Vanishree Rao
@vanishree_rao
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Building towards world proven with Zero-knowledge Proofs. Previously, Cryptography @InputOutputHK , @MinaProtocol , Xerox PARC. UCLA PhD.
Austin, TX
Joined April 2016
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I am so, so thrilled that I am now part of IOG that built Cardano. I have always been a huge admirer of the approach the project took - scientific rigor informing development.
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#Cardano
community - how nice are you! Thanks for the welcome. I believe Charles Hoskinson is astonishingly smart and the technical leadership of Romain and Aggelos puts us in very good hands...
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I am hiring cryptography engineers at all levels for Midnight! A project that I think is *timely*, given the push for regulations thanks to FTX collapse, and everything else that has befallen with our space. You will be working with folks who are highly knowledgable and kind.
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We are building a confidentiality blockchain! Isn’t this awesome?! So thrilled to get to work on it!
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Thank you for this wonderful opportunity,
@IOHK_Charles
! The warm welcome means a lot to me 🙏
Super glad to have Dr. Rao on the team. There are some amazingly difficult crypto engineering problems that we need to solve and it takes an amazingly brilliant person like her to solve them.
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Consensus is a core part of any blockchain. We are proud of our consensus protocol that sets Mina up for the high degree of decentralization we are envisioning with Mina. A blog on how Samasika does it:
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In fact, I've known IOG’s work so closely that I have used and built on top of it in the past: At Mina, I worked on designing Ouroboros Samasika, a PoS consensus for succinct blockchains such as Mina, that's based on the Ouroboros framework that amazing researchers at IOG built.
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How cool is it to be able to tell someone what you are working on in a sentence! We are building a succinct blockchain! And the value prop is so clear that it never needed any convincing. So proud of
@MinaProtocol
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We are in stealth; we are a small, super passionate team working towards a bold vision for the world to enable zero-knowledge proofs adoption at a whole new level. We are of course hiring. The most important role we are hiring for now is an amazingly amazing engineer. Rust is…
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To come in and lead application of cryptography here is invigorating and I am so, so grateful.
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It wasn't easy saying bye to my folks at Mina! That was my second family for a long time and the project was so dear to heart. I am still a crazy fan of the Mina tech and I will cheer for it as it reaches every new milestone.
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They and the scary smart team they have put together have created some fantastic success in the past and the future looks bright too. Good times for useful bleeding-edge tech!
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Always fun to talk about zero knowledge proofs!
Is it possible to prove something to be true without revealing any information about it? 🤔
In this video,
@vanishree_rao
gives a baseline understanding of how Zero-knowledge proofs work through a simple scenario of solving a Sudoku puzzle.
For a deeper dive, check the full…
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For senior-level cryptography engineers with experience in zero-knowledge proofs and also cryptography engineers with Rust experience who are brave to learn this amazing new technology and grow within the team.
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Centralized systems are fine until they break. Making them decentralized is the right way to go, but a significantly-improved intermediate step is to make the party provide publicly-variable certificates of good behavior & state; this you can achieve with zkSNARKs
#FTXCRASH
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Zero-knowledge proofs are a mind-boggling cryptography tool, so I wrote an intuitive explanation to break it down. What other resources do a good job explaining it?
#zeroknowledge
#zkp
#zeroknowledgeproofs
#cryptography
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If you are awesome with rust programming and are looking to work on exciting projects with a really smart and kind team, reach out!
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I know the team behind
@nim_network
is sharp and driven; I have also known
@ligero_inc
for well over a decade and he is a fantastic cryptographer. Congrats on the partnership, friends!
We are excited to introduce the first building block of the Nim AI framework, which provides economic ownership and verified access to AI models.
Ligetron 1.0 by
@ligero_inc
, is a memory-efficient ZK system powered by Ligero Proofs. We created the first proof in the world for…
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Exciting times ahead!
As we make fast progress on enabling Snapps on
@MinaProtocol
, we recently met with community members to brainstorm exciting demo use cases.
