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The most popular blog posts about crypto & blockchain on Hacker News. 86 posts.
Despite considering myself a cryptographer, I have not found myself particularly drawn to “crypto.” I don’t think I’ve ever actually said the words “get off my lawn,” but I’m much more likely to click on Pepperidge Farm Remembers flavored memes about how “crypto” used to mean “cryptography” than ...
This week saw the cancellation of the Australian Stock Exchange’s long-running effort to build a blockchain-based trading system. Which, oddly, has me thinking of 2016, when AWS decided not to make a strategic investment in blockchain, with my input a contributing factor. It felt like a good story while it was…
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When I speak about the inefficiency of popular blockchains, or mention that we seem to be hurtling towards a 'web3' so centralized it challenges big tech's firm grasp on today's web, or point out that somehow no one has managed to find a positive use for blockchains that wouldn't be better served by one of the many…
Web3 claims to be the only way to save us from commercial entities defining what we can see and what not. Yet, it does exactly this: It results in commercialized entities defining what we can see and what not. More on the blockchain ecosystem in this overview and especially in the simple, hum
This post sparked a great conversation on Hacker News! See the comments here.Another update: Scott Alexander just (12/8/22) wrote the best counterpoint to this that I’ve read – see it here “The four most expensive words in investing are: ‘This time it’s different.’” John Templeton I’m writing this essay not so much to…
I've long been interested in the decentralization of computing and communication in general, and of the web in particular. The trend of communication and information becoming more and more centralized in large corporations is worrying and worth fighting against, particularly from the perspective of systemic risk. I…
Disclosure: I hold short positions in companies mentioned in this article. This is not financial advice.
And it is critical that we all keep that at the forefronts of our minds.
A Central Bank Digital Currency would enable a totalitarian nightmare
Contrary to his original intentions, cryptocurrencies and DeFi platforms are now more vulnerable to privacy breaches and hacking than…
I first wrote about the problem of bots front-running transactions a year and a half ago in The Order Flow , citing Dan Robinson and Georgio...
A group of cryptocurrency researchers and critics annotate the irresponsible cryptocurrency puff piece that was originally published in the New York Times.
A blockchain, put simply, is a way of building distributed consensus in a trustless system. It allows multiple entities (i.e. computers) to collaborate and do computations without needing to trust in either a central authority or in each other, as every computation must be verified before it is accepted. There are…
Billions in customer funds transferred directly from Binance.US to offshore Binance exchange. Is this just a ploy to trick regulators?
On 2/2/2022, I reported a critical security issue to Optimism—an "L2 scaling solution" for Ethereum—that would allow an attacker to replicate money on any chain using their "OVM 2.0" fork of go-ethereum (which they call l2geth).
Last week a group of technologists, including Bruce Schneier, sent a letter to Congress outlining their concerns around cryptocurrency and urging Congress to regulate the space. Now let me be the f…
Financial theory demonstrates that the concept is fundamentally flawed
Shorter title: SBF, FTX, WTF?
The hedge fund's finances appear to rest on the same scheme that destroyed Celsius Network. Will it work out any differently for Sam Bankman-Fried?
Where the pipe-dream of Bitcoin’s real-world fungibility goes to die.
Explaining Ethereum's consensus mechanism after The Merge
I looked at 34 projects listed by the top Google result for “real-world blockchain projects”. 33 of these are either dead, pivoted away from Blockchain, use Blockchain in a (sometimes dangerously) bad way, or are have no real-world utility.
Crypto is known for its toxicity towards outsiders. Similar attitudes are emerging from some who oppose 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…
