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Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place
Personal blog of Stephen Diehl - Software engineer writing about technology, programming, and the future
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Getting ready to operate GNU Taler in Germany
Taxable Anonymous Libre Electronic Reserves
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IPFS Maintainers Winding Down
We have some difficult news to share with the IPFS and wider peer-to-peer community. Our IPFS funding was cancelled
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A Call to Action: Stop the FCC's KYC Regime
The FCC is proposing to require KYC for anyone who uses a phone. We can act now to stop further erosion of our privacy.
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How Monero’s proof of work works
Monero does not use a simple fixed hash like Bitcoin. Its proof of work, RandomX, turns mining into running random CPU-friendly programs over a large memory dataset, which is why it behaves so differently from ASIC-first systems.
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The relay market powering token resellers and fraud
A look inside the gray-market reseller economy that gives mainland China cheap, structured, B2B-grade access to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and beyond
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Machine Payments Protocol (MPP)
We’re launching the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), an open standard, internet-native way for agents to pay—co-authored by Tempo and Stripe. Businesses on Stripe can accept payments over MPP in a few lines of code using our PaymentIntents API.
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Malicious skills targeting Claude Code and Moltbot users
Malicious ClawdBot skills target ByBit, Polymarket, Axiom, Reddit and LinkedIn, installing malware on unsuspecting OpenClaw user machines.
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Bitcoin and quantum computing
Neha Narula
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90% of crypto's Illinois primary spending failed to achieve its objective
The cryptocurrency industry super PACs dumped $14.2 million into the Illinois primaries. 90% of that – $12.8 million – was wasted, in that it went to opposing Democratic candidates who won their primaries (Stratton in the Senate race, Ford in H-07) or supporting their opponents. The PACs' only victories in the state…
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Who Is Planting Backdoors in Ledger Crypto Wallets?
The theft last week of an estimated $100 million in crypto using a hardware backdoor planted in Ledger wallets points to a sophisticated and systematic attack aimed at subverting crypto wallets sold by legitimate resellers in Asia and Europe
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The Resolv hack: How one compromised key printed $23M
Web3 security lessons from the Resolv hack: how a compromised key enabled a $23M exploit, what went wrong, and how DeFi protocols can prevent similar attacks.
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We found cryptography bugs in the elliptic library using Wycheproof
Trail of Bits discovered and disclosed two vulnerabilities in the widely used elliptic JavaScript library that could allow signature forgery or prevent valid signature verification, with one vulnerability still unfixed after the 90-day disclosure window.
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Crypto grifters are recruiting open-source AI developers
Two recently-hyped developments in AI engineering have been Geoff Huntley’s “Ralph Wiggum loop” and Steve Yegge’s “Gas Town”. Huntley and Yegge are both…
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Crypto Capture of Foreign Aid
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.