Written by Paige Peterson, @ioptio , reblogged by David.
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Ah no this was Paige 
@ioptio and it’s very good, I reblogged it though so this is why the confusion perhaps.
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Thanks, David. Corrected the OP. Great piece, Paige.
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Thanks! This was quite fun to put together… it’s the perfect combination of testing my knowledge of math, being able to teach others and having fun with design. Stay tuned for a follow-up which dives into xor-based consensus… this was initially part of a full consensus write-up but dang… it got long. 
I also look forward to doing these deeper dives for various components of the network like SD vs immutable, self-auth, attack vectors, and eventually these data-chains once I can wrap my head around them.
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You reminded me of my early days in digital electronics. One other use of XOR gates was as a equality tester. XORed the 2 registers (bit by bit [LM7486] and OR [LM744078] the outputs) and 0 == equal. Mind you I was a young teenager and XOR was like “magic”. Little did I know how much I would use it in the years following.
Its use to create XOR address space is really quite brilliant and a great explanation by yourself which reminded me of my early studies on XOR logic.
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This clears up a lot of questions I was going to posit to these forums. I’ve got a list, but now it’s shorter.
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@ioptio’s treatment is far more thorough and accurate, but you might find this podcast interesting. It is mainly on XOR and network addressing, and touches on consensus groups. What it has that Paige’s post doesn’t is that it’s pretty funny, too.
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Thanks fergish! I’ll definitely check it out.
Looks like the original has been taken down. There’s an earlier article by David here Shortest distance between two points is not always a straight line | Metaquestions
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Thanks, thought that was pretty meta. I’ll try and get my head round it. There are links to that article all over the place. Quite enigmatic.
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