Best of 2014

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2014. 67 posts.

Crypto & Blockchain
8

Minimum Viable Block Chain

Block chain is agnostic of any 'currency' and it can (and will) be adapted to power many other use cases. This is a ground up explanation of why the particular pieces (digital signatures, proof-of-work, transaction blocks) are needed, and how they all come together to form the minimum viable block chain with all of…

20

Tarsnap now accepts Bitcoin

There is a significant commonality between Tarsnap and Bitcoin — both rely crucially on strong cryptography, and anecdotally it seems that many Bitcoin users rely on Tarsnap to back up their "wallets" (I have no concrete data since I can't tell what data people are backing up ) — so it's not surprising that many…