I am fairly skeptical of AI-based chatbots. I have seen them hallucinate a non-existent paper once. I have been taken down useless rabbit holes. Or just to put it bluntly, they have never given me a “over-and-beyond-Google” moment. And then this happened. I was discussing the 8-queens problem with my sons (place 8 queens on […]
Abstract Strategy Games
I have found a new love: Abstract Strategy Games. I have spent an entire lifetime playing chess as a weak-ish amateur, reading books on its history, theory, openings, strategy, and having watched a gazillion hours of commentary online. Let me just say that chess has been a great friend over the years, in moments of […]
Bitcoin’s Achilles’ heel
Luna token’s hyperinflation was a thing to behold. On 05/May/2022, each Luna token was valued at ~$85 in markets where it was listed. On 11/May/2022, there were 377,000,000 Luna tokens in circulation. On 14/May/2022, there were 6,530,575,000,000 tokens in circulation. That’s a 1,700,000% inflation over a 72 hour period. How did that happen? Read Swan […]
Anonymity in the open with Tornado Cash
Cryptocurrency transactions can be tracked from point to point because all transaction data is public. The transaction data needs to be public to ensure the financial integrity of the system, which is non-negotiable. So, given that we cannot get rid of transparency, how do we achieve privacy? In Bitcoin, one way to achieve privacy is […]
BIP-32, an explainer
BIP-32 is a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal that allows Alice to start with a single private key, and generate a series of private and public keys from it, where the public keys can be generated independently from the private keys. This is not as easy as it sounds, because in most public key crypto-systems, you can […]
Bitcoin’s Time
No, this article is not about whether it’s Bitcoin’s moment to shine. It is a somewhat technical explainer on how Bitcoin implements time, or timestamps. First, we need to understand why Bitcoin needs a notion of time at all. If you don’t care for this, you can directly jump to the “How” section of the […]
Homomorphism
If Zero Knowledge Proofs are the kind of magic seen in a full fledged opera theater, Homomorphisms in Cryptography are like intimate card tricks done in a 1-1 setting. Less grand, less machinery at work, but elegant and counter-intuitive all the same. You hear about homomorphism in encryption first. They also appear in commitment schemes […]
This Before That
This article is ostensibly about why the challenge space in an interactive zero knowledge proof has to be large. Understanding this rather obscure theoretical aspect of zero knowledge proofs is quite rewarding intellectually. I promise. Let me start with a trivial question. How do you convince yourself that something happened before something else? Here’re some […]
Trusting Trust
Ken Thompson is a Turing Award winner and an all-around genius – gave a seminal talk during his 1984 Turing Award acceptance called “Reflections on Trusting Trust.” In this lecture, he shows how to sneak a Trojan horse into your application (in his case, the Unix operating system) while you compile the source code of […]
Asymmetric power, reversed
What is power, really? Power comes about when someone has the ability to destroy someone else’s accumulated capital. What is capital, then? Capital Capital comes about as a result of raw materials, labour, and time. A healthy body, stored grains, a house to live in, a bank account with money earned through a job, or […]