Deep Future

Implementing Science Fiction

Cryptography

Risc0

civ·i·li·za·tion – the stage of human social and cultural development and organization that is considered most advanced

Creating better ways for humans to organize themselves, to cooperate and work together in new ways make it possible to become more “civil.”

One pillar of my own personal philosophy came from the Cypherpunks in the 1990s, the insight that we could use cryptography to create technologies that offer a level playing field, to preserve freedom. The most important & ambitious goal of all is to create a decentralized computing platform, accessible to everyone. To make that possible, we needed a way to transact, to reward people for contributing resources to the system – hence Bitcoin. The noise and hype around cryptocurrency since has obfuscated the north star. Cryptocurrency is a milestone, not a destination. We’re not just going to the moon, we’re going to the stars.

Decentralized computing must solve for these important attributes

  1. Decentralized – No central point of control, anywhere.
  2. Scalable – Linear growth with low latency, low cost, low energy.
  3. Secure – Bitcoin is the benchmark to meet or beat.
  4. Private – Private by default.
  5. Programmable – Support modern programming languages.
  6. Accessible – Any modern computer can participate without permission from any authorities.

Bitcoin solves 1, 3 & 6.
Etherium solves 1, 3, 5 & 6 (but now compromising on 3).
Cardano, Solana, Algorand, etc. are attempts to solve 2 by compromising on 1 &/or 3.

Risc0 is a zero compromise blockchain that solves 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6. It addresses the systemic issues of current systems without tradeoffs.
I’ve known this team for over 20 years as they’ve worked on cryptographic protocols. They built & exited three companies together. Their new zero-knowledge powered blockchain is the first thing I’ve gotten excited about in crypto since beta testing Bitcoin and I’m proud to be among their investors.

Unboxing the Crypto Toolkit – Ben Laurie

Hey guys, today we get to hang out with Ben Laurie who is one of my all time favorite geeks. You’re running code right now that Ben wrote. He built ApacheSSL, which is probably like half of the web servers on the internet that are secure running that code. He maintains OpenSSL, which is in everything else.

Ben is one of the few folks who’s a true coder and cryptographer. And there are very few people who really understand both sides of that and what it really means to write secure code and how hard that is. So if you’re interested in hacking, if you’re interested in computer security, if you’re just a coder of any description this episode is absolutely for you.

Beyond that, our conversation goes deep into the philosophy behind cryptocurrency. Ben has pretty counter views on Bitcoin to all the currency speculators out there. There are super interesting to hear. And if you want to learn about how to think about the crypto toolkit and what’s possible there I highly recommend spending time listening to this episode.

I couldn’t be more proud of the chance that I had to pick Ben’s brain for a couple of hours. I’ve known Ben for 20 years. He’s a member of the Shmoo Group, which is nonprofit think tank for computer hackers. He also is on the board of the Apache foundation. He’s a principal engineer at Google and was at DeepMind for awhile as well. Ben developed a program at Google for certificate transparency, which is a really important way of understanding what’s possible using the crypto toolkit to change the way that we provide accountability around data and how it’s handled.

I think you’re going to learn a lot. I really hope you enjoy this and definitely reach out with questions for me and for Ben and I’ll try to get to them next time we chat.

Deep Future
Deep Future
Unboxing the Crypto Toolkit – Ben Laurie
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