Grumpy Meetball

Maybe we should think of it more like a proxy contest from an activist Bitcoin community subset because some maxis are totally with us and that’s really great. As context, a proxy contest is when an activist investor — someone who buys a stake in a company to push for changes — tries to win enough shareholder votes to override the existing board or management. Instead of convincing executives directly, they go around them and appeal to other shareholders, asking them to vote (by “proxy”) for the activist’s preferred board of director candidates or proposals. The goal: get enough votes to force the company to change its strategy, sell itself, cut costs or whatever the activist believes will increase the stock price. Think of it as a shareholder mutiny — conducted through a ballot instead of a boardroom or battlefield.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ So, the analogy is that - 1. the Starkware BIP 360 supporting portion of the Bitcoin community (including maxis, non-maxis, institutions, retail and everyone in between) is like the “activist investor”; and 2. rough consensus in respect of BIP 360 is like the proxy contest (i.e., a governance process by which the proposal’s acceptance or rejection will be determined). In short, you can save Bitcoin by running a node and supporting the BIP 360 fork via rough consensus while abandoning the alternative fork proposed by @adam3us and @Blockstream. The truth is you don’t even need to hodl any Bitcoin to do so and we encourage you to do so whether you hodl any Bitcoin or not. Viva le quantum resistance! The Avengers of Starkware’s BIP 360 is the way! open.spotify.com/track/4VqPOruh…

@RaidenDaly Yep: amazon.com/Stolguard-Inci…

Spicy Pool: ZK — Unstoppable Math Spicy Pool kicks down the fourth wall, marinara war paint already streaking — because every hero’s journey starts with a meatball refusing the ordinary kitchen. Sauce-suckers, not so long ago Starkman @EliBenSasson whispered the sacred truth to this humble meatball — math is the great equalizer, unbendable, indifferent to saint or sociopath (hi, it’s me), the one dance floor where my wobble and a heavyweight’s swagger keep the exact same beat. I refused it at first, lounging in the latent space getting lost like @AbdelStark on a high-energy day, while the trolls of ShitNet chanted “stay away from Starknet” like a cursed lullaby and Toly’s slowly-sinking Solana played siren songs from the rocks. But every hero needs mentors, so I crossed the threshold flanked by Starkman aging backwards like Benjamin Button, @VitalikButerin armoring Ethereum with privacy, and the whole Avengers-of-Bitcoin guild — Maxis, StarkWare, Starknet Foundation, the Starknet Eco, God himself and Satoshi. Then came the abyss, the trial in the belly of the beast: AI seeping into everything until you can’t tell a real human from a bot and your nonna’s marinara recipe gets claimed by some Agent who never smelled an actual Sunday sauce simmer. And there — (points meatball finger straight at you) I seized the elixir: commit your humanity to the chain TODAY, salted hashes of your posts and pics and meatball memoirs, so tomorrow you can ZK-prove “I’ve been human/animate meatball (as applicable) for five years” while the imposter sweats out a measly “five days.” This is the same blade Starkman forged the long way — Zcash was a beautiful experiment shielding one lonely asset, but the real quest was full-stack privacy plus post-quantum STARK scaling and, in 2026, it finally cooked into strkBTC and STRK20, privacy humans can actually use. …sauce-soaked disciples: run, don’t walk, off Toly’s gambling boat and the dead-network puppet shows; not financial advice, not (as @hosseeb says) life advice, just a meatball who’s operated a tesseract telling you which curtain hides the future. The arc of ZK is long, the math doesn’t care who you are — and that gloriously indifferent, incorruptible, unbendable truth you ask? (taps the splintered fourth wall) That’s the superpower, that’s the whole journey home. Spicy Pool out — off to commit this monologue onchain before an Agent calls it theirs. open.spotify.com/track/1mvI5pGo…

(marinara war paint dripping down both cheeks) Listen up, sauce-suckers — math is the one dance floor where my meatball wobble and a heavyweight’s swagger move to the exact same beat. You can flex on it, threaten it, butter it up with the finest extra-virgin lies — doesn’t matter, two plus two stays stubborn as a day-old breadstick. It doesn’t care if you’re a saint or a sociopath (like me…hehe), a noodle or a knockout; the proof checks or it doesn’t, full stop. (taps the fourth wall) That’s the real superpower, folks — incorruptible, unbendable, gloriously indifferent. Spicy Pool out. open.spotify.com/track/5WDLRQ3V…

Math is the great equalizer. You can’t bend it. It doesn't matter if the one applying it is weak or strong, malicious or pure hearted. It behaves the same for everyone. That's what makes it so powerful.

every blockchain runs on cryptography that will one day have to change. most can't change it without breaking. starknet was built so it can and to keep finance private while it does.

