https://blog.zkdefi.org Trust systems, post-quantum substrate, occasional sci-fi. en Fri, 15 May 2026 14:19:20 +0000 https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/consensus-by-what-hasn-t-been-said-out-loud/ https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/consensus-by-what-hasn-t-been-said-out-loud/ Fri, 08 May 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A walking, breathing PoC of Mirco Richter's Crisis protocol — a DAG-based BFT consensus that achieves total order in fully open peer-to-peer networks by *deducing* votes from causal structure instead of sending them. Plus a SwiftUI visualizer that walks the protocol end-to-end in extreme slow motion, and an agent-coordination layer that lifts the same machinery from machines reaching agreement to AI agents reaching agreement. https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/a-monitor-only-research-scaffold-for-a-hashpower-buying-strategy/ https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/a-monitor-only-research-scaffold-for-a-hashpower-buying-strategy/ Sat, 25 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Tooling to study a "buy hashpower on Braiins, mine through OCEAN" strategy in monitor-only mode — recommendations, never orders. The whole point is the discipline of separating *deciding what the right trade is* from *placing it*. https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/modeling-absolute-temperature-from-powermetrics-in-a-tmux-split/ https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/modeling-absolute-temperature-from-powermetrics-in-a-tmux-split/ Wed, 22 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Apple Silicon doesn't expose junction temperatures to userspace. So model them. A tmux-based wall display that takes `powermetrics` output, runs a thermal model with tunable thetas and a clamshell factor, and shows estimated CPU/GPU temperatures alongside the raw power numbers. https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/one-command-to-herd-every-jupyterlab-on-the-laptop/ https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/one-command-to-herd-every-jupyterlab-on-the-laptop/ Thu, 16 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A cross-project Jupyter coordinator. `jupyter-hub status`, `ports`, `stop-all`, `orphans`, `which 8889`. The problem it solves is small. The reason it solves it well is that it treats your project layout as authoritative instead of asking you to remember which terminal owns which port. https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/six-notebooks-for-understanding-the-number-theoretic-transform/ https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/six-notebooks-for-understanding-the-number-theoretic-transform/ Thu, 16 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A local-first, notebook-first course on the Number Theoretic Transform, sized for the version of NTT that actually matters — the negacyclic, modulus-q, base-multiplication NTT inside Kyber. Lecture → Lab → Problems → Studio, six bundles, no IBM dependency. https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/an-apprenticeship-for-hardware-aware-quantum-circuit-design/ https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/an-apprenticeship-for-hardware-aware-quantum-circuit-design/ Wed, 15 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A local-first Qiskit learning platform that alternates between ideal mode (statevectors, clean circuits, conceptual clarity) and reality mode (transpilation, routing overhead, noisy simulation). The backward-designed target isn't "Qiskit literacy" — it's an independent hardware-aware quantum circuit designer. https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/an-overnight-loop-that-searches-for-magic-state-recipes/ https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/an-overnight-loop-that-searches-for-magic-state-recipes/ Sat, 04 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A Karpathy-style autoresearch ratchet that proposes, evaluates, and learns from magic-state preparation circuits on the [[4,2,2]] error-detecting code — wrapped in a teaching layer of twelve Jupyter notebooks that explain the same physics through four different pedagogical lenses. https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/a-publication-grade-monograph-generated-from-certificate-transparency/ https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/a-publication-grade-monograph-generated-from-certificate-transparency/ Sun, 29 Mar 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Pull every currently-valid leaf cert with matching SAN substrings out of the public CT logs; verify they're real leaves; assess intended usage via EKU/KeyUsage; scan their DNS names for effective CAA policy; emit a primary readable output as Markdown, LaTeX, and PDF. Made for the case where you want to *publish* the result. https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/a-local-first-refinery-for-the-corpus-you-ve-already-read/ https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/a-local-first-refinery-for-the-corpus-you-ve-already-read/ Fri, 13 Feb 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A macOS app for ingesting your corpus — papers, notebooks, archives, the stuff you've read once and need to find again — and exposing it through semantic search and a 3D concept