Learning

BLS12-381: One Curve for Consensus and Privacy ⚠️ Disclaimer: I’m learning math behind modern validator engines. Math shared here has been copied from the respective sources, and it takes an Eon to truly grok it. BLS12-381 is a pairing-friendly elliptic curve. It appears in Eth2 validator signatures, Filecoin storage proofs, Zcash shielded transactions, and - closer to the subject of this essay - in Commonware’s cryptographic toolkit for BFT consensus. The same algebraic structure that makes BLS threshold signatures possible also underpins several families of zero-knowledge proofs. ...

The Trap of Convenience March 2023. GPT-4 launched, and like many developers, I saw the potential immediately. Not the hype - the actual utility. I’d been writing Go for over a decade. Built distributed systems, debugged production nightmares, made every mistake worth making. I knew what good code looked like. But GPT was convenient. Why spend 20 minutes reading documentation when I could get an answer in 30 seconds? Why think through edge cases when AI could generate them? Why architect when I could prompt? ...