Ian Miers
@secparam
Followers
10,541
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215
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8,146
CS Prof. Security and applied cryptography.
Washington DC/ UMD
Joined April 2012
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At 15:40 BGP started learning at a geometric rate, at 15:52 UTC it became sentient. At 15:54, thinking that Asimov's 3 laws of robotics sounded like a decent idea, BGPnet shut dowm Facebook.
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There've been a lot of conversations about Apple's CSAM scanning and its impossible to follow. I made a nice summary.
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The risks of multiple implementations of consensus critical code 👇👇👇
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Most universities reopening plans would not pass IRB review for human experimentation.
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New paper. ZEXE: Zero-knowledge Execution.Think of it like a private OS for the blockchain. Can build private tokens, smart contracts, and maybe even a DEX. Joint work with
@matthew_d_green
@ebfull
@1HowardWu
@zkproofs
and Alessandro Chiesa
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iota is rapidly turning into the scientology of crytpocurrencies.
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Excited to announce I’ll be taking an Assistant Professor position at UMD starting Fall 2020. (For the next few months I plan to work on some real-world issues around privacy on Blockchains.)
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Hopkins CS students got a 0 on the final curved to an A by getting everyone to not take the final. Seems like a prisoners dilemma right? The trick was changing the game: they all stood outside the room. If anyone broke the pact, they all take the exam
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How would Apple not be able to add things to the hash list/ change which list they use? NMEC would need to publish some root hash of their list and Apple would have to bind it into their client software in a way even they couldn't change. Thats a tall order.
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Media: The FBI sold criminals backdoored phones for "secure" communication. The phone cost $1,700 and required a $1,250 annual subscription. Everything could be read by law enforcement.
Hacker news: "So the FBI built a 8 figure ARR hardware business..."
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zk rollups aren't zk:
Your data is public.
The proofs aren't private.
And the server sees everything anyway.
There are, of course, exceptions, but generally true. And if this is obvious to you, congrats, but a surprising amount of EthCC doesn't get it.
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P1: "Hi , I'd like to report a security breach. "
P2: "uh, where did you get this number?"
P1: "your hard drive."
When a company doesn't have a responsible disclosure Email/page....I have to choose an unexpected communication channel... :/
Please use security.txt
@securitytxt
#BugHunting
#ResponsibleDisclosure
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I'm sorry, the fan on my laptop is broken. I can only do zoom meetings for a half hour and then need a half hour cool down.
Best laptop bug ever.
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Zcash will add private custom tokens. These should allow stable coins and degenerate NFTs. It is, aside from ECCs amazing work for fast payments, the 1st major user facing change to Zcash since launch. And its a third party building it with ecosystem funds
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I successfully defended my thesis on "decentralized anonymous payments." 4 years from zerocoin to zerocash to commercial use as zcash. Crazy
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I once saw a company repeatedly claim their large database of customer DNA was safe because it had no personal identifying information in it. You know like names, fingerprints or .... the genetic code that uniquely defines every human on earth.
I’m shocked, *shocked* to find out that gambling has been happening here.
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Much of blockchain privacy research is: you're naked in time square. But don't worry, we can: 1) hide your pimples, 2) make you look kinda like several other naked people. 3) hide how many fingers and toes you have.
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Due to covid, my university wants contingency plans for grading my class if I die. Personally, I think everyone should get an A. Which sounds like the plot of a bad dark comedy. The Covid: a group of college seniors try to infect their professors with the plague to get a 4.0 GPA.
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Forward secrecy and metadata privacy are two of my favorite crypto topics. A KGB training manual contains a good story of why:
1) The GRU detects a new CIA radio transmitter in Frankfurt
2) The KGB sees activity at CIA's Moscow station
It's all encrypted, so thats all they know.
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What happens in Vegas stays in:
A ) Los Vegas, NV
B) Fort Mead, MD
C) Buffdale, UT
D) Seattle, WA
E) All of the above.
