TimJRobinson

ZK STARKS can be done without a trusted setup, they are slightly different from ZK SNARKS.

I believe it's possible to do a trusted setup with many hundreds or thousands of anonymous people too, someone would need to get every single contribution to recreate the trusted setup.

ZKPs have only become cheap and easy enough to do in the last few years, so of course Goldman Sachs doesn't use them yet. They'll be using them in a decade, for now look at startups. https://github.com/zk-passport/openpassport is one that is working today, worldcoin ID verification is another.

The ID would need to have some government digital signature for the ZK circuit to work. The proof would be "this digital ID that has this valid government signature shows XYZ".

The verifier would need the government public key and then can see "This ID that has been signed by the governments private key shows XYZ"

The hash check is binary, you can only check if a password is correct or not. The ZK proof can prove anything, like that the password has enough special symbols and numbers that it's secure.

There's no way to check that someone's age is old enough with just a hash unless you break the hash.

The most common but painful way to write ZK circuits is with Circom. Better more modern ways are with Noir or using SP1 which can prove arbitrary rust code.

50% of Australia lives in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. Having a nuclear power plant for each would make sense. Melbourne would make the most sense first as it gets a lot less sun than the others.

I went through the same thing last few years. Ended up joining a venture capital firm as a technical researcher and love it.

I focus on crypto most of the time, and sometimes robotics, AI or developer tooling. I mostly talk to startups about their tech and do due diligence to make sure they know what they're doing.

I read a lot of whitepapers and go to technical discussions at conferences to know where the industry is going to see where we should be investing.

What is ICP?

Coinbase + USDC are essentialy this now. They've started working with many merchants both in the real world and online to add USDC pay and transactions are less than a cent with Coinbase charging no additional fees.

Only needs to be done once though. I tip and buy things all the time with my crypto wallet now, and it's less than a cent per transaction. Just waiting on more sites and stores to support it.

Credit cards were also a PITA when they first came out.

There's a few new proof of human systems out there. For each of these you have a private key and the service attests that "the holder of this key is a human".

Then when you sign up to a service you can create a ZK proof that this service has said you're a human and that you haven't created another account before. This allows for anonymous registration while also proving you're not a bot.

The two biggest services for this are:

- Worldcoin - scan your eye in an orb and it attests you're human. This is integrated with Reddit and Discord already.

- Gitcoin Passport - connect it to your social media accounts, proof of humanity services etc and it gives you a humanity point score.

I moved into research at a Venture Capital firm. Mostly doing due diligence on companies, assessing new technologies, thinking about where the industry is going.

I love it, was getting sick of the constant framework and language churn in programming and I enjoy having a wider view of everything happening rather than just working on one company/product.

I don't understand how they lost their startup though? Doesn't the accelerator only take a small percent?

Foreign students pay 2-3x as much as Australians do to study in Australia. Allowing rich Chinese children to study abroad contributes a lot to Australia's economy and those high fees subsidise everyone else which allows keeping local tuition low, which is why Australia is so open to them.

> I'm not talking about any services that allow password reset through SMS alone - that's beyond idiotic, obviously.

Twitter allows this, it's been a security flaw for years they've never fixed, and it's possible even if you have non-sms 2FA enabled! If you have a phone number on your Twitter account you should definitely remove it.

Quite a few high profile very security conscious people (e.g. Vitalik Buterin) have had their accounts hacked because of this.

There's a service called 3Num where you can get a number controlled by a private key. No one else has access to your number/account. Only supports SMS messages currently though, it's not a full phone service.

I work in crypto and see Sim swaps happen all the time, mostly for Twitter account takeovers of famous people where they then post phishing links and steal their followers coins. T-Mobile is easily the biggest offender for this, most people reporting they use it, so this has been going on for a long time.

The other big problem with Twitter security is you can have your account taken over even if you use non-sms 2FA! If you have your phone number on your account it can be used for recovery completely bypassing 2FA. They've had this security flaw for years and still haven't fixed it.

Good related article on the dangers of TikTok: https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/tiktok-may-be-a-chinese-bio-wea...

Cockatrice has been around for a while without getting a C&D. They separate the game client from the card images to get around it. Could do similar.

