- Blockchain onboarding matrix - some notable bridges, wallets, apps, etc for each blockchain
- Awesome cryptography papers
- a curated list of papers on various cryptographic techniques
- Cryptographic hash function
- the mechanism behind generating a hash
- Digital signature
- how signing works. key ideas: asymmetric (public key) cryptography, hard to compute but easy to verify.
- Merkle tree
- important data structure optimizing the storage of hashes in a blockchain
- Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (Castro and Liskov, 1999)
- a seminal algorithm for state machine replication / transaction ordering in a distributed system with up to 1/3 malicious nodes
- Distributed Systems
- excellent 101-level lecture notes. presumes some comfort with math notation, particularly predicate logic. distributed systems concepts can help answer questions like "why is Solana's "Proof of History" an innovation?"
- CAP Theorem
- fundamental trade-off between staying consistent vs. staying available when there's a network partition, i.e. nodes can't communicate
- FLP Result
- why distributed consensus is not guaranteed when a node goes down. in practice, this is solved by relaxing the constraints of their model
- Proof of useful work
- using collective computing power to search for prime number chains. an academic application but interesting concept
- HotStuff BFT
- an iteration on PBFT attempting to optimize for variable network delays
- P vs. NP -
deep theoretical question on the very nature of computation: whether easy to verify implies (
=>) easy to solve - Elliptic curve cryptography - in-depth blog post with plenty of diagrams on how elliptic curve cryptography works