Hello Internet! You're at the one and only remaining blog of Thor Kamphefner, my posting destination for long-form cognitation, rendered approximately fit for public dissemination.
Give me Identity Categories or Give me Death
My interests, which are my preferred identity categories, include the set of all sets with particular emphasis on the union of the following: cryptography, mathematics, system programming, science fiction, economics, cogitation, community building, and naturally, armchair philosophizing.
Some posts I'm proud of include:
- a walkthrough of a Distributed Key Generation Scheme from the 1990s
- an experiment measuring my effectiveness as a programmer, varying implementation techniques
- my analysis of illusions around Human Rights, originally conceived as an essay for an undergraduate class
My attention points are currently directed at:
- A Zero Knowledge cryptography study group with the good Dr. Justin Thaler, which you can find through the zkHack discord server.
- The group has been awarded a grant by the Ethereum Foundation, and is soliciting funding via the Gitcoin Grant GR14 zk-side round
- Cowriting the ZK Mesh cryptography newsletter with Anna Rose of the Zero Knowledge Podcast, which I highly recommend as a source for independent technical discussion in the blockchain space.
- Cryptographic research and engineering at entropy, a trustless, chain-agnostic asset custodian.
Feel free to reach out and say hi on Twitter if you've half a mind to tell me what you think about my posts, or would even like to collab on a post in the ever-impending future.
Past attention points have accumulated to:
- Wrote a standard to enshrine NFT royalties for NEAR smart contracts, linkboop. Note to the uninitiated: NFT Royalties on Ethereum are a HUGE pain, and are mostly hacked around by centralized databases, which is a problematic solution for NFT creators who might like to have multiple marketplaces respect their Royalty settings.
- Paper: Combining GHOST and Casper - coauthored a mathematical security paper with my mentor Yan Zhang analyzing the security and liveness properties of the Ethereum 2.0 beacon chain consensus protocol (it secure, it synchronously live, it even plausibly asyncronously live!)