Topics /
Crypto & Blockchain
The most popular blog posts about crypto & blockchain on Hacker News. 850 posts.
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.
Bitcoins the hard way: Using the raw Bitcoin protocol
All the recent media attention on Bitcoin inspired me to learn how Bitcoin really works, right down to the bytes flowing through the netwo...
Why I’m Cryptophobic
Adam Fisher’s exegesis on why he believes that despite the recent crash, crypto will rise again to the detriment of society.
David Rosenthal on cryptocurrencies
I was asked at short notice to fill in for a speaker in Stanford's EE380 course who had to cancel. Below the fold is a hastily updated vers...
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…
Carta to exit secondary trading business
No. Not anymore. Because we have the data, if we are trading secondaries, people will always worry that we are using the data, even if we…
Bitcoin is not a store of value
Before we begin, I’m not just some crypto FUDster.
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…
Bitcoin is more like ham radio than the early internet
People in the bitcoin community often make fun of me as a nocoiner . That is, I don't have any bitcoins and am vocal about that fact. (Ne...
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 […]
Web3: A VC-funded gig economy of securities fraud
If you look at a “Web3” offering and just think of it as a pump-and-dump onto retail investors, everything will make much more sense.
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/
Three Delusions: Paper Wealth, a Booming Economy, and Bitcoin
The reason that delusions are so hard to fight with logic is that delusions themselves are established through the exercise of logic. Responsibility for delusions is more likely to be found in distorted perception or inadequate information.
An Update on USDC and Silicon Valley Bank
The Circle Blog is your source for the latest product features, company announcements, and insights from Circle and USDC. Read and subscribe for more info!
Bitcoin mining on an Apollo Guidance Computer
We've been restoring an Apollo Guidance Computer 1 . Now that we have the world's only working AGC, I decided to write some code for it. Try...
Mozilla founder unveils Bitcoin-based micropayments system for users, publishers
The following post contains early plans for, and descriptions of, the Brave Publisher Ads program. Publishers were expected to earn no less than 55% of ad revenue for participating in this program.
Ethereum Services Are Centralized
EDIT: I would have fleshed this out more had I known it would be so widely circulated, but to address some common criticisms:
DAOs, Hacks and the Law
“The DAO” is in the midst of an epic hack due to an exploit on the originating smart contracts. Unfortunately it may seem that their own…
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…
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…
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…
Why I’m betting on Nostr
Nostr - the simple, decentralized messaging protocol with the potential to replace centralized apps like Twitter and WhatsApp - is going mainstream. And fast.