Claude FTW!

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]