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Crypto & Blockchain
The most popular blog posts about crypto & blockchain on Hacker News. 850 posts.
Sabotaging Bitcoin
Source I find myself in the unusual position of defending Bitcoin from its critics, if only reluctantly. In 2024 Soroush Farokhnia & Amir...
The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November
[UPDATE: This post was originally said that the SegWit2X fork will happen on November 1. In fact it is scheduled to occur on block 494,764 ...
Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr
P2P and federated protocols converge toward becoming Nostr, but with extra steps
Ethereum programming for web developers
HappyFunCorp ships AI-enabled products and custom software for web, mobile, TV, and more. Trusted by leading startups and Fortune 500 clients since 2009.
Bitcoin and positive vs. normative economics
There’s an agenda there, and it’s a bad one.
Web3 Is Not Decentralization
It's just not. Here's a deep dive into why, exactly, I think that.
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…
Dark Moon: The Inevitable Collapse of Luna
Luna/UST went from a collective market capitalization of ~$50 billion to now down 99%. The collapse of the Luna/UST Ponzi scheme occurred even faster than anyone expected, but this implosion was perfectly predictable.
The cryptography behind electronic passports
This blog post describes how electronic passports work, the threats within their threat model, and how they protect against those threats using cryptography. It also discusses the implications of using electronic passports for novel applications, such as zero-knowledge identity proofs.
Building Permanent and Censorship-Resistant Blog with Ethereum ENS and IPFS
The internet nowadays is ephemeral. Layers upon layers of trusted 3rd parties are necessary to distribute content online. It requires ongoing maintenance and is susceptible to censorship or hostile takedowns. In this blog post, I describe the steps I took to host my blog in a trustless, permanent, and…
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...
Lightning on Stellar: Technical Spec and Roadmap
The technical specification and timeline for Lightning on Stellar, including working examples and an explanation of the new BUMP_SEQUENCE operation.
Swedish government agencies say energy-intensive crypto mining should be banned
The most common method for producing crypto-assets requires enormous amounts of electricity and generates large CO2 emissions. Crypto-asset producers are keen to use more renewable energy, and they are increasing their presence in the Nordic region. Sweden needs the renewable energy targeted by crypto-asset producers…
How SHA-256 Works Step-by-Step
SHA-2 (Secure Hash Algorithm 2), of which SHA-256 is a part, is one of the most popular hash algorithms around. A cryptographic hash, also often referred to as a "digest", "fingerprint" or "signature", is an almost perfectly unique string of characters that is generated from a separate piece of input text. SHA-256…
BGP leaks and cryptocurrencies
Over the few last hours, a dozen news stories have broken about how an attacker attempted (and perhaps managed) to steal cryptocurrencies using a BGP leak.
Opera adds native support for blockchain domain names
When my kids were born, I immediately set up gmail accounts for each of them using their nicknames. I’d email observations to their accounts of their first everything, along with photos of moments captured on my mobile. As they grew, I sent audio messages of them reciting poems or silly stories in their raspy, caveman…
The Decentralized Future
A good method for discovering startup ideas is to look into technological breakthroughs and think about what they unlock that wasn't possible before. In this introductory post, we are going to use this framework to examine Bitcoin.
AI Hedge Fund Goes Live on Ethereum
Numerai just released 1.2 million Numeraire tokens on Ethereum to build a bridge between artificial intelligence and the stock market.
Selling Bitcoins in Canada
In 2013, I bought a few Bitcoins from a dude in a coffee shop, paying with hundred-dollar bills. Later that year I sold enough to get my money back . Then I forgot about them, Bitcoin’s price gyrations occasionally registering in a corner of my mind. But earlier this month I decided to find out if the remainder could…
Crypto for kids
When, in the spring of 2030, he almost incidentally invented the most terrible biological weapon known to humanity it took him about three seconds to realize that should his invention fall into the hands of one of the superpowers -- or into the hands of any common idiot, really -- it could well mean the end of the…