As holidays have come, there is a too much free time in hand. I am afraid that it might get wasted in useless things like spending too much time on YouTube, getting lost in random thoughts(generally happens during the college days). At the same time, I got to know about the fact that for a day, a human mind thinks of around 50,000 conscious thoughts. I still don’t trust the fact though! But still I am convinced that there are a lot of things that we think of randomly. A very few of them are interesting and are exciting to discuss with like minded people. Hence I felt for a need to document such relatively useful thoughts.

“Relatively useful?”

Extension of some awesome ideas that I have read in book. A link between two different books while they speak about the same thing but at different levels and some learnings from my personal experiences and reflections on them.

Conclusion

I plan to document thoughts in form of blogs, no matter how small they are! For these reasons mainly

  • Not waste time in useless things

  • Improve at expressing my thoughts: I felt that if I want to express something, I keep repeating the most important fact. For example in this blog itself, I have mentioned twice that I don’t want to waste my time and hence plan to blog(now its thrice!). I have seen people express their ideas very fluently, not just in their writing but also while speaking. Hope I learn that soon!

    (So,I have thought about the above and I believe there is a strong reason why I do that. In any piece of information(may be from a lecture or a piece of text or a video) I feel that some parts of it are very important and if those important parts are conveyed successfully to the listener, the rest are just the details and can be figured out. In other words, I feel the whole information is summarized in those few sentences, hence I tend to repeat those so as to grill them into the listener’s mind. For example, if I was asked to explain Proof of Work algorithm(consensus protocol used in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies), I would repeat the following message multiple times:

    The idea of One Identity One vote is easy to replicate using computers, I can create multiple identities using a single machine, instead to allow and individual from casting a vote, we need something instead of identity to count the votes, something that not easily available and difficult to replicate by a individual. Hence we use computation power , one has to spend some computation in order to cast a vote. So, for that reason to validate a transaction one has to solve a puzzle, which is computationally expensive.

    I found the above explanation in a course, and found it really helpful because for months I was wondering why the heck does one has to solve a puzzle to validate a transaction. Now one’s immediate question would be “how would you design such a puzzle”, which are details and contain some math. And one would then show interest in understanding the details of puzzle and figure out why it is so. But in the most places, I saw it other way around, people start explaining the puzzle directly with context. In summary, knowing the answer to why for me is the most important thing(most of the times) in understanding some, because the answer to what are the details and can be understood well if I know why )

    “Writing is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is” by Guindon

    (I got to know about this from this talk by Leslie Lamport)