a project to create a new currency for the Internet, inspired by Bitcoin. Bitcoin is an amazing and complex…
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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 Web3 Fraud
By now effectively all ;login:’s readers have heard the term “web3” and “dapps” bandied about as if they are some great revolution. They are not. The technical underpinnings are so terrible that it is clear they exist only to hype the underlying cryptocurrencies. The actual utility of these “decentralized” systems is…
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The Merge
Learn about The Merge, when Ethereum Mainnet moved from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake in September 2022, cutting its energy use by about 99.95%.
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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
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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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How Iran Uses Bitcoin Mining to Evade Sanctions and “Export” Oil
The US imposes an almost total economic embargo on Iran, including a ban on all Iranian imports and sanctions on Iranian financial institutions.
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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.