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Experienced executive, but engineer at heart. Cryptographer. #cplusplus wizard. Shaved head aficionado.
JaQie Space Force Profile picture 1 subscribed
Dec 20, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
The information in this breach will not directly compromise your Ledger device, but it will be used (in fact, it’s already being used!) in social engineering attacks.

Here are some tips to protect yourself: 1) Personal information about you, including the fact that you have digital assets and that you use a particular hardware wallet is now public.

Attackers will use that information to target you. Expect emails, phone calls, snail mail and even packages to come your way.
Nov 27, 2020 • 11 tweets • 5 min read
@ipinky77 Validators will typically have two sets of keys: a long-term key (the “master” key) which is not needed on a day-to-day basis, and an “ephemeral” key which the validator needs to operate.

Both are important and should be kept secure, but the master key is the higher-value key. @ipinky77 The master private key should be secured like all high-value keying material; books could be written on the subject, but generally I’d recommend storing at least two encrypted copies, on separate USB sticks that are kept at a secure location.
Nov 25, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The XRP Ledger doesn’t use proof of stake, so this is not directly applicable to @bascule’s question, but it’s an important topic.

During the AWS US-EAST-1 outage, the XRP Ledger continued operating, closing ledgers approximately every 4 seconds. The AWS outage had no impact. That’s great and highlights how resilient the XRP Ledger is, there are lessons to be learned from this latest AWS outage.

Most important is avoiding accidental “centralization” by making sure that the infrastructure underlying the XRP Ledger is not reliant on any one entity.
Oct 30, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
I generally see little point in engaging with people who are so biased that they will unashamedly lie despite the fact that their lie is more transparent than low-iron glass.

A thread… Ryan’s statement that you need a “server farm to audit the XRP blockchain” is such a blatant lie.

The reference implementation of the protocol doesn’t require much in the way of resources to run: I was running a server on a seven year old ultrabook until late last year.
Jan 7, 2020 • 13 tweets • 5 min read
@QasamWahid Oops, I guess it can be a bit alien. Let's have a thread about cryptographic hash functions and why this result is important from a cryptographic standpoint! @QasamWahid First, what is a cryptographic hash function? The best way to think of it is as a compression algorithm, designed to compress inputs of arbitrarily large size down to some small, fixed size.
Sep 22, 2019 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
1/ It’s Saturday night. I’m a cryptographer. Let’s have a chat about quantum computers and crypto.

Google didn’t just achieve quantum computing and even if they advanced the state of the art, I very much doubt that Google has achieved “quantum supremacy” in a meaningful way. 2/ With that said, even if you do get quantum computers, to say that “no code is uncrackable” is simply not true.

Yes, of the crypto algorithms we use can be attacked once general purpose quantum computers with a sufficient number of qubits are available.
Jan 29, 2019 • 11 tweets • 10 min read
@AnselLindner (1/11) Hi! I'm Nik, an engineering manager at Ripple. I've been working on XRP Ledger going on 6 years and, along with my teammates, I've contribute to the XRP Ledger codebase. Let's address your tweet point by point.

Ready?
Set.
Go! @AnselLindner (2/11) Academic research is an interesting topic. We've published several papers which describe the algorithm we use, and provide a mathematic framework to analyze it. We welcome academic review. @XRPTrump already linked one of them.