Top all-time · #1294
Paradigm
Company blog · paradigm.xyzbusinesseconomics
Paradigm is the company blog at paradigm.xyz, writing about business and economics. Since 2020, 53 different Hacker News readers have linked it 69 times, most often “Ethereum is a dark forest (2020)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (25) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Paradigm's posts mainly for the 'Ethereum is a Dark Forest' essay on front-running and MEV, and for explainers on Bitcoin, perpetual futures, zk hardware and intents. Commenters call several of them good intro or explainer pieces.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 25 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Paradigm is a frontier technology investment firm that builds and invests in crypto, AI, robotics, and across new frontiers from the earliest stages.
Most-linked posts?
- Ethereum is a dark forest (2020)10 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2021-12-24
- Ethereum Is a Dark Forest6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2021-06-24
- Bitcoin for the Open-Minded Skeptic [pdf]2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-07-11
- Hiding in Plain Sight2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-11-11
- The Dangers of Surprising Code2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-08-14
- A Guide to Designing Effective NFT Launches2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-10-14
- How to Survive a Crypto Cycle [pdf]2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-03-17
- Surviving Crypto Cycles2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-04-01
- Goldfish: A Provably Secure Replacement for LMD Ghost in PoS Ethereum2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-09-09
- A $350M crypto vulnerability was averted2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-08-17
What Hacker News says?
Agreed that conceptual simplicity is always best, and the current Casper FFG + LMD-GHOST doesn't have provable guarantees yet (though seems to be working in practice). I'm excited to see slight modifications to the consensus/forkchoice algo that do have provable guarantees, like [Goldfish]( https://www.paradigm.xyz/2022/09/goldfish ) from Paradigm Research.
Comment linking /2022/09/goldfish
on “The Ethereum merge is done”Submitted Pm-AMM: A Uniform Automated Market Maker for Prediction Markets as a story · 57 points
HN discussionImagine my delight as a crypto cynic who only admires gold/stablecoin and had recently created a article just for hn (and thus the name) about this... and how stablecoins make sense But I had literally said that stripe should've actually ventured into and created their own cryptocurrency or something... Tada, I might be one of the happiest person thinking that I actually really predicted something by my own observat…
Comment linking /2025/09/tempo-payments-first-blockchain
on “Stripe Launches L1 Blockchain: Tempo”Submitted Ethereum is a dark forest (2020) as a story · 40 points
HN discussionSome of my favorite "Intro to Bitcoin" pieces - "Bitcoin For The Open Minded Skeptic" - https://www.paradigm.xyz/Bitcoin_For_The_Open_Minded_Skeptic... "Stone Ridge 2020 Shareholder Letter" - https://www.microstrategy.com/content/dam/website-assets/col...
Comment linking /Bitcoin_For_The_Open_Minded_Skeptic.pdf
on “Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future”Submitted Hiding in Plain Sight as a story · 11 points
HN discussionSome of my favorite "Intro to Bitcoin" pieces - "Bitcoin For The Open Minded Skeptic" - https://www.paradigm.xyz/Bitcoin_For_The_Open_Minded_Skeptic... "Stone Ridge 2020 Shareholder Letter" - https://www.microstrategy.com/content/dam/website-assets/col...
Comment linking /Bitcoin_For_The_Open_Minded_Skeptic.pdf
on “Tesla buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, may accept it as payment in the future”Submitted Hardware Acceleration for Zero Knowledge Proofs as a story · 8 points
HN discussion> Could be that the Wormhole team spotted the bug, patched it, but the attacker got to it before the patch could be rolled out. It's a dark forest. Many predators who are smarter, faster and better connected than you are silently watching, ready to exploit your mistakes and ignorance for their profit. Dark Forest -> https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest
Comment linking /2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest
on “In second largest DeFi hack, Blockchain Bridge loses $320M Ether”Submitted Ethereum Is a Dark Forest as a story · 5 points
HN discussionEthereum is a Dark Forest: https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest
Comment linking /2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest
on “In second largest DeFi hack, Blockchain Bridge loses $320M Ether”Submitted A $350M crypto vulnerability was averted as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI should point out that because Ethereum is a dark forest[0], slashers will collapse to a subset of stakers. More specifically, anyone who is not a staker is at the mercy of the mempool[1] to broadcast their slashing transaction and at the mercy of other stakers to correctly record it. There is no economic incentive to do so, and no way to constrain the software such that stakers cannot manipulate the slashing messa…
Comment linking /2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest
on “Mainnet Merge Announcement”Submitted Paradigm’s New Venture Fund as a story · 4 points
HN discussionYou will like this 2020 classic piece by the folks at Paradigm: https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest
Comment linking /2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest
on “Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn”Submitted A Guide to Designing Effective NFT Launches as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI find the "dark forest" of Ethereum ( https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest/ ) fascinating rather than terrifying, though I might be scared if I put in a good chunk of money and risked losing it (which is why I don't plan to invest myself). There's an intellectual beauty in creating a world people can choose to join, where "code is law", developers construct castles out of air and pure logic, t…
Comment linking /2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest/
on “Notes on Web3”Submitted The Superexponential Research Publication Boom as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis essay scared me away from Ethereum, among other coins, for good: https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest
Comment linking /2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest
on “Bybit loses $1.5B in hack”Submitted The Case for Leaving FAANG Companies for Crypto as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYou'd be surprised! Some of the best smart contract security folks in the space are pseudonymous and I imagine many organizations would work with them without needing to know their legal identity. One of those people is samczsun[1] who, amongst other things, famously prevented a potential ~$350m hack. [1] https://www.paradigm.xyz/team/samczsun/posts
Comment linking /team/samczsun/posts
on “Show HN: I made a site that shows jobs where you can work pseudonymously”Submitted Ethereum Is a Dark Forest as a story · 3 points
HN discussionMiner extracted value. https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest/
Comment linking /2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest/
on “Ethereum just activated its ‘London’ hard fork”Submitted How to Survive a Crypto Cycle [pdf] as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThere are a great many of them, you just can't see them in the dark forest. https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest
Comment linking /2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest
on “AI agents find $4.6M in blockchain smart contract exploits”Submitted Interesting LLM visualization I stumbled upon as a story · 2 points
HN discussionInteresting coincidence, I was reading this paper after seeing it being quoted here: https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest
Comment linking /2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest
on “Flash Boys 2: Frontrunning, transaction reordering, consensus instability (2019)”Submitted Verifying a solution to Kryptos K4 without ever seeing the answer as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAgreed that it's a good idea from that perspective. It doesn't help that Coinbase listed ETH2 as a separate asset in their app to represent staked yield producing Ethereum. It can be adversarial. It's like the dark forest analogy that Dan Robinson coined: https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest/
Comment linking /2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest/
on “The great renaming: what happened to Eth2?”Submitted Alloy: Fast, battle-tested and well-documented Rust library for Ethereum as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
