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Crypto & Blockchain

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

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338

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…

348

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…

352

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…

353

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.

357

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…

360

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…