Surprisingly, an LLM does better here. Even Hauki does the right thing (though on low, it messes up letting me download it)

Relevant XKCD strikes again, this time for real. A certificate authority actually generated private keys where 4 was part of the key.

"Computers now constitute or will soon constitute adangerous threat to individual privacy " Some of the first notions of cryptography, privacy , and computers came from someone at .... fucking IBM. Yes, this the Feistel of Feistel network fame. These guys were not just in it for the math. (from Steven Levy's Crypto, written in january 2001 when Crypto meant Cryptography)

I have. Interesting to look at it now with it being somewhat clear we have too many sensationalist "cryptography broken" claims.

Trying to get the menu for a brewery and now I have to dox myself...

Something is a little surprising with the papers results. We'd expert diversion to be large amounts by corrupt insiders, which seems unlikely to show up as a spike in transaction volume a month later. And apparently they don't have geolocation data for transactions, they used web traffic by country as a proxy.

Again, I want to emphasize, the socio-political constraints in Bitcoin are not invented by the authors of Shielded Bitcoin, and they are what lead to the complex design and its downsides. It looks like it’s the best you can do under the circumstances if you want to keep Bitcoin as is. It’s impressive in that sense. I'd say it’s the idea I would have come up with too given these (absurd) constraints, but the truth is I'd have given up and found some folks to make their own blockchain.

Why does adding private payments to Bitcoin seemingly require witness encryption, the cryptographic equivalent of a jetpack? Why is that awesome, impressive, and a bad idea? And how do you make a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Zcash private in the first place? To answer that, we need to cover 1) why Bitcoin is public, 2) how you fix that, 3) the socio-political complications using that solution in Bitcoin, and 4) the cryptographic jetpack workaround.

My grad students and I are looking at zk proofs for human-generated content, and we keep wondering how often folks nominally want authentic content but mainly want to believe things they like For example: a dude with a $900/year AMEX card asking if he's the asshole for not letting his GF use their free dining credit on a steak.

Here, let me visualize it. There are two ways to add shielded transactions to Bitcoin. And yes, witness encryption and jet packs are awesome. This is a fun design, but you shouldn't require these gymnastics to deploy privacy in Bitcoin.

In a few months we will have: "Muse: Hey girl, I know you still think about him, want to see where he's been?" And guides like we got with Venmo:

Trying to read part of the dream of 80s cryptography in the reality of 2026.

Conflating shoplifting, digital piracy, and fair evasion is .... an interesting editorial choice.

So what originally got me thinking of DSA as mangled Schnorr (beyond the obvious patent avoidance issue), was a version of ECDSA someone put up at RWC 2016. Its a little hard to read, so I just asked Gemini for a cleanup version with Schnorr and Elgamal next to it. Its not a perfect fit. But its kinda interesting.