Wynn Las Vegas first hotel chain to incorporate Amazon Alexa smart controls for its rooms.
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If you think signatures/ciphertexts/zk-proofs are too big, consider this: Including facebook's like button on an *empty* page downloads 200KB of data.
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If you think crypto means cryptocurrency, then you probably think Fiat-Shamir is a hot new stable coin.
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This is why you need technical privacy protections. Policy ones can and will be easily overturned but by then you've already gotten all the help you need to build your data collection system. A system you couldn't build covertly.
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Mastodon is the only thing where, when using it, I go "you know what might make this better, a blockchain" With federated servers, one of the few ways to have global accounts is to have the blockchain store a username to server mapping.
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Why is it that crypto (and particularly the very nice Eth people), write all these great explainers on various topics, but never give credit who came up with the ideas? You'd think zkSNARKs or private payments came out of industry, not, at least initially, academic work.
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Zerocash won the 2024 IEEE S&P Test of Time Award. Published in 2014, it pioneered using zkSNARKs for blockchains. Its techniques ended up in Zcash, Tornado Cash, Railgun, and other deployed protocols for private payment on public blockchains. It started with last years winner...
Pinocchio nearly practical verifiable computation (aka snarks) wins the test of time award at Oakland. Fun fact, that paper was how I found out about snarks being practical and led to Zcash. Congrats to the authors.
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Christina Garman,
@matthew_d_green
, Gabriel Kaptchuk, Michael Rushanan, and I found some crypto exploits in iMessage:
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Email from my university: "Ian is expected to deliver light to moderate rain this weekend"
Talk about unreasonable expectations for junior faculty.
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Pinocchio nearly practical verifiable computation (aka snarks) wins the test of time award at Oakland. Fun fact, that paper was how I found out about snarks being practical and led to Zcash. Congrats to the authors.
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State of cryptocurrency privacy:
Bitcoin isn't private if you use it.
Monero isn't usually private. E.g., if you withdraw from Binance and pay a friend who deposit to Kraken.
Zcash isn't private until you find 1) a wallet supporting shielded payments 2) someone to accept shielded
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Facebook paid for an zeroday against Tails, the privacy focused OS used by activists, to nail a horrific child predator. They gave it to the FBI. Queue moral debate over ends vs means. But here's the thing, after it was done they never fixed the bug.
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Facial recognition is just a return to village life where everyone knew your face .... and the king had a mage who knew everyone's face (and travels) in every town ... and the mage tracked the king too and warned his accomplices if their faces were tracked. And you were afraid.
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Anyone looking for interns for rust crypto or zk work? Ideally a mixture of engineering + research. I have some extremely good graduate students who are looking.
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@balajis
You can summon the CEOs of Microsoft, Google, AOL, Apple and Comcast to Congress. I'd bet that covers >50% of US email. Decentralized protocols can end up very centralized too. Email is a good example: anti spam is a significant barrier to running your own mail server.
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@profmusgrave
@BGGoodell
Even if you have a rich uncle or lottery winnings, paying for a PhD is a massive red flag. At its best, a PhD is a serious investment by your advisor in teaching and training you. If they can't find the money to pay you, it doesn't bode well for them putting in the effort.
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We need to move IEEES&P. $1400 for reg + 330 a night for the conference hotel is awful. And it gets you SF, not Rome or San Diego. Worse, if you have many graduate students and cannot afford the conference hotel, you have to make sure they find somewhere safe to stay.
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Zcash and blockchain privacy is like selling seatbelts in 1910. Yes they're needed, but no one knows yet.
@EranTromer
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Pseudonym1, a minister, and a rabbi walk into a gay bar. Pseudonym1 goes to his sister's lake house, his apartment, and his office. His location data is bought, the unique locations used to ID him, and he's outed and resigns. The Punchline? it's legal
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With the help of
@sonyaellenmann
finally managed to get a write up of my talks on privacy theater and failures in blockchain privacy. Hopefully this will help others think through privacy in coins like Mimble-wimble.
