About Me

Hey there, I'm Red. I write code and research in the crypto space. At the core of nearly all that I do are
1. my passion for education and
2. my fascination with complexity theory (i.e., puzzles).


Crypto[graphy/currency] has the same appeal to me as sudoku/chess; it's all about puzzles. Cryptography is one of the rare phenomena of our universe in which breaking things is harder than building them. Nearly everything that we as humans build can be broken with considerably less effort than it took to build it; this is the endless battle against entropy: the final boss of life.

Thanks to complexity theory, cryptography is inherently defensive. Defending, i.e., building secure systems, can be exponentially cheaper than attacking - a rarity. This asymmetry may only be due to our (the human race's) ignorance to the right algorithms, but until we can prove P=NP, it remains a powerful tool. As a defensive piece of technology, it naturally favors the individual (it's not an economy of scale). Cryptography is a friend to freedom and a tool against tyranny. These properties are, in many cases, inherited by cryptocurrency.

Crypto is a substrate for rapid iteration over social coordination systems such as finance/economics, voting, resource allocation (e.g., taxes), conflict resolution, and more. The sandbox that is crypto is enabling a renaissance of governance, allowing people to test new systems at scale, such as Harberger tax and quadratic voting, that have been otherwise confined to theory/academia for decades. Social coordination is the core value prop of crypto.