Rosa Del Mar

Daily Brief

Issue 51 2026-02-20

Baseline Pir Mechanisms And Why They Don’T Scale

  • PIR with preprocessing can remove the 1-of-2 trust requirement by having the client precompute many random-query XOR sums after an upfront full-database download, effectively acting as one of the two servers.
  • Plinko reduces both client communication and server compute from O(N) to O(sqrt(N)) while using preprocessing to eliminate the trust assumption.
  • For an Ethereum-like dataset of 10 billion 32-byte values arranged as a 100000x100000 grid, Plinko would require storing about 100000*128 hints (approximately 390 MB), plus additional backup hints.

Why-Gkr-Is-Fast (Commitment Avoidance And Sumcheck Reductions)

  • A key efficiency mechanism of GKR is that it avoids committing to intermediate-layer values and requires commitments only to inputs and outputs.
  • For Poseidon-style cubing layers, the GKR reduction can be implemented via a degree-4 sumcheck that relates a next-layer evaluation to a sum over previous-layer values transformed by cubing and round constants.
  • A demo cost model described suggests GKR proves Poseidon hashes with about 15× theoretical overhead versus roughly 100× for STARK approaches that commit to all intermediate trace values.

Investing Culture Trust And Information Edges

  • West Coast investors can outperform when a visceral product leap precedes obvious numerical proof because they are more willing to translate qualitative experience into future market expansion.
  • The alien-founder view over-attributes success to innate genius because it ignores the compounding training effect of years of operating and learning while building a company.
  • A key unresolved question for crypto is whether today’s projects resemble early-internet dead ends or eventual winners.