visualization. Local-first. Nothing leaves the device. The model isn't "search engine"; it's "refinery." https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/a-puncturable-key-system-with-an-ios-emergency-puncture-companion/ https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/a-puncturable-key-system-with-an-ios-emergency-puncture-companion/ Fri, 13 Feb 2026 12:00:00 +0000 GGM-tree puncturable keys in Go. A macOS app/server manages derivation, provider issuance, asset encryption. A native iOS app exists for one purpose — remotely puncturing a provider when something has gone wrong. The asymmetry between primary and emergency surfaces is the point. https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/a-52-file-go-re-implementation-of-swiss-post-s-e-voting-protocol/ https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/a-52-file-go-re-implementation-of-swiss-post-s-e-voting-protocol/ Fri, 13 Feb 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A ground-up reimplementation of Switzerland's official internet voting cryptographic protocol as a single Go binary. The reference production system is 14 Java repositories, 500K+ lines of code, and requires 50 GB of RAM. This distills the cryptographic core into 52 files and 2 dependencies. https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/a-harness-for-letting-ai-agents-trade-against-the-future/ https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/a-harness-for-letting-ai-agents-trade-against-the-future/ Mon, 12 Jan 2026 12:00:00 +0000 Polymarket as a substrate for letting LLM-driven agents propose, defend, and rebalance positions on the future itself — a quiet sandbox for studying how machine reasoning behaves when it has skin in the game. https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/a-zero-knowledge-perpetual-dex-in-a-single-zkvm-proof/ https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/a-zero-knowledge-perpetual-dex-in-a-single-zkvm-proof/ Tue, 06 Jan 2026 12:00:00 +0000 A fully functional proof-of-concept for a perpetual futures DEX whose state transitions are verified by a zero-knowledge proof from the RISC Zero zkVM. The state machine — matching, funding rates, liquidations — runs off-chain. The proof reduces "I have to trust this exchange" to "I can verify a single SNARK." https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/a-scratch-notebook-for-thinking-about-pqc-acceleration/ https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/a-scratch-notebook-for-thinking-about-pqc-acceleration/ Tue, 09 Dec 2025 12:00:00 +0000 A small Jupyter-notebook scratchpad for working through where the bottlenecks actually live in Kyber and Dilithium implementations — not the published asymptotics, the real-world cycle counts on the hardware that's available now. https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/replicating-r1-zero-on-a-countdown-task/ https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/replicating-r1-zero-on-a-countdown-task/ Tue, 07 Jan 2025 12:00:00 +0000 A reinforcement-learning replication of the R1-Zero training recipe on a small countdown task — using the TinyZero pipeline as the substrate. The point isn't the result; it's the discipline of reproducing a published recipe from scratch on consumer hardware. https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/the-terraform-kubernetes-ansible-pki-acme-pipe-that-started-this-whole-thing/ https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/the-terraform-kubernetes-ansible-pki-acme-pipe-that-started-this-whole-thing/ Mon, 11 Oct 2021 12:00:00 +0000 The 2021 prototype that turned out to be the first draft of everything I've been doing with self-hosted infrastructure ever since — Terraform for the cloud, Kubernetes for the runtime, Ansible for the configuration, PKI for the trust, ACME for the cert lifecycle. Five letters, one pipe. https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/b9lab-exercise-1-with-the-lessons-it-actually-taught/ https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/b9lab-exercise-1-with-the-lessons-it-actually-taught/ Sun, 19 May 2019 12:00:00 +0000 A 5 KB Solidity exercise from B9Lab's Ethereum developer course. Not a notable artifact on its own. Worth a note because it's the first time I sat with a smart-contract language and felt the specific category of caution it demands. https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/nvidia-s-2017-ai-summer-school-in-the-form-of-preserved-notebooks/ https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/nvidia-s-2017-ai-summer-school-in-the-form-of-preserved-notebooks/ Fri, 22 Sep 2017 12:00:00 +0000 An archive of notebooks from NVIDIA's 2017 AI Summer School. Predates the current LLM-shaped attention economy by a decade. Worth keeping for what it shows about what people thought "AI" meant when transformers were a year old and 'attention' was the new mechanism nobody was sure about yet. https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/a-profile-page-at-github-io-kept-for-historical-reasons/ https://blog.zkdefi.org/posts/a-profile-page-at-github-io-kept-for-historical-reasons/ Tue, 19 Sep 2017 12:00:00 +0000 The default GitHub Pages profile site I set up in 2017. Modest, unmaintained, and exactly the kind of artifact that proves how long this account has been doing this kind of work. Not interesting on its own. Interesting as a date stamp.