Mapping Ring Signatures and Stealth Addresses in Monero

Monero employs many techniques to enhance the cryptocurrency users privacy. In this article, I take a look at two of these, Ring Signatures for sender anonymity, and Stealth Addresses for receiver anonymity.

Merkle Trees: Concepts and Use Cases

ms including Bitcoin, Amazon’s Dynamo DB, and the ZFS filesystem. The basic concept is quite simple, but some of the clever applications are not so obvious.

Zero Knowledge Proofs: Example with Pedersen Commitments in Monero

An Explanation Between Cartoons and Greek Symbols If you spend a bit more time reading about cryptocurrencies, blockchains, or many other related technologies, you likely run into the term zero knowledge proofs (ZKP). To me, the term sounds like a paradox. How can you prove anything with zero knowledge? How do you event know what to […]

PoW vs PoS. Whut?

Recently I have tried to understand blockchains and how they actually work. It seems the internet is full of high-level descriptions that always stop before actually explaining how the different blockchain variants really work. What is proof-of-work in practice, and what does proof-of-stake actually mean? What actually happens when you deploy a blockchain node in […]

Porting Naivecoin tutorial to Golang (first parts)

Recently I got interested in blockchains, and how do they work in practice. Found a nice tutorial called Naivecoin: a tutorial for building a cryptocurrency. There is also a nice book on the topic called Mastering Bitcoin: Programming the Open Blockchain. Had to get that too, didn’t I. So to get a better understanding of […]

Trying to learn ECDSA and GoLang

Recently I have been looking at the Naivecoin tutorial, and trying to implement it in Go to get an idea of how blockchains really work, and to learn some more Go as well. The tutorial code is in Javascript, and translating it to Go has been mostly straightforward. However, porting the third part with transactions […]