i put the “crypto” in “cryptocurrency.” head of cryptography at @aptoslabs 💍 + 👶 + 🏍️ = ❤️
Austin, TX
Joined July 2009
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I remember a cryptocurrency space that used to have higher ideals.
Satoshi did not set out to “solve users’ problems today.”
What Sandeep would call “larpers” were the early adopters from 2012 and before, whom Satoshi won over, and who set out to establish the field we’re all in today.
None of them built pragmatic solutions.
There was nothing pragmatic about Ethereum. Or Zcash.
It was due to their complete disregard for pragmatism that we’ve made it this far (scalable BFT, fast ZK) and we now stand to solve **tomorrow’s** problems (censorship, surveillance).
The f*** outta here with “today’s problems.”
What @ilblackdragon and NEAR team has built is a pragmatic solution which solves users’ problems “today” and such solutions win the users, technically perfect solutions win larpers (that too for a short time, you can never satisfy them for long)
> show me what your privacy looks like...
> THIS IS WHAT FAKE PRIVACY LOOKS LIKE!
This is craazy. I asked one of our PhD engineers to look into NEAR *Confidential* Intents wondering how they designed their system. Unredacted, word-for-word, this was his answer 😱😱😱
"Everything I found out about the privacy claims and confidential intents is so bad that it seems almost comical and I cannot believe what I am seeing. Apparently they run a completely separate instance of the protocol, which is called FAR (as an opposite to NEAR), and that has a permissioned operator set. The entire confidentiality claim seems to rest upon the fact that it is a permissioned chain and the nodes are trusted to keep things private, there doesn't seem to be any deep technology behind it and it also does not seem to be open source. The entities running the nodes are also not publicly known.
I almost feel weird writing this because it is so absurdly bad that it feels like ... I don't know ... a simulation? I know the usual level of overpromising in Web3 but this is so many levels beyond believable that it still feels unreal."
An important "clarification" by @CommunityNotes: turns out the danish national ID system wasn't hacked.
No, no, no...
It was simply *designed* to be easily & legally accessed by every dimwit who can't set a password.
But it was not hacked. Totally-secure design!!
while we could do all of this, i'm afraid it may be moot: there's no limit to the incompetence:
the CA could simply leak their (now hardened) SK too.
<< goes to the shower to cry in fetal position >>
of course, CT can and will catch incompetent CAs whose SK is used to equivocate about HTTPS certs, like eMudhra.
so, keygen transparency would only serve to reduce the rate of such disastrous incidents.
1. local randomness from the (potentially-incompetent) CA
2. (secret) randomness from a distributed system
not one, not the other, but both.
simple value proposition:
if you don't want toxic MEV eating into your profits, come trade on @DecibelTrade
