If someone has great background in math but not a coder, but he/she wanna contribute to bitcoin, nostr, and web5, what would you recommend him/her to do?
Discussion
Learn to code.
I'm sorry but nor knowing ro code in 2024 is like not knowing to read 50 years ago: it puts you at a severe disadvantage.
In a way, knowing how to code is what gives you the freedom to express your ideas.
Focus on the cryptography part. Of course you'll have to learn to code a bit for that, but cryptography is not your typical software development job, and most nostr devs aren't great with cryptography
Thanks, what problems are on your mind?
Learn to code? Math is orders of magnitude harder to learn than most programming languages.
He codes, at least that was his job, but he wants to work on more theoretical stuff which involves less coding.
Perhaps help with cryptography audits or new cryptographic features? That's all math before the code gets involved
Thanks, would like to hear more about this. Some specific problems they can try?
What are your thoughts on probability distribution modeling such as Erdon Renyi or similar ones to analyse community-based structure for networks - nodes, edges and connections. For Nostr this could be based on #follows, #relays, while the connection could be part of the r/w function of the relays and the ability to broadcast to other relays. This was a random thought in terms of clients and relays that operate within the Nostr sphere - if there is a formula to plug in the variables that reflects the outcome of the community structure. This community based structure model could be within the same family of NIP65 gossip model, blastr and it gives a clear picture of how the communication is flowing, what's the strength and weakness, filtering effects tailing the normal distribution etc .
I think you have a very unique and useful skillset for Nostr - mathematical modeling draws a picture of how the systems are, the possibilities and probabilities. For some people it will be easier to imagine relay operations or Nostr better if there is a mathematical model explaining it.
Perhaps what you can do is to read up all the NIPs out there, and let your creativity go wild.
Thanks, it’s my friend interested in this. (So do I anyways)
You said some Interesting projects which one can use existing algorithms which analyses graph data. Google page rank to detect important relays, clustering including community detection, and so on.
Any recommendation on public data of the network which is easy to use?