Thor's personal site and blog
designer babies no one asked for: protein cryptography paper speedrun cryptographers are finally getting around to answering our deepest, most pressing questions but what if we used babies as encrypted storage format? 1 i surely cannot imagine encoding dad-jokes in my future childrens' proteins. but no one is actually talking about using babies as a substrate for cryptography (yet). a paper posted…
What follows an introduction to the Stone Prover . Pebble Stark is my WIP re-implementation of the Stone Prover as a set of modular Rust libraries targeting web-assembly compilation, thereby enabling client-side proving (proving Cairo from a browser or phone). The target audience for this post are those familiar with verfiable computation at a high level, looking to learn more about the Stone…
What follows is a solution to ZK Hack IV, Puzzle 3 . ZK Hack is a series of zero-knowledge cryptography CTFs, workshops, hackathons, and study groups. Thanks to the ZK Hack organizers for creating this CTF, Geometry for this puzzle, and the ZK Hack community. You might also be interested in solution for puzzle 2 . If reposting elsewhere, find this post on my blog here . You might be interested in…
GM! Just a short note describing a recent new project of mine, git merkle (gm) ! gm is a recursive tree of all the repos I’ve worked on since 2017 after a little spring cleaning; I removed about 40% of my pre-existing github repo history in the process of writing gm . There are about 90 repos contained in gm , and counting. I removed about 60. Why did you do this?! This is a very real…
What follows is a solution to ZK Hack IV, Puzzle 2 . ZK Hack is a series of zero-knowledge cryptography CTFs, workshops, hackathons, and study groups. Thanks to the ZK Hack organizers for creating this CTF, Geometry for this puzzle, and the ZK Hack community. You might also be interested in solution for puzzle 1 . If reposting elsewhere, find this post on my blog here . You might be interested in…
What follows is a solution to ZK Hack IV, Puzzle 1 . ZK Hack is a series of zero-knowledge cryptography CTFs, workshops, hackathons, and study groups. Thanks to the ZK Hack organizers for creating this CTF, Geometry for this puzzle, and the ZK Hack community. Thanks to Paul Gafni and Daira Hopwood for discussion. You might be interested in this post if you’re interested in: a smattering of…
Walking Through Distributed Key Generation (DKG) This post is a follow-along to a talk on Distributed Key Generation at DevConnect, Amsterdam 2022 ( slides here ). It also functions as a stand-alone resource. The post is intended to briefly introduce the motivation for threshold signatures, relating them to multisignatures, and clarify a Distributed Key Generation protocol introduced by…
I was interested in the time-effectiveness of problem-solving different programming languages. I looked for research around comparative developer productivity across languages, but came up mostly empty-handed, so I constructed an personal experiment using Project Euler . Professionally, I write Rust for the smart contract platform NEAR . Years ago, I learned to program in Python, though have not…
What's that? Anna asked. "It's anything you want it to be," said Ted the Tokenmaker. "But that's not a thing," said Anna. "That's the magic of crypto," said Olly the Optimist, "the more people believe in these, the more they are." … "What's that?" said Alex. "It's anything you want it to be," said Anna. "Sounds like magic beans," said Alex. "They are until they're not, unless they are, but I like…
What makes a game a “blockchain game”? A simple definition: some part of the state of the game is stored on a blockchain and is therefore publicly visible. Think chess or tic-tac-toe: each move is a state change on a publicly visible ledger. Compare this to games like League of Legends or Call of Duty, where the game state lives entirely on a private game server. Suppose we wanted to store the…
The year was 2020. An epidemic swept across the globe, driving all human life indoors. Unrest concerning police action and longstanding racial inequality in the US drove the very same back into the streets. Like cattle, driven back and forth we were, with global sociopolitical and health trends our ranger. In other words, there was never a better time to read an primer on Cows. Yes, those magical…
I wrote this paper as a course paper in sustainability and innovation at the University of Oslo. In the section before the conclusion I propose an original (possibly not, but I didn't find it elsewhere) system for coordinating government agreements around international policy. Abstract Climate change presents a pressing range of tragedy of the commons problems, eg. global sea level and atmospheric…
23 books, 3 unfinished with no intention to finish anytime soon. 5 fiction, 18 nonfiction (would it be cheeky to count The Little Bitcoin Book as fiction?) Trends: non-fiction especially about business, identity, and climate science early on Biographies and Neal Stephenson towards the end I'll give a couple sentences of my thoughts about each book and a rating out of 10. Climate and Society, Robin…
Introduction “The speed with which human rights has penetrated every corner of the globe is astounding. Compared to human rights, no other system of universal values has spread so far so fast…. In what amounts to a historical blink of the eye, the idea of human rights has become the lingua franca of international morality” (Normand 8). With the simultaneous rise of secularism and the middle class…