Here you'll find an assorted mix of content from yours truly. I post about a lot
of things, but primarily
26 Nov 2015
I designed a mechanism that allows for probabilistic payments in Bitcoin.
The foundation of the mechanism is sane, where it veers out of “sanity” is in
the attempts to get it to work well off-chain.
I originally wrote this paper on November 26th, 2015, and circulated it among a
few colleagues. I think this is the first use case of OP_SIZE to implement XOR
fair coin flipping, although Secure Multiparty Computations on
Bitcoin
has similar elements and it was discussed on IRC in #bitcoin-wizards that
OP_SIZE might enable probabilistic payments, but not specifically.
I am first posting it on my website as of March 11th, 2017.
full text here
Part One
11 Sep 2015
I’m honored to be serving as Program Chair for the first ever Scaling Bitcoin in Montreal.
More Info
Shenzhen Adventure Day 51
27 Jul 2015
Well, my travels in Asia are over. What better way to wrap things up
than to make tea ceremony with mom and take photos on a shenzhen-selfie stick.
Thailand Adventure Day 38
14 Jul 2015
Note the change of location!
While I was in Thailand visiting my friend there; I had the fortune of being
able to visit his family’s rice processing factory. They’re basically the
world’s largest Thai Jasmine Rice processing company.
That’s a lot of rice!
Unprocessed rice comes in like this.
Lots of random stuff mixed in…
The junk gets removed in big gravity sifters.
Gravity Sifting
Look at that junk!
The rice is then polished…
An array of polishers.
Shiny!
Then, an electronic separator uses jets of air to eliminate non rice things.
This uses some fancy machine vision to detect rice/non-rice.
The finished products
Shown are two different grades of rice
Science!
There is also some cool stuff going on to make sure the rice is of the right quality.
Spectrophotometer.
Rice-o-meter
Measures transparency, whiteness, and the milling degree to judge quality.
There were several other tests as well, including an amylose test.
Shenzhen Adventure Day 30
06 Jul 2015
The smell clock is a device I built for the Shenzhen manufacturing bootcamp. While we were there,
we had a challenge to build a prototype on a tight budget. The assignment was to build something
that could denote the passage of time.
I decided, while walking around the market, that these little bottle top humidifiers were really cool:
So I knew I had to incorporate them. I walked around the market scoping out
prices and couldn’t find them for a good deal. Just when I was about to give
up, I found them at a price I could afford – if I recall it was a few dollars
a piece, but I needed a lot.
I laser cut a case for each humidifier out of acrylic and opened up each humidifier and attached a wire
to trigger the toggle switch.
In order for it to look nice, I needed some good looking bottles, so I hit the grocery store, where I found:
A bicycle built from toothpaste.
I didn’t find any nice bottles, so I ended up using some ugly ones.
The design uses 4x4 grid of individually controllable humidifiers connected to an arduino mega. Each of the bottle is filled with different fragrances.
I ended up running into trouble with the plastic case, so I cut a new one from wood.
And the finished product:
