31–40 of 51 posts
It's good that he noted that this scheme is insecure against quantum computers. Anyway, homomorphic cryptography is a fascinating field with many cool applications. I'm sure the ideas will remain useful even in the quantum era.
I always enjoy reading Vitalik's posts. I remember many years ago back when Bitcoin was fun. I traded it back and forth with friends for pizza and such. I even used it once at a hip restaurant in town. Some Bitcoin forum (the name of which escapes me atm) had a bitcoin drip, which would give you a free Bitcoin every once in a while. But then Bitcoin's value exploded, it's not very useful anymore since transaction fee…
It's good that he noted that this scheme is insecure against quantum computers. Anyway, homomorphic cryptography is a fascinating field with many cool applications. I'm sure the ideas will remain useful even in the quantum era.
The main advantage of pairings is that you can have constant-size commitments.
Author of the 2019 paper introducing Verkle Trees here [1]. Super exciting to see this on the front page of Hacker News! As the post explains very nicely, Verkle Trees basically let you save space (typically bandwidth, which can be expensive) by replacing a secure hash with a vector commitment scheme, making the tree shorter and fatter with some branching factor $k > 2$. This saved bandwidth comes at the cost of some…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had btc since 2012 not super early, but early enough that I briefly used mygox. Bitcoin has become toxic, the block size wars were interesting, but they yielded two communities that were less than what they were before the split. Bitcoin has stagnated technologically and Bitcoin cash believes that it will win based off of the principals that governed the split. Bitcoin will be on top for a good while longer, but…
The Bitcoin community got more focused on the fundamentals, long term thinking and actual value preservation. That is not true that it has stagnated technologically — MAST, taproot, Schnorr sigs. Lightning. Getting adopted as an official currency… Bitcoin is as cutting edge as ever. People got used to the slapdash lose a few hundred million in an eth smart contract world, and expect lambos in weeks. Which we see in t…
I don’t mean to shit on the work to integrate this stuff, but a lot of it is either something that other chains already had (better versions of), or that other chains don’t need (eg: lightning)
It's good that he noted that this scheme is insecure against quantum computers. Anyway, homomorphic cryptography is a fascinating field with many cool applications. I'm sure the ideas will remain useful even in the quantum era.
That's because it's polynomial commitment based on pairing-based cryptography (elliptic curves) but there are schemes based on hash functions (FRI) that are quantum secure. The main advantage of pairings is that you can have constant-size commitments. 28:47 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bz16BURH_u8
There’s no space or computation savings when using FRI for the PC scheme here
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The Bitcoin community got more focused on the fundamentals, long term thinking and actual value preservation. That is not true that it has stagnated technologically — MAST, taproot, Schnorr sigs. Lightning. Getting adopted as an official currency… Bitcoin is as cutting edge as ever. People got used to the slapdash lose a few hundred million in an eth smart contract world, and expect lambos in weeks. Which we see in t…
> MAST, taproot, Schnorr sigs. Lightning I don’t mean to shit on the work to integrate this stuff, but a lot of it is either something that other chains already had (better versions of), or that other chains don’t need (eg: lightning)
It’s like TCP/IP. It is, just as tcp/ip innovates in a careful way.
If you think any chain doesn’t need a layer 2 overlay, which ultimately is the only way to scale tx’s. Anything else is kicking the can down the road.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Bitcoin community got more focused on the fundamentals, long term thinking and actual value preservation. That is not true that it has stagnated technologically — MAST, taproot, Schnorr sigs. Lightning. Getting adopted as an official currency… Bitcoin is as cutting edge as ever. People got used to the slapdash lose a few hundred million in an eth smart contract world, and expect lambos in weeks. Which we see in t…
> Bitcoin is as cutting edge as ever. Everything you listed is years old, not cutting edge
I always enjoy reading Vitalik's posts. I remember many years ago back when Bitcoin was fun. I traded it back and forth with friends for pizza and such. I even used it once at a hip restaurant in town. Some Bitcoin forum (the name of which escapes me atm) had a bitcoin drip, which would give you a free Bitcoin every once in a while. But then Bitcoin's value exploded, it's not very useful anymore since transaction fee…
Another cool piece of crypto tech is mina, there's really interesting bits of math & engineering being done as well as all the shilling, scams and speculation
All it takes is a single mistake and the Mina chain become useless, taking out all the embedded txs.