I gave this lightning talk at the Foresight Crypto, Security, and AI Workshop in 2022 to a group that included software engineers and…| Articles by Kate Sills
In contract law, we are allowed to add custom rules, but we aren’t allowed to do the same in property law. Property (both real and virtual…| Articles by Kate Sills
97% of the code in a modern web application comes from NPM, and JavaScript has a rich culture of code reuse. But using someone else's code means leaving yourself potentially vulnerable to attackers. Or does it? By using patterns from Object Capabilities, along with code isolation enforced by SES, you can use other people's code much more safely.| katelynsills.com
Out of curiosity, I had tried reading a few blockchain books for the general public and was horrified at what I found. This talk pinpoints where exactly the authors of these books went wrong and explores how to fix the misconceptions, even when there is no apparent market incentive to do so.| katelynsills.com
Starling Lab hosted a three-part Seminar Series at Stanford University on new ways to guarantee the authenticity, availability, and…| Articles by Kate Sills
Some of the largest frauds in history occurred because an agent contracted to act on someone's behalf, decided to act in their own self-interest instead. This talk given to economists at APEE explains how basic cryptography could have prevented some of those major frauds and changed the nature of the principal-agent problem.| katelynsills.com
The solution to the problem of AI-generated images isn’t to try to detect the “tells” of AI. That’s a battle that’s lost every time AI improves. The solution is to use technology—specifically, cryptography—to record what’s real. This different approach shifts the burden of proof to better fit a world where AI is cheap and investigations are expensive.| katelynsills.com
Smart contracts often get confused with a similar concept called "computable contracts." This talk explains the difference between smart contracts and computable contracts, and counters some of the common arguments made by legal scholars against smart contracts.| katelynsills.com
Back in October, I had the opportunity to speak at Qcon SF on combating AI-generated fake images, as part of a fantastic track including…| Articles by Kate Sills
Average reading time: 20 minutes. A big thank you to Rick Dudley, Matthew Di Ferrante, and Kaliya Young for reviewing drafts of this post…| Articles by Kate Sills
Recently, Bitcoin supporter Jimmy Song wrote a popular article critiquing smart contracts and later reiterated his arguments on Laura Shin’s…| Articles by Kate Sills
Kate Sills joins the Building Tomorrow podcast to discuss the so-called Oracle Problem and other critiques of smart contracts. Transcript…| Articles by Kate Sills
“Smart contracts aren’t legal contracts,” they say. They’re right. But that’s missing the point. Smart contracts were never intended to be…| Articles by Kate Sills
When people live without credible property title, many complex transactions—taken for granted in an economist’s model of a free market…| Articles by Kate Sills
The genius of the West was to have created a system that allowed people to grasp with the mind values that human eyes could never see and to…| Articles by Kate Sills
Because of the Internet, our lives are significantly different. Writings on any topic, no matter how obscure, can be reached with a quick…| Articles by Kate Sills
STAN: Jerry, we’re not just going to give you seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. WADE: What the heck were you thinkin’? Heck, if I’m…| Articles by Kate Sills
Distinguishing between fake and real accounts is an incredibly hard problem, and the solution proposed by The Democracy Earth Foundation, as stated, will not work.| katelynsills.com
Recently I came across a puzzling fact: the International Criminal Court hashes electronic evidence with MD5, even though MD5 is badly broken. So, why are lawyers using broken, outdated technology? The answer involves the common law system, cultural isolation, and a single man named Don L. Lewis.| katelynsills.com