Authenticated Attributes: An Alternative to Deepfake Detection
A version of this piece was originally published on the Starling Lab Dispatch. The Pope didn’t wear Balenciaga, but Chrissy Teigen thought…
Articles by Kate Sills
Kate Sills is a software engineer and consultant. She designs technical solutions to hard societal problems using cryptographic hashes, digital signatures, and timestamping services.
Latest posts
Smart Contracts at University of Miami Law
Download all slides as a pdf. Note: Due to time constraints on this 15 minute talk, I had to leave out pre-blockchain smart contracts…
The Curious Case of MD5
Comments on Hacker News | Average reading time: 11 minutes. Recently I came across a puzzling fact: the International Criminal Court hashes…
Authenticated Databases (with Starling Lab at Stanford University)
Starling Lab hosted a three-part Seminar Series at Stanford University on new ways to guarantee the authenticity, availability, and…
Combating AI-Generated Fake Images (QCon SF 2023)
I had the opportunity to speak at Qcon SF on combating AI-generated fake images, as part of a fantastic track including Ryan Dahl (creator…
Tamper-Evident Logs and Unalterable Docs
I gave this lightning talk at the Foresight Crypto, Security, and AI Workshop in 2022 to a group that included software engineers and…
The Most Popular Blockchain Books Are Really Bad (AKA Blockchain Education as a Public Good)
This is a talk I gave at Funding the Commons, an event put on by Protocol Labs for the sustainable funding of public goods and open source…
Soulbound Tokens (SBTs) Should Be Signed Claims
Average reading time: 20 minutes. A big thank you to Rick Dudley, Matthew Di Ferrante, and Kaliya Young for reviewing drafts of this post…
Trust But Verify Cheaply (APEE)
Some of the largest frauds in history occurred because an agent contracted to act on someone’s behalf, decided to act in their own self…
NFTs and Engineering Property Rights
In contract law, we are allowed to add custom rules, but we aren’t allowed to do the same in property law. Property (both real and virtual…
Making 'npm install' Safe
97% of the code in a modern web application comes from NPM, and JavaScript has a rich culture of code reuse. But using someone else’s code…
Smart contracts aren't trustless, nor should they be
Recently, Bitcoin supporter Jimmy Song wrote a popular article critiquing smart contracts and later reiterated his arguments on Laura Shin’s…
Podcast: How Smart are Smart Contracts?
Kate Sills joins the Building Tomorrow podcast to discuss the so-called Oracle Problem and other critiques of smart contracts. Transcript…
The Forgotten Contracts
“Smart contracts aren’t legal contracts,” they say. They’re right. But that’s missing the point. Smart contracts were never intended to be…
Code is Capital
When people live without credible property title, many complex transactions—taken for granted in an economist’s model of a free market…
Property Rights Are Already Virtual
The genius of the West was to have created a system that allowed people to grasp with the mind values that human eyes could never see and to…
The Dream of the 90's is Alive in Cryptocurrencies
Because of the Internet, our lives are significantly different. Writings on any topic, no matter how obscure, can be reached with a quick…
The Promise of Smart Contracts
STAN: Jerry, we’re not just going to give you seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. WADE: What the heck were you thinkin’? Heck, if I’m…
'Sovereign' and the Problems with Internet Voting
An interesting proposal popped up on Twitter this week, from an organization called The Democracy Earth Foundation. They claim that they’ve…