Software designer and crypto-anarchy historian. about • twitter • telegram
Hey, my team at Safely is looking for an experienced devops engineer to help design and maintain infrastructure before the public launch later this year. Requirements: Over 10 years of experience in administering servers, networks, databases, p2p nodes. Hands-on approach to develop custom tooling. Ability to solve any problem at any time of date from any location on Earth. Strong professional…
In the past 13 years, I did extensive cryptography research, developed a number of decentralized protocols at Chain/Interstellar , designed a breakthrough blockchain engine ZkVM , and spent years building products for real users. For the last four years, together with the TON developer community and key ecosystem partners, I helped build the TON ecosystem. My team created Tonkeeper , TON Connect ,…
Christopher Nolan is, of course, a genius. Because as far back as ten years ago he had a very LLM-like robot — practically one-to-one with ChatGPT in audio mode today — but in the dumbest possible mechanical shell, so you wouldn’t forget that you were giving commands to a robot, not a person. In the film, this was probably driven by the need not to dilute the theme of saving humanity with the…
Consume content These two words embody many things that are wrong in technology, business and our society. Both words are forbidden in my company. Do I still need to elaborate? Abstract concepts such as “user” / “consumes” / “content” used routinely strip the things we love doing from all humanity and sense. When I listen how Apple engineers explain how you can put your content in a glassy rounded…
I am into UI design, software architecture, information security and crypto-anarchy. On crypto industry Blockchain is social game based on math tricks to escape 5000-year-old symmetry of force. Crypto assets are harder to steal than to protect. Bitcoin is better than gold in all respects. It is a 500-meter solid cast iron plate, on which our entire civilisation can stand. For everyday finances…
Sometimes you need to summon 3+ people in a group chat for a discussion. I’ve been using Telegram since it’s launch in 2013 and since then I have accumulated over 600 group chats. Most of those were added while working on Tonkeeper in the past 2.5 years. When people use group chats incorrectly, we all suffer from the consequences. Here’s how to use group chats: Make everyone an admin. This will…
Building apps on a blockchain is very much like the top-tier racing sport, F1. And it’s not about speed, performance or running in circles. You see, F1 is a technical sport between some of the best engineers on the planet, and the smartest one wins the trophies. In F1, like in real life, there is a stack of technical regulations saying what you can and cannot do. If you break the regulations — you…
Insightful quotes from an article by Marcel Weiher on Mojo , a new language designed by Chris Lattner (the author of LLVM and Swift). To those who don’t know: Mojo is a fun new language that extends Python with features usually reserved for “systems programming”: static type system, algebraic types and memory ownership. The language is so fun, the file extension is the fire emoji, literally:…
Bitcoin is dead again, economies are in recession, wars are everywhere. It’s once again the time to build decentralized systems! Preface For the past 8 years I’ve been extensively studying cryptography, Bitcoin, politics of crypto-anarchy and cypherpunk culture. The very first day when I discovered Bitcoin I understood that the world is irreversibly moving towards decentralized finance based on…
Apple has published a brochure Building a Trusted Ecosystem for Millions of Apps where they argue that the App Store is an important middleman that delivers safety to billions of people and that if people are allowed to load apps from random sources, bad things™ would happen. I respect many people at Apple who work real hard to push for better design and better technology. I also respect Apple as…
TL;DR: make complex UIs driven by a domain-specific command-line language, which itself has interactive controls built into the flow of the commands. Am I a crazy linuxperson who prefers to sit in front of a terminal all day? Nope. Some fifteen years ago I was lucky to witness Autocad’s interface that’s pretty much all GUI, but that was having this little terminal with its own command language…
Symmetrical power is defined by the risk being proportional to the potential gain. This automatically translates into “the bigger guy wins”. Example 1: security of the physical gold, which is easily confiscated by the state and is now largely held by central banks. Example 2: second amendment in US. Militia formed by armed citizens is going to lose against same-sized army professionally organized…
This is a declaration of a new era. Cryptography was almost exclusively a military technology for centuries. When in 1990s millions of personal computers connected to the internet, cryptography graduated from a munition to an industrial tool to secure credit card payments over a global, open and hostile environment. For the next 20 years cryptographic research and engineering was very vibrant, but…
Bill Gates on Reddit AMA : The main feature of crypto currencies is their anonymity. I don’t think this is a good thing. The Governments ability to find money laundering and tax evasion and terrorist funding is a good thing. Right now crypto currencies are used for buying fentanyl and other drugs so it is a rare technology that has caused deaths in a fairly direct way. I think the speculative wave…
Blockchain is a data structure for proving that certain events happened in a specific order. Blockchain consists of a chain of timestamped blocks of events. Events are often called transactions . Why timestamps? To not only order events relatively, but also pin them to the real time as it’s way more useful and in some cases necessary to make plain ordering work (e.g in Bitcoin to readjust…
Modern programming languages allow building sophisticated modular systems, where everything is in the right place and feels good . Enthusiastic engineers invent more and more powerful abstractions so we can build our software with ease and confidence. However, there is a caveat. Power of abstractions is often considered by one factor only: the formal one, that qualifies how much things are…
99% of ideas around Bitcoin existed long before 2008. There was a proof-of-work money , there was a bit gold idea and there was paper on distributed property titles . Not to mention all the necessary cryptography that existed for decades. The missing link was a simple idea: instead of tracking individual proof-of-work coins of bit gold inside some distributed property title registry , lets turn…
Bitcoin is like physical cash: it is not reversible and you are responsible for handling it. If you lose your wallet, you lose your money. You can give bitcoins to someone to hold them for you, but it will be like with any bank: you have to trust them that they won’t run away with your money. Bitcoin is unlike physical cash: you can store as much as you want and it will not take any space. You can…
Bitcoin compared to traditional financial assets is the same as Tesla compared to gasoline cars. Both Bitcoin and Tesla are sustainable, require less maintenance and eliminate bullshit on a planetary scale. Recently Elon Musk showed a new truck and a new roadster. Both are the same thing: a battery, couple of motors and a few wheels. Both are very fast, efficient and both not only beat the shit…
You can only buy Bitcoin once in your life. You are going to make your homework and buy some coins with the intent to hold them for at least several years. They will (probably) eventually increase in value, so buying more some time after would not make a difference to your balance. Unlike popular ponzi schemes, such as social security, pension funds and modern stock market, there are no dividends:…