Cryptography on truegav

Monero has better privacy than any coin you use and you do not care

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 14:00:00 +0530

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. Amount hidden. The engineering is meticulous. The cryptography has survived every audit and every upgrade without a single known privacy break.

Nobody uses it.

The market prefers Tether, which broadcasts every transaction onto a permanent public ledger and can freeze any address through a single administrative ICANN-style phone call. Tether operates a customer support hotline and maintains 115 billion dollars in circulation. Monero operates a whitepaper and a development community of cryptographers who would lose a marketing contest to a sandwich board outside a hardware store. The cardboard box with a toll-free number printed on the side is overflowing with customers. The cathedral is empty.

ecrecover has been lying for eight years and your code still trusts it

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 14:00:00 +0530

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. A precompile. Hardcoded into every Ethereum node. When ECDSA public key recovery succeeds, it returns the signer’s address. When recovery fails, it returns address(0).

Zero. The null address. Delivered with the emotional affect of a cinder block. No revert. No event. No error state. Just zero.

Every single signature you have ever verified has a twin

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 14:00:00 +0530

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. Your protocol processes them as distinct authorizations because the raw bytes differ.

r, s, v = original_sig
s2 = (-s) % SECP256K1_ORDER
v2 = v ^ 1
# (r, s2, v2) recovers to the same address

The secp256k1 curve is symmetric. For every valid point (x, y) that exists on the curve, (x, -y) also exists. The s component of the signature encodes which y-coordinate was selected during the signing process. Flip s modulo the curve order and flip the parity bit in v. You have now manufactured a second, completely valid, cryptographically indistinguishable signature for the identical message from the identical key. You never touched the private key. You performed modular arithmetic that a motivated fourteen year old could execute.

A 1982 paper broke knapsack crypto and nobody noticed for a fucking decade

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 14:00:00 +0530

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 published it, collected their citations, and went home. They had no idea they had just handed the world a weapon that would still be executing cryptosystems forty years later while they enjoyed retirement.

The algorithm finds short vectors in polynomial time.