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 […]
Category: bitcoin
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 […]
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 […]
Bitcoin is Gold, but better.
The more I learn about Bitcoin, the more I respect gold. The more I learn about gold, the more I appreciate Bitcoin – Nic Carter One thing Bitcoin taught me is that goldbugs don’t truly understand why gold is valuable – Vijay Boyapati Bitcoin as Gold 2.0 is a great analogy. Both Bitcoin and gold […]
Zero Knowledge
“Zero Knowledge”, contrary to what it sounds like, is actually quite interesting and fun. It might even be a solution to our long standing problem of validating the world’s transactions without a trusted third party or government or central bank. If you Google for the terms Zero Knowledge and Blockchains, you will be flooded with […]
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 […]