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Hi, I'm Ian. I'll be reviewer
#2
on the inevitable rush of "privacy" "preserving" contact tracing papers that will either advance questionable notions of privacy, provide no useful functionality because they're too private, or only work for spherical cows in aerosol free vacuums
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The OTR paper was hugely influential. It popularized the importance of forward secrecy and deniability in encrypted messaging. Led to Signal, and its ideas are now deployed to 1 billion + people in Whats app. It was a workshop paper and only has 300 cites.
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Pentagon employees worry they will be forced to spy on American protestors. This is why we need encryption: to protect against government abuse. And it is no longer an abstract worry about some future government. Don't take my word for it, take the DIA's
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Yahoo stock finished up today due to synergies with Verizon's existing surveillance programs and anticipated cost savings
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Last 2 slides form my devcon talk. My research group's work. We're recruiting phd students.
zk-creds: use a real passport to prove you're over 18
Snarkblock. anon posts+blocking
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Reminder: Assange thought Bitcoin was anonymous.
Wikileaks still thinks it is
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Dear theoretical cryptographers: zk proofs are not ( meaningfully) a subset of MPC. Non interactive zk proofs let third parties verify something is true even after the fact. With MPC you're stuck trusting whoever participated. This is a huge difference in practice.
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My EthCC privacy panels reminded me of Zcash's legacy:
*Aleo via the zexe paper with me+
@matthew_d_green
*Aztec via
@rel_zeta_tech
, who started at Zcash, wrote Powers of Tau w/ me+
@ebfull
, then Plonk
*Penumbra via
@hdevalence
who had the cosmos+zcash idea at ZFND
*Nomada: ...
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@csoghoian
Telegram truly deserves the label "military grade":Overly complicated, unlikely to work, and over hyped.It's the F35 of chat apps
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How bad is Intel doing right now? Well even the conspiracy theorists don't think there's an Intel microchip in the covid vaccines.
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We need the NRA for encrypted messaging. No compromise absolutists who annoy everyone.
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Because the US gov banned Americans using tornadocash, I am unable to use it as part of a homework assignment in my class on Real World Security and Privacy. But now I have a new lecture topic.
@valkenburgh
, want to give a guest lecture?
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We live in a world where machine learning tracks your every move online to feed you ads, and billions of dollars are spent on algorithmic trading. Blockchains make this even easier. Almost all blockchain privacy tech isn't designed with this world in mind. It needs to be.
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Reminder: Confidential transactions are neither confidential nor transactions. CT is just a way to hide the value in a tx, it dosn't specify let alone hide who the TX is form or to. With CT, we'd know you paid for hand size enhancement surgery, just not how much.
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Confidential transactions(CT) hide the value of a payment, not where it came from or went. On it's own, it does almost nothing for fungibility, which is discrimination based on coin origin. CT is good for hiding how much or little of a cryptocurrency you have.
#PrivacyTheater
Fungibility is the only property of sound money that is missing from Bitcoin & Litecoin. Now that the scaling debate is behind us, the next battleground will be on fungibility and privacy.
I am now focused on making Litecoin more fungible by adding Confidential Transactions. 🚀
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If you saw all the build errors cryptographers ignore in latex, you'd never trust the software they write.
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Bitcoin, just like Venmo, exposes your payment history publicly. Unlike Venmo, there's no way to turn it off. If you think Coinbase, etc won't ask you to explain things based on your payment history, why did they buy Neutrino.
This is both hilarious, scary and the perfect example of why we need Bitcoin. Venmo worried about the word "Cuban".
h/t
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A genealogy of zero knowledge c/o Prof. Jens Groth. The guy you never heard of behind snarks and bullet proofs.
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OH: Have you considered the adversarial model in which Alice and Charlie just kill Bob and take his money?
