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 […]

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 […]

Bitcoin’s secret sauce

Bitcoin’s secret sauce, and how it works, was on full display these last few weeks. Bitcoin was designed to work against the most powerful of adversaries, and boy – did the adversary show up! China Ban A few months ago, 45% to 75% of Bitcoin mining happened inside China. Then the Chinese government banned it. […]

Governance, Decentralized

Define Governance: the act or process of governing or overseeing the control and direction of something (such as a country or an organization). In this article, I will focus on whether any organization can have decentralized governance, and what does that even mean? And how is this related to cryptocurrencies. Let’s start with a very basic organization, and […]