Top all-time · #1770
Peter Todd
Personal blog · petertodd.org · on HN as petertoddsecurityeconomics
Peter Todd's personal blog at petertodd.org covers security and economics. Since 2016, 41 different Hacker News readers have linked it 64 times, most often “Cypherpunk Desert Bus: My Role in the 2016 Zcash Trusted Setup Ceremony”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-07, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (27) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers cite Peter Todd's blog mainly for his 2016 OpenTimestamps announcement and his writeup of taking part in the Zcash trusted setup ceremony, both on Bitcoin and cryptography.
- Recommended for · 2 comments
- One commenter called his Zcash ceremony writeup cool; another said it is an excellent read for the opsec alone, written by a skeptic who took part.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 27 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Cypherpunk Desert Bus: My Role in the 2016 Zcash Trusted Setup Ceremony17 people · 19 mentions · first linked 2016-11-14
- /2016/opentimestamps-announcement8 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2016-10-04
- /2016/are-wallets-ready-for-rbf2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-03-06
- Soft forks are safer than hard forks2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-01-17
- ‘Carbon Dating’ the Internet Archive with OpenTimestamps2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-05-26
- /2016/commitments-and-single-use-seals2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-05-27
- Tierion ICO: The Misleading and Inaccurate Claims Made to Investors2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-08-15
- /2016/delayed-txo-commitments2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-09-02
- /2016/opentimestamps-announcement2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-11-04
What Hacker News says?
Thanks for letting me know. It seems to rely on bitcoin's block timestamps which are accurate within tens of minutes or hours. https://petertodd.org/2016/opentimestamps-announcement#how-o...
Comment linking /2016/opentimestamps-announcement
on “South Park creators have new political satire series with AI-generated deepfakes”Submitted Cypherpunk Desert Bus: My Role in the 2016 Zcash Trusted Setup Ceremony as a story · 126 points
HN discussionYou don't need a cryptocurrency specifically to do this. Rather you can piggy back on a different consensus system: https://petertodd.org/2017/scalable-single-use-seal-asset-tr... For example, while it'd be a bit of a hack, you could fairly easily re-use even the various Certificate Transparency blockchains to trade stocks. Also, I wouldn't say that the incentive mechanisms keep the ledger running. Rather they keep…
Comment linking /2017/scalable-single-use-seal-asset-transfer
on “A faster, more efficient cryptocurrency”Submitted ‘Carbon Dating’ the Internet Archive with OpenTimestamps as a story · 106 points
HN discussionSee OpenTimestamps: https://petertodd.org/2016/opentimestamps-announcement It timestamps to Bitcoin, and you don't need to own any Bitcoin for it to work.
Comment linking /2016/opentimestamps-announcement
on “Mirroring US climate data”Submitted Why Scaling Bitcoin with Sharding Is Very Hard (2015) as a story · 72 points
HN discussionOne interesting application is the ability prove that something existed at a specific point in time (at scale). Publish the hash of the content to the chain. This can be scaled by combining an arbitrary number of items into the same hash using a merkel tree ( https://petertodd.org/2016/opentimestamps-announcement#how-o... ). It's not a new idea - you could also publish the hash in a bunch of newspapers, but it's not…
Comment linking /2016/opentimestamps-announcement
on “Ask HN: Am I going insane or is there genuinely no value in blockchain tech?”Submitted MIT ChainAnchor – Bribing Miners to Regulate Bitcoin as a story · 53 points
HN discussionI was thinking about using an existing blockchain such as Bitcoin. Of course then the inconvenient is that archive.org would have to pay a fee every time they submit a new hash. A comment above pointed out that the scheme I described (unsurprisingly) already exists at https://petertodd.org/2016/opentimestamps-announcement Realistically it might be overkill though, simply setting up some mailing list where anybody ca…
Comment linking /2016/opentimestamps-announcement
on “Addressing Recent Claims of “Manipulated” Blog Posts in the Wayback Machine”Submitted Surprisingly, Tail Emission Is Not Inflationary as a story · 6 points
HN discussionIn fact, I probably have timestamps for the raw WARC files in the wayback machine archive which would prove that any hacking must have happened prior to May 2017: https://petertodd.org/2017/carbon-dating-the-internet-archiv... Unfortunately, the files themselves aren't public, and each file contains dumps from hundreds of websites, so even if they were public they're not the easiest thing to verify. Still, being the…