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So Zoom:
1) Lied about end-to-end encryption🤔
2) Sent US traffic to Chinese servers that could spy on it😰
But that was an accident, they'd never succumb to Chinese gov pressure😌
3) Closed the account of US based dissident due to Chinese gov pressure.
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
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This is backwards. ZK L1's are easier to upgrade than L2s! For both L1s/L2s your VM/IR should be proof agnostic. Many zk l1s AND l2s fail here! But its doable for both. For an l2, you also need to get Eth to verify the new proof system. This has costs
I have a ton of respect for anyone working on ZK tech.
But I’m skeptical of ZK Alt-L1s for two reasons:
1) There’s a false belief that ZKPs are more efficient on ZK L1s than on Ethereum
2) They're effectively impossible to upgrade.
Why you should stick with Ethereum...
[1/n]
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OpenAI's plagiarism detector works 26% of the time and falsely accuses people 9% of the time.
Hot take: this is much worse than harm it tries to fix
ChatGPT has positive uses. This detector is good almost for only false accusations and people will use it in spite of the warnings
We’re developing a new tool to help distinguish between AI-written and human-written text. We’re releasing an initial version to collect feedback and hope to share improved methods in the future.
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A stable private payment method is a public good. Actual digital cash. Blockchains don't get usability+ stability on their own and stable coin issuers won't touch privacy because it's not worth the profit risks. We need a non profit private stable coin as a public good.
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Apples CSAM scanning proposal and anything like it is a literal cryptographic panopticon. The cryptography is used not to protect us but to ensure we never know when we are watched, what they are looking for, or if they find it.
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Introducing fuzzy message detection. Testing if a ciphertext is yours is a recurring problem in anonymous messaging and private cryptocurrencies. Existing approaches require you to fully trust a server or download all messages. We found a middle ground:
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The Dutch arrested a Tornado Cash developer. Tornado is a zero-knowledge proof based cryptocurrency mixer. There's no person running it, just people writing smart contract software using cryptography. What does the arrest mean? We need to wait for facts. .
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For 5 years, Zcash shielded adoption didn't happen. Why? Snarks were slow, but that changed. It was bad wallets. Private payments needed ECC's linux-only command line client. Thanks to
@zecwallet
(funded by
@ZcashFoundation
), and ECCs wallet SDK(2 years in the making), not anymore
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I've been trying to find a good icon for privacy. Found no good options so far, but a few some bad ones. With Brave's icon I don't know if I'm in a private tab, a 80s gym, or an ad for the Color Purple movie tie-in Kool aid flavor.
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Cryptographers: If Alice wants to get an anonymous payment, can we break the math?
FBI: Alice, please put the nuclear submarine plans on an SD card in a peanut butter sandwich and leave it in a park. We'll pay you 10k anonymously in Monero if you do.
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STOP talking shit about different coins
Bitcoin is ORIGINAL
GRIN/MW is REALLY INTERESTING
Monero is COMMUNITY DRIVEN
Dash
Zcash is ADVANCED
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There's some amazing work being done on ZKVMs. The hilarious thing is.... theres really nothing zk about them. Sure, they use zk proofs under the hood (for now), but they'll be used to compress computation that is public and make blockchains scale.
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The "alt" zk-L1 vs zk-L2 debate misses a key point: many zk l2s are an optimistic rollup with a zk proof attached; All state is public on chain. Re-execution is replaced with proof verification. In contrast,in private L2s or L1s, tx data is hidden with commitments and zk proofs.
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Game theoretic security is tricky. In cryptography, costs are asymmetric: a linear increase in security exponentially increases attacker computation costs. So uncertainty about an attacker's resources is cheap to hedge against. For game theoretic security, this isn't true.
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Twitters DMs are not encrypted end-to-end.
How many people would Elon need to fire to read someone's DMs?
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.
