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Crypto & Blockchain

The most popular blog posts about crypto & blockchain on Hacker News. 850 posts.

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272

Plausibly deniable encryption (2020)

It is safe to assume that in any useful cryptosystem C k ​ there exists at least one person with access to the key k . An adversary with sufficient leverage can bypass the computational cost of a conventional attack by exerting their influence on this person.

277

Kraken Wins Bank Charter Approval

We are thrilled to announce that the State of Wyoming has approved Kraken’s application to form the world’s first Special Purpose Depository Institution (SPDI), called Kraken Bank. Headquartered in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Kraken Bank is the first digital asset company in U.S. history to receive a bank charter recognized…

283

Exodus Bitcoin Wallet: $490k swindle

Edit: There’s a short follow-up to this post: Exodus Bitcoin Wallet: Follow up. tl;dr: A Bitcoin investor was recently scammed out of 9 Bitcoin (worth around $490K) in a fake “Exodus wallet” desktop application for Linux, published in the Canonical Snap Store. This isn’t the first time, and if nothing changes, it…

286

Bitcoin Is Dead, Long Live Bitcoin

I’ve been writing about the Bitcoin blocksize debate here at AVC (the only place I write and I’m hard core about that) for the past year. It’s a big deal. At the core of the debate is whether the Bitcoin blockchain should be a settlement layer that supports a number of new blockchains that can […]

289

In Response to My first impressions of Web3

This a response to Moxie Marlinspike’s “My First Impression of Web3” Both gave me a feeling for how the space works. To be clear, there is nothing particularly “distributed” about the apps themselves: they’re just normal react websites. The “distributedness” refers to where the state and the logic/

296

Bitcoin 0.13.0 Binary Safety Warning

Bitcoin.org has reason to suspect that the binaries for the upcoming Bitcoin Core release will likely be targeted by state sponsored attackers. As a website, Bitcoin.org does not have the technical resources to guarantee that we can defend ourselves from attackers of this calibre. We ask the Bitcoin community, and in…

297

Elliptic Curve Cryptography: A Basic Introduction

Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is a modern public-key encryption technique famous for being smaller, faster, and more efficient than incumbents. Bitcoin, for example, uses ECC as its asymmetric cryptosystem because it is so lightweight. The mathematical entity that makes all of this possible is the elliptic curve…

299

Smart contracts on Bitcoin

While Bitcoin is the gold standard in crypto, Ethereum has been the innovator, bringing new ideas, particularly smart contracts, to the table. Smart contracts allow developers to easily build things on a blockchain and we have seen a proliferation of new things built on the Ethereum blockchain as a result. But what if…