Next up: Designing MVPs for our top picks. Find out more in this retrospective!
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I woke up a bit late today and my daughter had drawn this for me. I wanted to share it here as a representation of how I feel these days and what I am doing these days. I am starting a project. I am so, so energized - haven’t felt like this before at all.
I get frequently asked…
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In a few mins, m going to talk to 4th graders in Napa Junction Magnet Elementary School about what I do as a cryptographer and specifically for
@MinaProtocol
. m unusually thrilled, 80000 times more thrilled than giving talks at conferences.
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16 yrs. ago, I was introduced to
#cryptography
. My uni. had no program, but a prof. encouraged me.
Today, I'm taking off for the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, where I'll get to meet my CS superheroes.
A good time for me to look back on this really amazing journey.
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You know that feeling when you are reading a beautiful paper/article and suddenly you find a jarring ill-formed sentence or a typo? It can really take out of the flow! I was thinking... what if we're able to point it to the authors in one click?
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I think it’s not the right choice of proof system or most optimized implementation of it that dictates success of a confidentiality blockchain; it’s the final goal and the high-level technological strategy that decide the project’s long-term state.
#zkp
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The best thing about entrepreneurship is that there is nobody to blame. Assuming complete responsibility.
------------------
I wasn't much of a reader growing up, so I remember clearly the handful books that I loved reading and re-reading. One is this tiny book of quotes from…
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1/ A popular question about the evolving world of SNARKs is “how is it that some of the recent SNARKs don’t need a trusted setup, whereas there is some impossibility result on SNARKs without trusted setup?“
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Excited to introduce Ouroboros Samasika, our provably-secure PoS consensus protocol. For more details:
- Read the whitepaper:
- Listen to my talk at zkSummit Online on March 31st:
@evanashapiro
@izmeckler
@josephbonneau
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@BobMcElrath
@valardragon
@cdetrio
@zmanian
@CodaProtocol
1/ Here are a few clarifications about the
@CodaProtocol
. The protocol is account based, not UTXO based. Specifically, at any given point in time, there is a Merkle tree of account balances.
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@TrendsXBT
@zooko
@balajis
This is quite true. And a lot of credit goes to the Zcash team for doing so much foundational work in this area. Including the work that
@zooko
did to normalize zero knowledge proofs among folks from Washington DC, as much as anyone else could!
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In a decade, a Web3 innovation set for Google-level adoption is the distributed reputation engine. Here's why: AI's rise is reshaping industries profoundly. Current fraud detection won't be sufficient in the AI era. For instance, ID verification via Zoom is increasingly…
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Thank you
@sreeramkannan
, this means a lot!!!
Great to hear that Dr. Vanishree Rao, who has a wealth of experience in applied cryptography, is building a stealth startup in the zk space. Please ping her if you are looking to join a startup in this space.
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We are announcing this CFP to find an efficient and secure hybrid cycle of curves. Note that this will be beneficial to the blockchain space, to allow for fast proof verification of a recursively computed proof, applicable to zk rollups, zk bridges, etc.
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I wasn't a fan of doing recursion on BN/grumpkin until now. Now you just do a very small circuit in grumpkin, this is great!
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The zero-knowledge approach for PLONK that uses Bulletproofs-based commitments (like in Halo) can be inefficient. We propose a new way of achieving zero-knowledge for PLONK: . Joint work with
@izmeckler
.
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Most of this is me too for 2024. Full send! 💃
More of Less of List in 2023 vs 2024:
Every year I write a list of things I want more of in the year to come and things I want less of. Keeps me honest.
Less of:
- Respect seeking: I tried to get people to respect me who I honestly don't respect (or even care about). I got…
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Think from the point of view of a developer or anyone who is starting to work with zero knowledge proofs and would like an intuitive glossary of the words used in the ZKP world. I am planning on creating a video for it. What words should I include?
