Best of 2016

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2016. 58 posts.

Crypto & Blockchain
32

Hard Forks

The crypto-currency Ethereum completed a hard fork on Wednesday. The Ethereum core developers, after getting a vote of support from the Ethereum community, hard forked Ethereum to “get back” the roughly $40mm of Ethereum that was taken in the hack of The DAO. Hard forks are a bit of a lightning rod issue in the […]

58

Nothing is Cheaper than Proof of Work

I previously wrote a post on proof of work (PoW) and mining . The first half generated great interest but (apparently) failed to be universally persuasive. For example, CCRG (Ethereum’s multi-million dollar funded “research” organization) consists almost entirely of academics theorizing about proof of stake (PoS) .