Khalid Hamadeh has published a technical write-up titled “How RC2's π table was made,” posted to his personal site at khalidhamadeh.com/writing/rc2-pi-table. The Hacker News submission of the piece (item ID 50146286) has drawn 3 points and 1 comment. That's the whole of the news.
The subject is the π table inside RC2, a symmetric block cipher designed in 1987 by Ron Rivest. The table — a fixed array of constants baked into the cipher — wasn't plucked from nowhere: it was derived from the digits of π through a defined selection procedure. Hamadeh's piece walks through that construction. The engagement numbers tell you most of what you need to know about its reach.
Why an RC2 π table write-up shows up at all
RC2 is a legacy cipher. It shows up in older S/MIME implementations, some VPN stacks, and password-based encryption inside PKCS#12 files. It is not used by Bitcoin, Ethereum, or any major blockchain. The article's appearance on Hacker News is a small-signal event in a niche corner of applied cryptography, not a development in crypto markets.
📊 Market Data Snapshot
The connection to digital assets is, at best, oblique. Cryptographic hygiene occasionally resurfaces in crypto conversations around key management and protocol security, but the transmission mechanism from a note about a 1987 cipher's constants to BTC or ETH pricing is essentially nonexistent. BTC is trading at $82,087, up 0.86% over 24 hours and down 1.83% over seven days on low volume. That's the backdrop, not a consequence.
The ticker-collision risk
One thing worth flagging: “RC2” is a plausible token ticker, and obscure technical items are exactly the kind of source that can be screenshotted and repackaged as “RC2 cryptography news” to move a micro-cap. There is no evidence in the facts of any token named RC2, but the absence of a disambiguation in the source is a real gap. Anyone who sees RC2 trending on a low-cap screener in the next few days should check whether the move traces back to this item — if it does, that's a pattern, not a signal.
What the article is and isn't
It's hosted on a personal writing site, not a peer-reviewed venue. Whether it's original research, a re-derivation of published RC2 analysis, or a correction to the historical record is a question the piece itself would need to answer. If it's original and correct, it's a minor cryptographic contribution. If it's a rehash, it's noise. Either way, the lack of peer review means no security conclusion — and certainly no market conclusion — should be drawn from it.
RC2's π table construction has been public for decades. Any finding here is retroactive, not forward-looking. No major blockchain uses the cipher, so the piece cannot affect current crypto markets. The only forward-looking angle is whether legacy-system deprecation timelines at standards bodies get nudged — and those move on multi-year cycles, not news cycles.
What to actually watch
The tangible next data point is whether the Hacker News thread picks up more than its current single comment, or whether anyone with a stake in legacy-system security weighs in on the reproducibility of the derivation. If a low-cap token using the RC2 ticker moves in the coming days, check whether the move is tied to this item. Beyond that, the story ends where it started: a 3-point submission and a technical note on a cipher most of the industry stopped thinking about years ago.
