Viewing profile — nadahalli

A fresh printable worksheet of maths and computational-thinking puzzles for kids. Every question, every answer, and every wrong answer is computed by a program, not written by an A…

[pedantic hat on] Bitcoin doesn't use encryption. You mean digital signatures - and yes, we use signatures everywhere in public key cryptography.

You will like this 2020 classic piece by the folks at Paradigm: https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest

The hashing part is kind of orthogonal. The real negative outcome of quantum computers getting reliable and powerful would be that ECDSA would be broken (using Shor's algorithm var…

I started reading the article assuming it was an April fool's joke. After a bit into it, I thought it was not a joke. When the self-deprecation began, I was again convinced it was …

That's the entire point. Bitcoin has just one use case, and it's very inefficient design is tailor-made for that one use case. Alt-coins have use cases that can all be solved by AW…

Zero Knowledge Contingent Payments are one approach. Encoding everything that you might want to buy as an input to a ZKP system is a stretch, obviously. But at least, that's the sp…

I was like "This cannot be the top comment on HN". It is. Sigh.

As for "Crypto-less federated systems like Mastodon and friends" - you have to ask yourself why they don't work at scale. That's the key insight of Bitcoin. You need to have a syst…

> If we could magically make 100x the gold, that would be great! Current gold investors would be sad but it would be a win for the world. I am not sure about that. If there were a …

You are on the wrong forum my friend. Austrians and the HN community talk past each other because it's not easy to get the latter (which I am a part of) to see that their large sal…

SlowMist has a non-humorous writeup. https://slowmist.medium.com/the-root-cause-of-poly-network-b... I am still waiting for Rekt to cover this one.

Most smart contracts on Ethereum, or other blockchains are only immutable in their marketing material, but not in practice. Either they use an obvious PIMPL/Proxy contract (OpenZep…

That'd be quite expensive. And as you manipulate prices across blocks, arbitrageurs would arb it back to "market price". Uniswap V3 allows for a 3rd party smart contract to ask its…

Many European countries also charge negative interest rates. In Switzerland, where I live, bank balances above CHF 100K gets a flat -0.75% interest rate. Just saying.

I am curious why the author thinks that security is not a commodity.

That primitive has not been invented (maybe yet). Till then, we have Bitcoin.

For those who already know about Bitcoin's timestamping really well, it's worth reading about the time-warp attack. David Harding wrote a great answer about it on StackExchange age…

This is deflation, and turns out everyone hates deflation. Just to be clear, I am with you here.

That's true. It's a verifiable "burn of electricity". The only upside to the burning is the verifiability. If there was some other way to generate this verifiable scarcity of somet…

There's your argument for Bitcoin. It cannot be planted by anyone, like tulips. Its supply cannot be increased arbitrarily. Tulips, in fact, could be a bit more complicated. Bitcoi…

Just as an aside, you cannot build the Bitcoin blockchain overnight as well - because of proof of work and network effects of bitcoin full nodes. That gives it "value". It's functi…

Merkle trees are everywhere in Bitcoin (full node or otherwise). The block header has the merkle root of all transactions that are a part of that block. The witness merkle root is …