Comment linking /2017/carbon-dating-the-internet-archive-with-opentimestamps
on “Addressing Recent Claims of “Manipulated” Blog Posts in the Wayback Machine”Submitted Tierion ICO: The Misleading and Inaccurate Claims Made to Investors as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> Hashing the data that's added to the archive and then putting the hash in the blockchain would reasonably prove the data in the archive hasn't been modified at a later date. Here have yourself a timestamp https://petertodd.org/2016/opentimestamps-announcement https://github.com/opentimestamps/opentimestamps-client pip3 install opentimestamps-client ots stamp myfile.txt
Comment linking /2016/opentimestamps-announcement
on “Addressing Recent Claims of “Manipulated” Blog Posts in the Wayback Machine”Submitted The Misleading and Inaccurate Claims Made to Tierion ICO Investors as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThey're trusting you, much like most restaurants trust their guests to not just leave the table without paying. Most wallets have terrible protections against doublespends. They're so bad that many don't even warn you after you've been doublespent: https://petertodd.org/2016/are-wallets-ready-for-rbf
Comment linking /2016/are-wallets-ready-for-rbf
on “Bitcoin transaction processing takes up to 10 hours”Submitted Cypherpunk Desert Bus: My Role in the 2016 Zcash Trusted Setup Ceremony as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI mentioned that fork because you implied that a 75% hard fork would be effectively riskless. There are all kinds of things that can go wrong, and not wanting a hard fork unless there are no other options is prudent. RBF helped the existing problem of transactions never going through. A fee market will need to develop eventually anyway (as nullc has said, there's an unlimited amount of data people would like to stor…
Comment linking /2016/are-wallets-ready-for-rbf
on “Bitcoin transaction processing takes up to 10 hours”Submitted Cypherpunk Desert Bus: My Role in the 2016 Zcash Trusted Setup Ceremony as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHow large is the overhead in numbers? I tried to search but didn't find any clear examples. EDIT: found some data in the ceremony report linked elsewhere in this discussion: https://petertodd.org/2016/cypherpunk-desert-bus-zcash-trust...
Comment linking /2016/cypherpunk-desert-bus-zcash-trusted-setup-ceremony
on “Keybase chooses Zcash”Submitted Cypherpunk Desert Bus: My Role in the 2016 Zcash Trusted Setup Ceremony as a story · 3 points
HN discussionOne of the six is Peter Todd. Bitcoin expert and Zcash skeptic. He posted about his participation here: https://petertodd.org/2016/cypherpunk-desert-bus-zcash-trust...
Comment linking /2016/cypherpunk-desert-bus-zcash-trusted-setup-ceremony
on “Keybase chooses Zcash”Submitted Do Multiple Implementations Make Ethereum More Reliable? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI'm not that much into zcash, but this is cool: https://petertodd.org/2016/cypherpunk-desert-bus-zcash-trust...
Comment linking /2016/cypherpunk-desert-bus-zcash-trusted-setup-ceremony
on “Keybase chooses Zcash”Submitted What You Need to Know about the Tierion Network Token / Chainpoint ICO as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI think you have to be more precise when making claims of this sort; in this case "establishing a global clock" is not very precisely defined. Suppose we have an oracle that implements this protocol: it publishes a new public key every hour, and at any time someone can present it a blob of data which it will sign with the private key corresponding to the current hour's public key. Furthermore, you can query it for t…
Comment linking /2014/setting-the-record-proof-of-publication
on “Proof-Of-Work is a Decentralized Clock”Submitted Cypherpunk Desert Bus: My Role in the 2016 Zcash Trusted Setup Ceremony as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI also have a blog post describing the Git timestamping use-case: https://petertodd.org/2016/opentimestamps-git-integration
Comment linking /2016/opentimestamps-git-integration
on “Welp, there go my Git signatures”Submitted Cypherpunk Desert Bus: My Role in the 2016 Zcash Trusted Setup Ceremony as a story · 2 points
HN discussionOh, interesting! I do something not unlike that with my OpenTimestamps git commit signing: https://petertodd.org/2016/opentimestamps-git-integration I don't describe it in that post unfortunately, as I still consider the git tree "rehashing" support to be alpha-level, but I'll look into git-evtag.
Comment linking /2016/opentimestamps-git-integration
on “Phasing Out SHA-1 on the Public Web”Submitted My Role in the 2016 Zcash Trusted Setup Ceremony as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
