Changelog

New Pages

• Leader leases versus quorum writes — 141 words
• The Grokster Decision - Ode To Thomas Jefferson — 4364 words
• Crash versus Byzantine faults — 256 words

Edited Pages

• Cryptography and blockchain:

  • - Tech:
  • - Uxtreeo
  • - Bitcoin Core PR review group
  • - Architecture
  • - Consensus layer
  • - Execution layer
  • - PeerDAS
  • - A Formalization of Cross-Domain Maximal Extractable Value
  • - Malachite (Tendermint v2)
  • - Multi-Proposer Construction on top of Tendermint
  • - Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE)
  • - Tiny BFV HE implemented in Tinygrad
  • - How does a skip ratchet work?
  • - Probabilistic sampling:
  • - Recursion in cryptographic computation schemes:
  • - ZK proofs
  • - SNARK’s can themselves implement verifiers for SNARK’s (recursive verification)
  • - FHE.
  • - FHE circuits theoretically implement decryptors of their own encrypted state
  • - Merkle signature scheme / one-time signatures
  • - Information retrieval
  • - Private Information Retrieval (PIR).
  • - Puzzles
  • - Hashcash, POW puzzles
  • - Order-preserving encryption
  • - Functional Encryption
  • - Short: Classic public key encryption + new ability to generate keys specific to functions that compute over the encrypted data and return public output.
  • - Example usage of private contact tracing: Phones encrypt users’ location logs. Health authorities hold functional keys that only reveal whether two users were co-located within a time window—without revealing their full location histories
  • - Indistinguishability Obfuscation
  • - Network Time Protocol attacks
  • - https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2019/04/03/collusion.html
  • - How does a skip ratchet work?
  • - Probabilistic sampling.
  • - https://vitalik.ca/general/2019/04/03/collusion.html

• The Path Matters:

  • Archived from: https://boz.com/articles/the-path-matters

• The World According to Rene Girard:

  • Archived from: https://eriktorenberg.substack.com/p/the-world-according-to-rene-girard

• Distributed systems:

  • - Facebook.
  • - Finding a needle in Haystack: Facebook’s photo storage
  • - Fault Tolerance (cheatsheet)
  • ## Replication
  • - quorum-based replication
  • - chain replication
  • - Fault Tolerance

• Fallacies of distributed computing:

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_computing

• John Carmack UpperBound 2025 talk:

  • - Markdown
  • Archived from: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-Fqc6R6FdngRlxe9gi49PRvU97R83O7ZTN_KFXo_jf0/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.blcl01j3jyj6
  • - Markdown

• UpperBound 25 talk notes:

  • # UpperBound 25 talk notes

• Programming:

  • - Site Reliability Engineering book (Google)
  • - See Notes on abstraction in mathematics versus computer science.
  • - Measurement, observability:
  • - Metrics
  • - Logs
  • - Traces
  • - Profiles
  • - File systems: block sizes.
  • - Databases (relational): page sizes.
  • - P2P networks: BitTorrent’s piece sizes
  • - Prometheus/Grafana
  • - the original client, in order to discover peers, would ping random IPv4 addresses. this isn’t even as hairbrained as it seems. you can query the entire ipv4 address space in 16mins
  • - The core elliptic curves of ZK-STARK’s were discovered computationally. They had to search for the parameters of two elliptic curves - MNT4 and MNT6 - which took over 610,000 compute hours
  • - Did you know, this was originally called the Albanian Generals problem (and hence Albanian Fault Tolerance) before they realised that might be a bit touchy..
  • ## Quotes
  • - “Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships."
  • - See Notes on abstraction in mathematics versus computer science.
  • - P2P networks: BitTorrent
  • - the original client, in order to discover peers, would ping random IPv4 addresses. the funny thing is this isn’t as hairbrained as it seems. you can query the entire ipv4 address space in 16mins
  • - The core elliptic curves of ZK-STARK’s were discovered computationally. They had to literally search for the parameters of two elliptic curves - MNT4 and MNT6 - which took over 610,000 compute hours
  • - Hahha did you know, this was originally called the Albanian Generals problem (and hence Albanian Fault Tolerance) before they realised that might be a bit touchy..