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You know, you listen to all these sound thinkers like
@naval
talking about blockchain in general and what excites them about it, and you can't help but notice that Mina's vision and action embodies all those exciting aspects of blockchain.
@MinaProtocol
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1/ Usually, zero-knowledge proofs are designed & proven in the standalone setting, but are typically used in settings where multiple proofs need to be done. So there can be some efficiency techniques one can imagine that likely don’t get discussed in the original papers.
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@VivekGRamaswamy
You just gained my vote! You have an unusually high level of knowledge and leadership acumen among the current candidates - you deserve to win!
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Excellent work!
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1/ This is why I love working in the blockchain space, really interesting open problems, derived from real-world projects (as opposed to pure academia isolated from industry). Giving a talk on "Bridging the gaps between forward-secure signatures and proof-of-stake protocols" at
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What I realized coming in to the project is that our goals are high and worth it and that we are very well-positioned to forge a successful technology strategy, thanks to some really well thought-out structure for the skeleton.
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Hi, we are looking for someone to come in part-time and help with operations. An ideal person is someone who is already helping with ops at another blockchain company and would be interested in a few hours a week arrangement with an amazing startup. If you are that person or know…
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Ciao Milano! Pumped to meet
@robviglione
, Liat and the entire
@horizenglobal
team! And to get on stage and talk about privatizing NFTs tomorrow! Thanks so much, Horizen, for the warm invite 🙏
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Here is a definition of a blockchain. It was too detailed for what I needed, so I didn't use it and I haven't thoroughly proofread it. But can be a good starting point if you're writing one. There are a few definitions that exist, but I found them not generic enough for my case.
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I have a few questions:
1. to work with Lasso, what's a good frontend?
2. Has anyone emulated field arithmetic of BLS or BN in Pallas or Vesta?
3. Other than plonky, has anyone proven a complete verifier in circuit? (not just the non-decider part; proving systems in question are…
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I should learn better to tweet. Said everything without the golden beautiful word
#midnight
:)
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Thank you for the opportunity
@TamaraHaasen
! You are exceptional yourself - you got this ability to connect on a friendship level even while working crazy amount. The honor is all mine, looking forward to learning so much from you 🙏
It is an absolute honor to work with this exceptional woman. Thank you for joining our team
@vanishree_rao
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Decentralization is necessary not just for censorship resistance but also something very important for the fair economics of the world. To see why, imagine a centralized system -- it can charge whatever gross margin it pleases at for different kinds of demands, while censoring…
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Here is a primitive that seems useful to achieve confidentiality on blockcahins. Anyone thought of/came across an eff. construction?
Unlinkable Derived Keys with Efficient Proof of Derivation: There exists f st given (pk,sk), f(pk,sk,i)=(pk_i,sk_i) is i-th derived key pair
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It feels good to trace back the current popular techniques of proof systems to the hardness problems we cryptographers believed in decades ago. Discrete log! The way it allows for us to compute polynomials in the exponent, the way that (together with some other components)..
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PLONK is powerful. It lends itself nicely to many useful tricks. Here is a couple:
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The Plonk snark paper is really well-written. For eg, in S1.4, the overview of Sonic, Halo, Marlin, Fractal is crisp. Appreciate the minimalism in naming new primitives. I love reading papers that read like a novel.
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In Mina, how many blocks are summarized in one blockchain state proof update?
@bkase_
@cryptodavidw
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@TheOCcryptobro
Yes and yes, so that MidNight can make use of high degree of decentralization that exists in Cardano
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This is what I remember from my time in academia, on how much time we spend on various aspects of writing a paper
- solving a problem took anywhere between 3 days to 2 months
- writing up the solution in the format that I thought of it took less than 2 weeks
- polishing,…
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Thank you so much,
@TamaraHaasen
- it means a lot coming from you! I am lucky to work in an org with leaders like you. You are one of the most charismatic and intelligent person I have met! Thank you for being so inspiring!