@lessig
's piece defending the Ito/MIT media lab/Epstein scandal is accidentally its best indictment. Lessig says publicly accepting money from evil people launders their reputation, but this was secret so it's fine. But it wasn't secret to the billionaires Epstein cared about
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Standalone network layer privacy for cryptocurrency is useless. No matter how good your network privacy is, cryptocurrencies are like Twitter for your bank account... every transaction leaks an amount, source and destination to everyone. Hiding your IP doesn't fix this.
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How orwellian is clearview's new face surveillance app? Well, when the police demo'd it to a journalist by running their face through it, Clearview called them to see if they were talking to the media.
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If you're trying to figure out which snark will win, don't. It's like arm vs. intel vs w/e 20 years ago. They all have different strengths and a bunch of marketing hype. It's unlikely there's one winner. These probably aren't even the final competitors; new ideas abound.
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Ethereum's scalability issues in one tweet: smart contracts are RAM model general computation. But Eth pays a O(log(n)) Merkle tree overhead for most reads/writes. Everything else is a secondary problem. Rollups avoid this by effectively batching writes to amortize the overhead
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Student: "How do you do x zk proof technique/"
Me: "Very carefully. I messed it up as a freshmen PhD student and someone invented five million dollars out of thin air"
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My blog post describing
@matthew_d_green
and I's new payment protocol, BOLT. aka fast off chain private payments.
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What blockchains run Hotstuff/DiemBFT/LibraBFT in production for PoS (i.e. permissionless chains) ?
gives a nice overview of the trade offs between Hotstuff and Tendermint in theory, but what about lessons from practice?
@ittaia
@stonecoldpat0
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Monero and Zcash both had an interesting privacy bug. TLDR: clients behave differently when they see a payment that belongs to them vs one that doesn't. Interestingly, Monero was effected despite splitting wallet code and node/networking code into different processes.
First we came for Zcash, then we broke Monero:
Joint work with
@florian_tramer
and
@danboneh
#not_so_anonymous
#cryptocurrency
#update_your_clients
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The reviewers said our paper(paraphrasing) was heavily based on snarks and so of limited practicality. Zexe was eventually published at IEEE S&P 2020. And my coauthor
@1HowardWu
turned it into a company, Aleo, that just raised $28m. So take that reviewer
#2
,
#2
', and
#2
''.
Today, the Aleo team is proud to announce our $28M raise from industry-leading investors to build the first platform for fully private and decentralized applications. We’re thrilled to work with our lead Series A investor
@a16z
and other first-class supporters.
Thread 👇(1/6)
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If you aren't a cryptographer and want to understand how zkSNARKs work, conceptually, the two best things to read are section 2 of the Pinocchio paper and this blog
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Soon: Iota announces it is suing the number 13 for breaking their signature scheme.
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The
@ZcashFoundation
is not yet hiring people to work on making cryptocurrency private and usable. But when it does, the pitch should be "Do you want to make sugar-water tokens for the rest of your life or help prevent the world from changing into a surveillance state"
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"Bitcoin may become the United States’ best option for fighting Chinese survelliance".... with even more surveillance. Seriously, this is insane. Bitcoin might become somewhat private (e.g. Lightning if it stays decentralized), but as is, it's Twitter for your bank account.
Bitcoin may become the United States’ best option for fighting Chinese survelliance.
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Them: Why would you want private money?
Me: Well suppose you bought something embarrassing like "ice cream"?
Them:..... but what's embarrassing about ice cream?
Me: Nothing, but you got birthday blast frozen dairy dessert topped with skittles
😋🍨 WHO WANTS ICE CREAM? 🍨😋
Help us celebrate
#Zcash
's birthday! Use the promo code from
@FlexaHQ
for $10 of $ZEC to spend at
@BaskinRobbins
.
#ZcashBirthdayParty
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Signal's MobileCoin integration is interesting for privacy coins. MobileCoin is designed around <5 second payments at all costs, which includes using SGX and being permissioned. Other coins may get there for less cost, but would need to focus on consensus instead of cryptography.
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