Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 21 posts.

Crypto & Blockchain
19

A Review of Consensus Protocols

The consensus problem is a fundamental problem in multi-agent systems which requires a group of processes (or agents) to reliably and timely agree on a single data value. Although extensively discussed in the context of distributed computing it’s not exclusive to this field, also being present in our society in a…

21

Fintech in Chains

"Fintech can come out of the shadows" is the title that Wall Street Journal editors gave to Brian Brooks and Charles Calomiris' oped last week . I have not in a long time seen a title that more utterly contradicts the content of the essay. For what they advocate is exactly the opposite: Fintech in chains, hemmed in by…