It is an absolute honor to work with this exceptional woman. Thank you for joining our team
@vanishree_rao
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I haven't seen a single house on the market advertising two home offices. Even the newly built ones.
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Would be nice if eprint.iacr adds a feature for ppl to suggest edits to authors. It's not nice to email authors about typos/oversights, but if you spend an hour tallying things to make sense of an error, this feature might save many others' one hour.
@IACR_News
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It’s wonderful how Prof Dan Boneh picks up highly impactful future-looking questions to solve. Now it’s proof of solvency
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That is incredible,
@ljxie
! More power to you!
Donating $13k (Optimism season 4 compensation) to UC Berkeley
@SimonsInstitute
's family stipend program. This goes towards helping cover the costs of daycare/childcare for researchers in theoretical computer science
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@BrianRetford
@RiscZero
Sending you vibes of strength, Brian. There is no taking away that you have contributed fundamentally to the world of web3 and zkp at large. You should be proud of yourself. All the best!
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Great start! zk has long been touted as the solution for provenance, but it's all about timing - zk performance and maturity has made the world now ready for such projects. Not sure if they will use zk - a lot can be done better over web3 without zk, but there are problems in the…
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Rare are impacts like this, so deep and so wide! Congratulations to the team at
@eigenlayer
!
I have had a chance to talk to a few folks from the team and every one of them is intense! Kudos to
@sreeramkannan
for being the orchestrator inside and outside. If we as a world were…
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The way these credentials are issued, verified is a whole topic in itself and zero knowledge proofs can play a crucial role there... Zooming out, it's impressive that
@InputOutputHK
is betting on technologies that can interact in many ways and create values in many ways.
#ZKProof
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I should say that this warm welcome means a lot to me. Thanks again
@rom1_pellerin
!
We keep adding up exceptional talents to our team 🖖
Glad to have you in our Technology department Vanishree, our cryptographic engineers / applied cryptographers are delighted 🚀
Accumulating knowledge about Zero-Knowledge 😁
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Scotfest is going to be wild! I am just hoping to get my visa on time. 🤞
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1/2 I am not powerful enough to help in big ways, but I am happy to do the following bit:
- If you are a CS student graduating this year and wanting some guidance on industry jobs or a sounding board for your ideas
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Anyone knows an efficient construction of a predicate encryption scheme for function that verifies a signature?
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Very well-written summary on our consensus protocol, Ouroboros Samasika, by
@gareth_t_davies
: . Also, the best explanation I have seen so far of the design's starting point, Ouroboros Genesis.
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Update: Damn, it went so well! I was able to convince an avg of more than 60% that initially wouldn't do math for a living to a clear yes! And many of them were girls!!!
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As we're building Coda, we're inventing and implementing cutting-edge solutions. And the value proposition of our offering is incisive: scalability & usability! I am having a blast working on Coda. Ping me if you want to learn more.
#blockchain
#cryptocurrency
If you want to design and implement cutting edge crypto, program SNARKs, and like
@rustlang
and
@OCamlLang
- got a dream gig for you:
We’re hiring a cryptographer engineer at
@CodaProtocol
! People of color, LGBTQ ppl, women strongly encourage to apply!
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@AnnaRRose
This question has been well studied in academia, so gladly we don't need to reinvent the wheel. The idea would be to cite the previous one in line and also credit the one who has done the most significant contribution in the whole line. Like for IBE and for short signatures, I…
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Well these failures have been happening for some time now; what I mean is every such event adds to the clarity that some proof is solvency is needed
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What a milestone! Well done, Justin!
The first ever SNARK proving ASIC 👀
Real-time proving, real-time settlement, universal synchronous composability—coming sooner than most think :)
We can fix Ethereum fragmentation!
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Has anyone surveyed how snark verification time has changed over the evolution?
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I completely agree with
@sreeramkannan
on this. The idea of building a product and affecting a positive impact doesn’t come from overindexing on the cryptographic vs. non-cryptographic tools over-passionately. It comes from obsessing over the value the product can create.
