Pardis retweeted
Yahoo!
This is an exciting day for me. After a long journey through blockchains, cryptography, and ZK rabbit holes, my new book, co-authored with @NathanOnCrypto, is finally out.
It's part history, part deep dive, part red pill, and it's about two of my favorite topics: blockchains and ZK.
This is a book for non-experts, written in plain language, zero complicated jargon.
And now it's finally published!
Grab a copy for yourself or send one to a friend, and start the journey 👇
Pardis retweeted
Goodbye, Poseidon!
An epic 8-year, 8-figure rabbit hole in post-quantum cryptography reaches its dream conclusion. The Ethereum Foundation is abandoning Poseidon for L1, pivoting to SHA or BLAKE. This milestone unlocks ultimate security for lean Ethereum and foreshadows a golden era of hash-based cryptography.
Since 2018, the Ethereum Foundation has invested in magic cryptographic bricks, so-called "SNARK-friendly hashes". In 2019, Poseidon was born. It held strong and became the dominant SNARK-friendly hash, securing billions via zkrollups and zkVMs.
In a stunning reversal, breakthrough SNARK designs show that SNARK-friendly hashes aren't necessary after all. Off-the-shelf traditional hash functions like SHA2 and BLAKE2s can now match Poseidon in a SNARK. In hindsight the key was not SNARK-friendly hashes, but hash-friendly SNARKs.
The secret is doing maths over the smallest prime number: 2. So-called "binary fields" natively speak the language of bits, aligning with the boolean operations inside traditional hashes. This is a stark departure from "prime fields", where awkward large-prime arithmetic makes bit manipulation painfully expensive.
We're talking sci-fi cryptography. 1M traditional hash calls proven per second, on a laptop. Just 100x overhead vs native CPU boolean compute. Nobody predicted such performance, not even the handful of binary-field visionaries. Hat tip to the research geniuses: Jim and Ben with Binius in 2023; Ron, Benedikt and William with Flock in June.
With SHA2, the lean aesthetic of minimal assumptions reaches its climax. The EF's principled stance on pure hash-based cryptography has aged like fine wine. We now enjoy foundations the world can trust for decades and centuries, foundations worthy of the dream of an internet of value.
Speed of deployment is a secondary win. There's no longer a need to wait years for Poseidon cryptanalysis to bake. Emile and Thomas from the EF post-quantum team are moving at breakneck speed with binary fields. The strawmap now points to a production-grade leanVM in 2027, with CL, DL, EL deployments in 2028.
As AI becomes exceptional at cryptanalysis, the contrarian bet to avoid riskier structures like lattices and isogenies is visibly paying off. The past weeks have been brutal. Lattice-based "HAWK" and isogeny-based "SQIsign", both signature schemes in NIST's Round 3, have suffered blows. Sources I trust say more blood is coming.
On AI, the open autoresearch trend kicked off by ECDSA[.]fail is spreading fast, with amazing outcomes from zk[.]golf and SNARK[.]fast. Days ago SNARK[.]fast crossed 1.8M BLAKE3/sec proven on an M3 Max. Stay tuned for fresh autoresearch challenges dropping tomorrow.
Also tomorrow: Ethproofs call #10, dedicated to binary fields. Possibly the most noteworthy Ethproofs call yet. Experts leading the charge will present the future of hash-based SNARKs at 2pm UTC. What an incredible time to be alive. To witness history, DM me for a calendar invite :)
Today I can confidently claim that hash-based cryptography has won out for blockchain post-quantum signatures. SNARK succinctness compresses arbitrarily many signatures into one small proof per block. SNARK flexibility yields k-of-n threshold signatures, complex multisigs, and more.
Ultimate security. Uncompromising performance. Full programmability.
Believe in something. Believe in hashes.
Pardis retweeted
> Sounds a lil bit anti-islam but hey
Fuck statements like this.
Similarly, fuck claiming that standing up for Gazans', West Bankers, Lebanese, Syrian people's right to live in peace and not get encroaching settlements, constant drone strikes and bombs is antisemitic.
And fuck claiming that standing up for Ukrainian people's right to live in peace and not be invaded is Russophobic.
And fuck not even noticing the needless and extreme manmade suffering in Sudan, Myanmar, North Korea and elsewhere.
And fuck the possibility that in the future statements like this will have to include a line for Greenland.
We stand for human dignity. That is the bottom line. You can disagree on details of individual situations and what specific actions hurt or help, but the bottom line in resolving such issues must be a common agreement that the underlying goal is to protect the dignity of all people. This is more important than political teams.
There are also people who are on the same political team as you, but whose words and actions clearly demonstrate that they are not interested in human dignity - genuine *phobes who use appeals to freedom and life opportunistically. This must also be opposed. Again, the north star is human dignity. To be ultimately more interested not in pushing the people you oppose down, but in lifting the people you feel sympathy for up. If you observe the long-term pattern of how someone acts, you can tell.
Pardis retweeted
⚠️ Update: #Iran has now been offline for 120 hours.
Despite some phone calls now connecting, there is no secure way to communicate and the general public remain cut off from the outside world.
What footage makes it through shows extensive use of force against civilians 📵
Pardis retweeted
⚠️ Update: It has been 108 hours since #Iran introduced a nationwide internet shutdown leaving Iranians isolated from the rest of the world and each other 📉
The rights to free speech and free assembly are inviolable and must be protected #DigitalBlackoutIran
Pardis retweeted
“Virgin female prisoners should be raped before execution so that they do not go to heaven.”
-Ayatollah Khomeini
(founding leader of the Islamic regime in Iran).
Just a reminder that this is the evil that Iranians are fighting.
Pardis retweeted
⚠️ Update: #Iran's internet blackout is now past the 60 hour mark as national connectivity levels continue to flatline around 1% of ordinary levels.
The censorship measure presents a direct threat to the safety and wellbeing of Iranians at a key moment for the country's future.
Pardis retweeted
Incendia private Auction demo with @ZKPassport registration Demo 🔥
Pardis retweeted
Ethereum’s next major upgrade, “Fusaka”, goes live in less than 48 hours.
I read all 13 EIPs being included so you don’t have to.
So, here are 13 tweets (with diagrams) to explain the 13 upgrades in simple terms: 🧵
Pardis retweeted
Have a look at a first iteration of our private Safe wallet POC - powered by the Bermuda SDK!
The demo contains 3 steps:
1. Shield assets
2. Shielded asset transfer
3. Unshield assets
Expect ZK proving improvements, even better UX, and a testnet deployment in the coming weeks!
@safe @ethereumfndn @gnosis_ @VitalikButerin