David Wong

cryptologie.net

cryptography, security, and random thoughts

Hey! I'm David, cofounder of zkSecurity, research advisor at Archetype, and author of the Real-World Cryptography book. I was previously a cryptography architect of Mina at O(1) Labs, the security lead for Libra/Diem at Facebook, and a security engineer at the Cryptography Services of NCC Group. Welcome to my blog about cryptography, security, and other related topics.

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I'm launching a podcast: Two And A Half Coins

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It’s been forever since I’ve been thinking of doing a podcast. Today I decided screw it, I’ll do it live.

From the description:

This series focuses on teaching you about cryptocurrencies from the very start! We’ll start with databases, banks, distributed systems, and we will then go further with Bitcoin, Ethereum, Mina, and other cryptocurrencies that are making the world advance today.

Listen to it here or on your favorite platform:

Or just listen to it here:

Cryptocurrencies from scratch: databases, the banking world, and distributed systems

This is the first episode of a series on cryptocurrencies. In this series I will tell you about cryptocurrencies from scratch. This first episode is quite non-technical and should be easy to understand for most folks. I will explain what databases are, how banks around the world move money around, and what cryptocurrencies fundamentally offer.

Bitcoin from scratch: The Bitcoin client, public keys and signatures, and the miners

In the previous episode we briefly talked about what cryptocurrencies fundamentally are, and what problems they attempt to solve. In this episode we’ll dig int our very first cryptocurrency: Bitcoin. This will be a high-level overview that will cover what the software looks like, what cryptographic signatures are, and who are these miners who process transactions.

More on Bitcoin: How does mining work? What are hash functions? And what is Proof of Work?

In this third episode we’ll dig more into the tech of Bitcoin. But for that, we’ll need to talk briefly about cryptographic hash functions and how they work. Once done, we’ll talk about mining, proof of work, chains of blocks, and mining pools!

← back to all posts blog • 2022-08-31
currently reading:
I'm launching a podcast: Two And A Half Coins
08-31 blog
📖 my book
Real-World Cryptography is available from Manning Publications.
A practical guide to applied cryptography for developers and security professionals.
🎙️ my podcast
Two And A Half Coins on Spotify.
Discussing cryptocurrencies, databases, banking, and distributed systems.
📺 my youtube
Cryptography videos on YouTube.
Video explanations of cryptographic concepts and security topics.