If I like cryptography, programming and pure math, what should I do and build in crypto?

BDFL of Quilibrium, Eng @ Farcaster, ex-Coinbase, always opinionated, never hydrated

/quilibrium

I have not; I think she's in the default follow list?

yo

Depends on what you want to focus on — there’s a number of opportunities, but if you want to stay aligned to pure cryptography, MPC related work is probably the right niche — in existing networks there are MPC wallets that use threshold cryptosystems, some new networks are using MPC more broadly than signing

Zero knowledge proofs can be another niche to get into as well, though that typically narrows your scope to protocol work

what

For both ZKP and MPC how does one understand the lay of the land /what problems have been solved vs what would be worth thinking and tinkering with?

There’s a huge number of unsolved/undersolved problems, but you only really start to get a feel for them with experience — one example: zkSNARKs require a trusted setup. RedShift is a proposed answer, but to my knowledge, has no implementation