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Motivating The Math
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Number Theory is an incredible rabbit hole. There’s no way to master cryptography without uprooting your life to master it for however long the journey lasts. You will still be visible in the world but your mind will live in the glorious world for as long as it wants. While in that rabbit hole, the Chinese Remainder Theorem is a side quest that might make you invisible to the world. It’s a world within itself loaded with wondrous discoveries. These are like multi-year video games except finishing them makes you a superhuman.
We’ve created a mathematical monster!! Only took 8 episodes! Get on the bus - it’s much easier than you think and now we’re supporting the podcast with videos! View quoted note →
Homeschoolers. How can I help teach you and your children math? I know you want to learn and I want to teach it - but how do we really come together? I need to understand your pain and struggles. Please share with me here.
Did you know that the points on an elliptic curve form an Abelian group? Now I’m glad we suffered through 2 podcasts to explain what groups are and how we don’t know why but it’s important to know something is a group! We (on this podcast) still don’t know why this fact matters for elliptic curves yet - but it seems plausible in the context of what we discussed that we like: 1) closure under point addition (adding any two points gives us a point that is definitely on the curve) 2) infinity point is the identity (always wondered what that point meant in the coding books like @jimmysong Programming Bitcoin) 3) order of addition doesn’t matter (P1+P2) = (P2+P1) So the points being an abelian group makes all of the arithmetic around adding points nice. VERY NICE!
EVERYTHING YOU THINK YOU KNOW IS RIGGED TO LOOK A CERTAIN WAY THROUGH A CAREFULLY CONTROLLED MEDIUM. EXCEPT MATH They can’t rig math. They can rig how it’s used and what it says and they can demoralize you into not learning it or seeing for yourself what is knowable. They can co-opt its applications. But they cannot undo Euclid, Euler, or Gauss. Learn math and learn who these men were if you want to have a fighting chance against those who can rig everything you think you know.
I cannot stress enough the importance of modular arithmetic - the math where we divide and focus only on remainders Take any number N (preferably a prime - let’s use N= 5) (Here = is congruence ) 1(mod5) = 1 2(mod5) = 2 3(mod5) = 3 4(mod5) = 4 5(mod5) = 0 6(mod5) = 1 7(mod5) = 2 8(mod5) = 3 9(mod5) = 4 10(mod5) = 0 You seeing it? 3483638(mod5) = 3 Being good at this is SO IMPORTANT to learning cryptography. You have to be just as comfortable with these operations as nerds are with the other usual ones (addition, multiplication, etc)
@Phundamentals and @chicken go pretty deep in Episode 2. You might want to check the supporting video. We talk about Groups (seriously - who does that?) I’ve pinned a note on noStrudel exposing a mistake I already know I made - nothing horrible.
@Phundamentals and @chicken are committed to motivating Bitcoiners to study math and demystifying the majority of it. Mistakes will be made as none of us are professionals. We will always hold ourselves accountable - the listeners trust in our signal is paramount. View quoted note →