I recently wrote a post covering all the ways L2s will intoperate and share liquidity with each other: https://paragraph.xyz/@blueyard/how-ethereum-can-solve-l2-li...

The reason L2s can scale that high is every machine doesn't have to process every transaction.

Each L2 is its own chain that uses its own sequencer/s. The blocks from this chain are then compressed into a single blob of data with a ZK proof that the transactions are valid. The validators on L1 only need to verify that ZK proof matches the hash of the submitted data, which can be done in a few ms even if the L2 did 1M+ transactions.

It is amazing how prescient the book "The Sovereign Individual" is despite being written in 1997. I recently re-read it and it's spot on with what's been happening lately. Highly recommend if you want to better understand how the internet is changing society and causing nation states to lose their grip.

A real layer 2 would look more like something built on Ethereum (can see all its L2s at https://l2beat.com).

Essentially it's a separate network that every few minutes takes every transaction and compresses it into a data blob that it saves on Ethereum along with a proof that the computation was done correctly. The Ethereum L1 nodes then only need to verify the proof instead of re-executing all transactions that happened on the L2.

With this design users can go straight from an exchange like Coinbase onto the L2 and never need to use Ethereum, and fees are 10x cheaper because of the data compression. Fees will soon be 100x cheaper as Ethereum is adding extra space just for these L2 data blobs that is much cheaper than normal Ethereum data space.

Unfortunately it can't be done on Bitcoin right now because Bitcoin nodes don't have Turing complete scripting and so can't verify the proof that an L2 posts to Bitcoin.

Was thinking the same thing reading this. I use my daily note as the main launchpad for everything I'm writing each day, I add random thoughts in there and link out to separate notes for bigger tasks/ideas/information.

The daily node is so useful because when I look at an old resource I can see from the back links exactly when I had taken notes on it before and go to that daily note to see any additional context of what I was doing that day.

I use Trello for task management and jotting down things to investigate later.

I've been using syncthing to sync between my desktop, laptop, server, and phone for over a year and it works well.

> There's not really a problematic upper bound for global transaction volume on transactions per second with the lightning network

There unfortunately is, to open a channel you have to make a Bitcoin transaction, and you can't use lightning without opening a channel. Bitcoin processes a max of ~220M transactions per year so to onboard the world onto lightning with only one channel each would take a few decades.

A real layer 2 could solve it, or having some trustless way to use BTC on other chains

I think this is a large part of why many Americans in particular don't understand crypto. They already have access to the world's best financial system and all the protections of the state when using it.

Living in Australia and trying to invest in financial markets overseas is like pulling teeth sometimes, because every country has their own incompatible systems and local rules and regulations. And this is a developed well integrated country!

Crypto is the first time we have a global financial system that everyone can join without any one country being able to set the rules and control the system. This is extremely beneficial for countries that don't trust each other to be able to integrate and trade.

And yet if you were to visit Iran and attempt to access that wealth you'd quickly discover how little of that wealth is actually yours.

It's not just that it's in the cloud, it's the only form of wealth you can keep digitally AND only you have access and control over it.

Maybe that's fine because you're a good citizen who follows the rules, but some people are born into places where they don't get the privilege of a fair financial system, or the system changes on them.

It's a database optimization. Whenever you send funds that entire UTXO is destroyed and redistributed to new ones. Because of this you can easily calculate the current state of Bitcoin by only looking at the current UTXO set, and ignore all the old destroyed ones, instead of having to go back in history and see who sent what where.

It also allows for easier parallel processing because you can check many UTXO's in parallel without having some shared state they interacted with.

Only a few chains use this system - Bitcoin, Litecoin, Cardano, Fuel, maybe some others. Almost everything else uses an account based model, where everyone has an account balance, like how you'd imagine a blockchain whould work.

Caspian Report, a geopolitical YouTube channel that goes into depth on the background and context for events like this, did a great overview of the situation: https://youtu.be/T53qWE4Grck?si=PjYO7ObqeZ9YvNsY

Yea his gift is assembling teams to solve technical problems - things that people already want but can't do yet.

He sucks at solving social problems where it's unclear what people want.