So…
Cryptographic integrity can only solve execution validity of deterministic VMs with a prover cost being a significant multiple of the execution cost.
---------
We note that AI / gaming / scientific computation and many other domains require so much computation that even pure…
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@BobMcElrath
@valardragon
@cdetrio
@zmanian
@CodaProtocol
4/ Then, we do proofs of proofs to arrive at a single proof that stands for the entire blockchain... Hope this helps. Happy to try to answer if you have more questions.
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Mina for privacy, Mina for privacy, Mina for privacy,...
(not just scalability)
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I agree, I loved what
@nocturne_xyz
was building. It takes courage and awareness to pivot, so kudos to the team. Onward and upward!
@nocturne_xyz
Damn. This sucks to read.
Personally, I was really excited about Nocturne.
But, the team is pretty solid so I know you guys will crush it at your next endeavour.
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@TheOCcryptobro
@cardano_whale
Parts of design are still in flux, but this is the high level direction we might go with.
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#zkSummit
was fun! Couldn't get through all the questions on our consensus protocol, so will try to answer some of them here. Feel free to ask away.
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made us look to employ insanely powerful tools for polynomials like Schwartz-Zippel lemma. Now we got polynomial commitments together with zero test tools, efficient sumcheck protocols, etc. making up those popular proof techniques.
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Such a primitive is useful to achieve anonymity by using derived keys as one-time keys in confidential transactions
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If anyone owns a GPU, perhaps for gaming, I have a few questions for you. If I can get 15 mins of your time, I will buy lunch if we ever are in the same town.
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Sharp advice! Luckily, I prioritized correctly. Chose cryptography by passion 15 yrs ago, as I got to speak with
@izmeckler
before joining, I knew he will be kind, friendly, enriching to work with.
1/ People look for a new job completely backwards, e.g. "I want to be a PM at these 3 companies"
How people prioritize:
A/ Role
B/ Company
C/ Manager (sometimes)
D/ Market (almost never a consideration)
How people should prioritize:
A/ Market
B/ Manager
C/ Company
D/ Role
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Tomorrow, September 10, I am hosting a free meetup to describe what my upcoming course on
#cryptography
and
#blockchain
offers and give a sneak peek with my favorite topic of zero-knowledge proofs. Here are the details:
Want to learn about
#Blockchain
and
#Cryptography
and how they are impacting your industries today? Sign up and save your spot for my course at the UCSC SV Extension, on October 2-5.
#zkp
@UCSCExtension
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@1HowardWu
Knowing the population of a country doesn't mean you are invading the citizens' privacy. Come on! :)
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I have a super exciting announcement. I'm offering a 3-day crash course on
#Cryptography
&
#Blockchain
basics this Fall. You will get a solid understanding of various cryptographic constructs, from enc. to zero-knowledge proofs. Save your spot!
#zkp
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@wsfoxley
Neat! But you know, of all people, you would expect moms to be the first set of people to be doing this stuff :) if you can create something as complex as a human being, what’s running a stupid blockchain node!
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The following seems to be a common pattern in Web3 and we need to be aware of it:
In a system consisting of components A and B, where Component A is the most vulnerable to attacks, our primary focus is reinforcing A, often neglecting the importance of fortifying B. However,…
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It's always fun to talk about Mina. Looking forward to giving a keynote at DLT'22 on what makes Mina so fantastic:
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Genuinely proud of how unusually awesomely we do things!
Read more about Genesis in our official press release:
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In my spare time, I recently started thinking about privatizing NFTs. Copycat NFTs being so easy to create, for example, just doesn’t seem like we are doing NFTs right, you know. I wrote up my solution here
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@kaepora
Zk rollups are costlier to run and can be an overkill in some situations, where optimistic rollups are enough. It’s like when planes are invented, why does one still need cars.
In cases where the sequencer/rollup aggregator is disincentivized more than the incentive there can…
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