Vitalik Buterin
Hacker Noon
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Past articles by Vitalik:
The Most Important Scarce Resource in Blockchain: Legitimacy
To understand the workings of legitimacy, we need to dig down into some game theory. → Read More
How Are zk-SNARKs Possible?
Perhaps the most powerful cryptographic technology to come out of the last decade is general-purpose succinct zero knowledge proofs, usually called zk-SNARKs. → Read More
What is a Social Recovery Wallet?
How do we prevent users' funds from being lost or stolen? → Read More
How Should We Re-Evaluate Our Models of the World?
On the internet, "public goods" take center stage. → Read More
Is Your Perspective Convex or Concave?
How people approach the age-old tradeoff of compromise versus purity in making large-scale decisions. → Read More
What is So Great About Proof-of-Stake?
Attacks are much easier to recover from in Proof-of-Stake. → Read More
Can Humans Win at Progress With Coordination?
If you have improved the coordination in an unbalanced way, the results can be harmful! → Read More
Do 'Trust Models' Deserve Their Title?
When someone says that a system "depends on trust", ask them in more detail what they mean! → Read More
An In-Depth Look at Blockchain Validation
One of the most powerful properties of a blockchain is the fact that every single part of the blockchain's execution can be independently validated. → Read More
Reviewing the Gitcoin Grants Round 6
Round 6 of Gitcoin Grants has finished, with $227,847 in contributions from 1,526 contributors and $175,000 in matched funds distributed across 695 projects. → Read More
Introduction to Fully Homomorphic Encryption
Exploring fully homomorphic encryption which, for a long time been considered one of the holy grails of cryptography. → Read More
Reviewing the Gitcoin Grants Round 5
Round 5 of Gitcoin Grants has finished, with $250,000 of matching split between tech, media, and the new (non-Ethereum-centric) category of "public health" → Read More
Garbled Circuits: Basic Scheme and Applications
Garbled circuits are a quite old, and surprisingly simple, cryptographic primitive and simplest form of general-purpose MPC to wrap your head around. → Read More
Is There Truth to “Keep Layer 1 Simple, Make Up for It on Layer 2”?
One common strand of thinking in blockchain land goes as follows: blockchains should be maximally simple, because they are a piece of infrastructure that is difficult to change and would lead to great harms if it breaks, and more complex functionality should be built on top, in the form of layer 2 protocols: state channels, Plasma, rollup, and so forth. Layer 2 should be the site of ongoing… → Read More
Christmas Special: Games That Will Help You Understand Complex Math Concepts
Games like chess and tic-tac-toe are games that have been with us for centuries and many people find them boring. What happens if they get really complicated? → Read More
Decentralized Governance: On Quadratic Payments
If you follow applied mechanism design or decentralized governance at all, you may have recently heard of quadratic voting and quadratic funding. → Read More
What Are the Most Challenging Problems Cryptocurrencies Are Facing
Cryptocurrencies have come a long way but there are still several legitimate problems that need to be addressed before the system can reach wider adoption. → Read More
How we can Better Understand PLONK
Permutations over Lagrange-bases for Oecumenical Noninteractive arguments of Knowledge, or PLONKS are a new general-purpose zer-knowledge proof scheme. → Read More
Fast Fourier Transform: Scaling Multi-Point Evaluation
Fast Fourier Transforms are a key part of algorithms thanks to their ability to multiply large numbers quickly. They have been used in blockchain in a few ways. → Read More
Proving Unconditional Possession of a Private Key: A Short Story
Cryptographic key management is an effective way of minimising ways that the security of a blockchain may be compromised when humans begin interacting with it. → Read More