Coldcard Rewrote Its Seed Code to Escape the GPL. Users Paid the Price.
Coldcard rewrote shared GPL seed code while restricting competition; the replacement failed catastrophically, proving source visibility falls short of software freedom.
Articles tagged: cryptography
Two Roads to a Network Without Permission: Reticulum and FIPS
Reticulum and FIPS both build permissionless encrypted meshes, but they differ radically in routing, crypto primitives, and their relationship to IP.
Inside Marmot: Six Specs That Make Private Group Messaging Work
Six protocol specs define how the Marmot Protocol delivers fully encrypted group messaging on Nostr without centralized servers or metadata leaks.
The Problem They Said Could Not Be Solved
The builders of the best encrypted messengers declared decentralized group encryption impossible. The Marmot protocol proved them wrong.
Your Nostr Key Is Your Network Address
FIPS makes your Nostr npub a routable network address, unifying identity across social and infrastructure layers in a single self-sovereign keypair.
Verify Anyone on Any Channel
A simple challenge-response app can verify Nostr identities across any anonymous channel by querying the follow graph users already built.
The Mathematics That Bridges Bitcoin: From BitVM to Argo
Cryptographic enforcement succeeds where trust fails, and nowhere does this principle matter more than in Bitcoin's quest for trustless bridges.
The Cypher Wars: Choose Your Weapon Wisely
Use ChaCha20-Poly1305 everywhere without hardware AES. Use AES-256-GCM with AES-NI. Never reuse nonces. Prefer AEAD always.
Nostr-Native Distributed Storage System
The latest iteration of Garland, a privacy-preserving distributed storage system built on Nostr and Blossom, using erasure coding for durability and single-key recovery.
Private Relay Connections: Zero-Knowledge Solutions for Nostr
Nostr relays see everything - who connects, what they fetch, how often they post. Zero-knowledge cryptography can fix all three problems: Semaphore-based authentication hides which whitelisted user is connecting, private information retrieval hides which notes you're fetching, and Privacy Pass enables rate limiting without identity linkage.
Owned by No One: Solving Nostr's Key Rotation Problem
Nostr's greatest strength - that you own your identity through cryptographic keys - becomes its greatest weakness when keys are lost or stolen. This post introduces two simple, social solutions that let users mark compromised keys and rotate to new ones through community verification, without complex cryptography or pre-planning.