zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ

Zcash is winning. @zooko/48579b89770e" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">medium.com/@zooko/48579b8… ⤵️

NVIDIA's GeForce got owned by Shiny Hunters.

@PromisCarpenter Thanks. It’s fun! And to be clear, for anyone reading this, the current — unhardened — version of smalloc is probably safe to use as the global allocator in *Rust*. Just not so much in memory-unsafe languages.

@zooko Very wise and ethical

Every day I search twitter and b*sky for new discussions about the design of the `smalloc` memory allocator (github.com/zooko/bench-al…) and every day I find bupkis.

@recmo Thanks for the feedback!

@zooko I’m a huge fan of continuations and CPS, but it won’t magically solve concurrency issues. It simply converts them into re-entrancy issues. Still love it, because it makes control flow first class which gives enormous flexibility.

Twisted Rust Here's my pitch for why if you're starting a new codebase in Rust today, you should use the fully-synchronous model (a la Twisted Python) and don't use Tokio and `.await`. github.com/zooko/TwistedR…

We implemented @karpathy 's MicroGPT fully on FPGA fabric. No GPU. No PyTorch. No CPU inference loop. Just a transformer burned into hardware, generating 50,000+ tokens/sec. The model is small, but the idea is not: inference does not have to live only in software 👇

An yearly Zcash ritual should be to take the best tweets of the year, and award them permanent presence in the blockspace with memos XD

@PromisCarpenter Thanks for asking! I thought I was, but then I thought about how in modern AI-infused cyber domain, it’s not safe to use an unhardened memory allocator paired with a memory-unsafe language, so I started up again and I’ve been designing a -hardened variant of smalloc! 😊

@zooko Are you basically done smalloc now?

Imagine my goal is to not pay capital gains taxes on my ZEC sales. Nor taxes on the interest paid by borrowers. Everything must be private. I'm currently reading about decentralised lending protocols. This seems interesting. Everything should be translated into some hiding properties. Do you have any good 101 courses on lending protocols and in trad finance? Claude is good but I'm sure there are some good existing human written courses.

Difficult to ban what you can’t see Zcash $ZEC is freedom money

@AlexAuroraDev @zooko Fair point - smaller cases exist quietly. The size and public visibility here means this one likely becomes the reference precedent that gets cited going forward. Any of the smaller cases produce published opinions worth tracking?

@zacodil @zooko This is actually not the first case, but probably the first of this size. I know smaller cases with frozen tokens where LE of different jurisdictions claim the ownership of the money. This is pain in the ass for blockchain projects.

Wild story unfolding around the KelpDAO hack funds frozen on Arbitrum. Quick context: in April, Lazarus Group (DPRK-linked) hacked KelpDAO for $292M via a LayerZero bridge bug. Some of the stolen ETH flowed through Arbitrum, and Arbitrum's Security Council froze $71M before the attacker could move it further. The industry mobilized to recover. Aave, KelpDAO, LayerZero, EtherFi, and Compound co-authored a proposal asking Arbitrum DAO to release the frozen ETH to a multisig that would compensate hack victims. The vote is passing. Then this week, a plot twist. Lawyers showed up with a restraining order. But not on behalf of the KelpDAO victims. The plaintiffs are Han Kim and two other groups - family members of people killed in DPRK-backed terrorist attacks years ago. They hold combined ~$877M in unpaid US court judgments against DPRK. North Korea never paid. They have been hunting for any reachable DPRK asset for over a decade. When Arbitrum's frozen ETH was publicly identified as "DPRK money," they saw a target. Their argument: this is DPRK property, we have $877M in judgments against DPRK, give us the money. The counter-argument: DPRK does not actually own this ETH - they stole it. The real owners are the KelpDAO hack victims. The old terrorism creditors are trying to grab money that was never really DPRK's. Arbitrum is now caught in the middle. The industry wants to release funds for hack recovery. NY court is saying "do not move anything until we resolve this." If multisig signers transfer the ETH while the restraining order is active, they become personally liable. This is the first real test of DAO funds against competing US court claims. The precedent set here will shape how every future DAO incident response handles legal pressure.

Time for the April statistics - live from Las Vegas where we attended the Bitcoin conference. TL;DR: Monero grows relative to last month, Bitcoin and Nano are close, Zano doubles, and in general a longer tail emerges. More details 🧵👇

Ok, feedback over on b*sky (bsky.app/profile/krisko…, bsky.app/profile/piss.b…, bsky.app/profile/piss.b…) tells me that I failed at my goal here. Will circle back …

Huh. x.com/zooko/status/4…

Do I have any friends in London? The airline made me lose my connection flight and now I gotta spend the night here 🤷🏻‍♂️

reloading twitter and b*sky to see if anyone has taken me up on my Twisted Rust proposal yet or wants to argue about it

More important than “helpful” or “hurtful”…. Was it _truthful_? In the case of radiologists, it was false. It will also be false in the case of programmers. Understanding how software systems work is going to increase in value.

@theyknewww I view zec as complementary with btc. Each offers something the other can't provide alone.

@bkbollinger @robustus x.com/zooko/status/1…

@bkbollinger @robustus Honored Hodler!

I asked Claude to analyze how much of the original Zcash founders-reward/dev-fund that was issued from mining rewards during 2016-2024 has likely been sold to date (informed by an analysis of zec's price action & various price peaks & trading volumes):