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The most popular blog posts about crypto & blockchain on Hacker News. 488 posts.
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…
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…
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.
I previously wrote a post on proof of work (PoW) and mining . The first half generated great interest but (apparently) failed to be universally persuasive. For example, CCRG (Ethereum’s multi-million dollar funded “research” organization) consists almost entirely of academics theorizing about proof of stake (PoS) .
An introduction to Bitcoin without the jargon: Bookkeepers, Ledgers and Anonymity.
How do you encrypt a file such that it can be decrypted after a date, but not before? Use serial computations for proof-of-work using successive squaring, chained hashes, or witness encryption on blockchains.
If it wasn't MtGox I wouldn't even mention it — XSS/fixation/etc are web sec routines, and are not worth a blog post. But it *is* MtGox. W...
These past days, I have done a lot of thinking about bitcoin that ended up with me investing all of the money I had...
Micropayments systems are doomed. Here is why.
attached is signature proof
In his 2008 white paper that first proposed bitcoin, the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto concluded with: “We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust.” He was referring to blockchain, the system behind bitcoin cryptocurrency. The circumvention of trust is a great promise, but it’s just…
The majority of the EU Parliament's lead committees today approved far-reaching new anti-money laundering laws: Anonymous cash payments over €3,000 will be banned in commercial transactions. Cash payments over €10,000 will even be completely banned in business transactions. And anonymous payments in
Informed Tip of the Week: Take a look at our recent series of posts covering Informed’s premise and our business model. We will be adding additional content over the next few weeks. At the beginning of the year, I wrote about most of the obvious bubbles out there and how Continue Reading
The responses of many to my post on Bitcoin reveal a powerful tendency to underestimate the ill-effects of deflation on a social economy. This tendency to underestimate deflation’s deleterious impact matters beyond debates on Bitcoin per se. For example, in Europe the incapacity of the European Central Bank (ECB) to…
See also Bitshares: Don’t walk away – run, Stablecoins are doomed to fail, Stablecoins are doomed to fail, part II, and Stablecoins are doomed to fail, part III. UPDATE, 4/18/18 –…
Web3 has been a very fashionable term this year, mostly for the alt-finance cartoon characters and tech world’s ultrasophisticated twitter-thread authors.
What is the point of a public key fingerprint? What does it do that the public key itself doesn't do. This post explains.
A friend asked me at breakfast this week “what gets you excited in crypto these days?” I answered “Dapps.” If the second half of 2016 and all of 2017 was about raising capital to fund development efforts (and speculating on all of that), then it sure feels like 2018 is the year we start getting […]
Pyramid schemes, scientology and Tamagotchi
