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Topics /
Crypto & Blockchain
The most popular blog posts about crypto & blockchain on Hacker News. 40 posts.
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Why I want Bitcoin to die in a fire
Back to: Trust Me (I'm a kettle) | Forward to: Over-Extended Metaphor for the day
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The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin creator
I won’t discuss anything in this post. I’m tired of discussing technical things with people with skewed opinions and monetary interest. I’ve talked enough in the Bitcointalk forum…
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Satoshi Nakamoto is probably Nick Szabo?
I recently became interested in identifying the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. I started from the Bitcoin whitepaper [0] published in late 2008, and proceeded to run reverse tex…
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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 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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Bitcoin and positive vs. normative economics
There’s an agenda there, and it’s a bad one.
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The NSA Is Breaking Most Encryption on the Internet
The new Snowden revelations are explosive. Basically, the NSA is able to decrypt most of the Internet. They’re doing it primarily by cheating, not by mathematics. It’s joint reporting between the Guardian, the New York Times, and ProPublica. I have been working with Glenn Greenwald on the Snowden documents, and I have…
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Bitcoin Private Key Necromancy
tl;dr: https://github.com/pierce403/keyhunter ~ The Longer Version ~ A few weeks ago, a friend came to me with a problem. Way back...
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Zerocoin: making Bitcoin anonymous
Wow, what the heck is going on with Bitcoin? When I started this post, the value of a single bitcoin had surged upwards of $250. It’s corrected a bit since then (down $100 or so), but it̵…
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Stop Saying Bitcoin Transactions Aren’t Reversible
One of the criticisms leveled at Bitcoin by those people determined to hate it is that Bitcoin transactions are irreversible.
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Bitcoin as a law enforcement/natsec honeypot: what is the evidence?
Paranoia appears to be the order of the day, given what we know about the NSA and GCHQ thanks to Edward Snowden. Absent from the stories so...
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Bitcoin is Worse is Better
2011 essay on how Bitcoin’s long gestation and early opposition indicates it is an example of the ‘Worse is Better’ paradigm in which an ugly complex design with few attractive theoretical properties compared to purer competitors nevertheless successfully takes over a niche, survives, and becomes gradually refined.
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How to Buy Bitcoin
As someone who recently purchased Bitcoin and two other crypto currencies using three different methods, I thought I’d share how to buy Bitcoin because I know there’s precious little information out there:
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The Big Book of Bitcoin - An introduction
An introduction to Bitcoin without the jargon: Bookkeepers, Ledgers and Anonymity.
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Time-lock encryption
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.