Today, I dove somewhat deep into Rust’s Serde framework, which is the canonical ecosystem of libraries developers use to (1) serialize things, i.e. turn in-memory Rust objects into bytes which can be sent over the Internet or stored on disk and (2) deserialize data, i.e. take those bytes stored on disk or received over the Internet and turn them back into in-memory Rust objects. It was very demystifying to peek into the machinery powering such a widely-used library, though there are many parts that will need to be grokked in further explorations.

I will go into it when my own understanding is deeper.

Other than that, it’s been good for me to stay off of crypto Twitter. There are a million things happening at a rapid pace, which is a good thing for the ecosystem as a whole, but the most important thing for me right now is to hunker down and learn as much as I can without getting distracted. That pathway is Rust, number theory, cryptography, and eventually building my own dApp on Ethereum or Solana.

Oh, and I mention cryptography because I got a new copy of my junior year’s Intro to Cryptography textbook, Introduction to Modern Cryptography by Katz and Lindell. Now on its 3rd edition, of all things. Back in college we used the 2nd edition, but this new one was published literally this year—2021. I’d hypothesize the rising tide of Web3 and blockchains has caused a tectonic shift in the level of interest, money, and talent flowing into the field, and that may be why we’ve been blessed by a brand-new edition of this incredible textbook.

This time around, I’m actually patient and disciplined enough (and perhaps intrinsically more motivated by pure curiosity instead of grades or peer approval) to work through the examples and acquire an intuitive grasp of the material. Age does have its perks.

Taking a step back: I have never learned so much at so fast a pace as the past two weeks. I find myself sitting at my desk hours past when I told myself I’d step out for a break, whereas before I’d be counting down the minutes until my pomodoro timer told me 25 minutes of heads-down work was up. Instagram, video games, going out—these have faded into gray.

Today I listened to some podcasts involving Chris Dixon and Vitalik. One topic of discussion was governance.

Before I Google anything, let me think through crypto governance.

How does it work? There are a bunch of token holders, and there is some mechanism by which proposals are introduced and votes are cast. A proposal wins. But then how does it get carried out? Say the proposal is to airdrop all ENS domain holders an additional 50-100 ENS (I would love that, by the way, since I did not get any ENS, having signed on a few days late) based on their participation due to a perceived bug in the calculations for the original airdrop. Some centralized authority still has to carry that out, no? Unless the proposal itself comes with some contract that is merged in automatically once it has majority approval that distributes this airdrop. Perhaps that is actually what happens.

Anyways, that’s enough for today. Played some wolf.game. Feels like gambling. Also bought a Vogu NFT. Let’s get it.

Today, I dove somewhat deep into Rust’s Serde framework, which is the canonical ecosystem of libraries developers use to (1) serialize things, i.e. turn in-memory Rust objects into bytes which can be sent over the Internet or stored on disk and (2) deserialize data, i.e. take those bytes stored on disk or received over the Internet and turn them back into in-memory Rust objects. It was very demystifying to peek into the machinery powering such a widely-used library, though there are many parts that will need to be grokked in further explorations.

I will go into it when my own understanding is deeper.

Other than that, it’s been good for me to stay off of crypto Twitter. There are a million things happening at a rapid pace, which is a good thing for the ecosystem as a whole, but the most important thing for me right now is to hunker down and learn as much as I can without getting distracted. That pathway is Rust, number theory, cryptography, and eventually building my own dApp on Ethereum or Solana.

Oh, and I mention cryptography because I got a new copy of my junior year’s Intro to Cryptography textbook, Introduction to Modern Cryptography by Katz and Lindell. Now on its 3rd edition, of all things. Back in college we used the 2nd edition, but this new one was published literally this year—2021. I’d hypothesize the rising tide of Web3 and blockchains has caused a tectonic shift in the level of interest, money, and talent flowing into the field, and that may be why we’ve been blessed by a brand-new edition of this incredible textbook.

This time around, I’m actually patient and disciplined enough (and perhaps intrinsically more motivated by pure curiosity instead of grades or peer approval) to work through the examples and acquire an intuitive grasp of the material. Age does have its perks.

Taking a step back: I have never learned so much at so fast a pace as the past two weeks. I find myself sitting at my desk hours past when I told myself I’d step out for a break, whereas before I’d be counting down the minutes until my pomodoro timer told me 25 minutes of heads-down work was up. Instagram, video games, going out—these have faded into gray.

Today I listened to some podcasts involving Chris Dixon and Vitalik. One topic of discussion was governance.

Before I Google anything, let me think through crypto governance.

How does it work? There are a bunch of token holders, and there is some mechanism by which proposals are introduced and votes are cast. A proposal wins. But then how does it get carried out? Say the proposal is to airdrop all ENS domain holders an additional 50-100 ENS (I would love that, by the way, since I did not get any ENS, having signed on a few days late) based on their participation due to a perceived bug in the calculations for the original airdrop. Some centralized authority still has to carry that out, no? Unless the proposal itself comes with some contract that is merged in automatically once it has majority approval that distributes this airdrop. Perhaps that is actually what happens.

Anyways, that’s enough for today. Played some wolf.game. Feels like gambling. Also bought a Vogu NFT. Let’s get it.