The crime Thirty hours. Three days. Six subjects. Target: forty out of fifty on a makeup exam for Advanced Numerical Methods. I did not attend most of the lectures. I did not complete most of the …
The ocean that has no preferences Exurb1a released a 35-minute video in 2026 called “maybe I’m the alien.” A xenosychologist crashes on an ocean planet. The ocean is a single …
The funeral that nobody scheduled Bug bounty is dead. The industry has not scheduled the funeral because scheduling a funeral requires admitting a death occurred and admitting a death occurred is bad …
The drawer A piece of paper sits inside a locked drawer with a single word written on it in pen. Nobody on earth knows the word. A prediction market on “what word is in the drawer” trades …
1942 Two words were coined in 1942. Terraforming: redesign the planet until humans can survive on it. Pantropy: redesign the humans until they can survive on the planet. Terraforming got every movie. …
The cathedral and the cardboard box The best privacy technology in cryptocurrency has been running in production for ten years. Every transaction is private by default. Sender hidden. Receiver hidden. …
The jury of seven I built a triage bot for a major security platform. Seven agents arranged in a pipeline. Repo scope identification, finding scope extraction, function verification, proof-of-concept …
The three stamps Balancer V2 hired Trail of Bits. Then OpenZeppelin. Then Certora. These are the names you print on your pitch deck in 24-point bold to make the venture capital partner stop asking …
The liar at address 0x01 There is a function baked into the EVM protocol at 0x01 that has been deceiving developers since the Frontier release in 2015. Not a smart contract bug. Not a compiler issue. …
The sibling Every ECDSA signature (r, s, v) possesses an identical twin (r, n - s, v XOR 1). Same private key signed both. Same message was hashed. ecrecover returns the identical address for both. …
Two keys is a childs toy Monero solved privacy with two keys. A spend key and a view key. Two keys. One job per key. Ten years of flawless operation. The Monero cryptographers identified the minimum …
The gift that keeps on killing A 1982 paper about the geometry of numbers has killed more cryptosystems than every signals intelligence agency on the planet combined. Three Dutch mathematicians …
The variable that never moves msg.value does not change inside a loop. That sentence has cost the crypto industry more than a hundred million dollars and it will cost more because the sentence is …
The quiz contract A { function foo() virtual pure returns (string) { return "A"; } } contract B is A { function foo() virtual override pure returns (string) { return "B"; } } contract …
Two functions Solidity provides two encoding functions for preparing data before hashing. abi.encode pads every argument to a full 32 bytes with zero-fill. abi.encodePacked concatenates raw bytes with …
The liar embedded in the protocol extcodesize has been lying to Solidity developers since the Ethereum genesis block. Every developer discovers this lie during an active exploit. Never during …
The graveyard I have 47 unfinished projects. I counted them last night instead of finishing any of them. The counting process nearly became project 48. I caught myself opening a new repository at 2 AM …
The beetle that will outlive you The DAO was drained for sixty million dollars on June 17, 2016. I have reviewed twelve contracts in the last six months. Every single one contained the exact same …
Three opcodes and two want you dead The EVM provides three ways to invoke another contract. call sends ETH and returns data. Civilized. Predictable. What a normal engineer would design. staticcall is …