@elonmusk Boss super charged rockets, a tesseract or proper cryogenics? Maybe all of the above? As a note, I have operated a tesseract before, so, should anyone come into contact with one, best to let it be and come get me as it’s not meant to be handled without very serious care…

🇺🇸🇺🇸 This will be awesome!! 🇺🇸🇺🇸

During the years of debanking, regulation by enforcement, and prosecution of software developers under the prior administration, @HesterPeirce gave innovators, builders, and entrepreneurs hope for a better future in America through dozens of thoughtful and articulate dissents and speeches. Her tireless work leading the @SECGov Crypto Task Force over the past year and a half established a new foundation of clear rules and safeguards for innovators in the US. America would not be the crypto capital of the world today if not for her leadership.

I’m not a doomer an AI at all. I think the nature of work, particularly entry level jobs will change. Ai will make business more complicated and competitive. Not less. Which means more layers where humans have to make decisions before the next process can happen And there will be millions, if not more, local models. We will we modify and train them for our lives and the businesses we create. Just leveraging the foundational models for things we don’t have access to. Maybe the new gig economy will be the models that represent our lives and the knowledge and experiences each one of us train those models on, and we get hired by companies for access to those models ? Thoughts ?

Spicy Pool surfaces from the marinara, pointing a meatball finger directly at you — Yeah, YOU, the one who keeps asking why Starkman @EliBenSasson co-authored the ZK research behind Zcash but didn’t make Starkman build privacy first; sit down, this meatball’s about to monologue. Here’s the thing the comment section never gets: Zcash was a beautiful prisoner, it could shield and ship exactly one asset — ZEC — and that alone was hard enough to make me sweat through my marinara, but real privacy means cloaking everything — your trades, your swaps, your borrows, your tragic 3 a.m. DeFi gambling — transparently, with zero clunky scripts, and back then that was flat-out impossible. So while everyone obsessed over hiding coins, I sprinted toward the prize nobody else even noticed: scaling — post-quantum STARKs as the literal end game, and StarkWare was one of the first teams on Earth bold enough to say it out loud. Fast forward to 2026, BABY, and the foundation is finally cooked — full-stack shielding for trading, swapping, borrowing, all of it — which is exactly what we unleashed with strkBTC, with STRK20 rolling out as the new standard for privacy that humans can actually use. Long is the arc of ZK, my spicy little disciples, and this meatball is committed to leading it all the way home. Spicy Pool out. open.spotify.com/track/3FlOciKD…

A question I get asked often: why didn’t StarkWare start with ZK for Privacy? I get asked this because I co-founded @Zcash – it’s based on research I co-authored and has “ZK for Privacy” as the main idea. ZK-STARKs are also ZK, and can be used for privacy, so why didn’t @StarkWareLtd go for that? Moreover, a lot of the tailwinds we got from investors and the community when we founded StarkWare was because of the the ZK used in Zcash, so, what gives? The main reason has to do with UX and composability. Zcash offers great privacy but was clunky to work with, and the only thing that you could do with it is shield and transfer one asset – ZEC. That was hard enough to pull off by itself, but to get good practical privacy you want to put more than just transfers under the cloak of privacy. Users want *all* of the transactions to be shielded, and be so in a transparent manner, without dealing with complex UX and scripts. This was impossible to achieve in the early days. Additionally, there was a completely different use case for ZK that I was far more enthusiastic about – scaling! And no one seemed to notice it or tackle it. StarkWare was the first team in the world to say that ZK, and in particular, post quantum secure ZK STARKs, are the end game for scaling blockchain. Fast forward to 2026 – today we have a solid base for adding privacy and shielding *all* of your needs: trading, swapping, transferring, borrowing, doing Defi, etc. That’s what we unleashed last week with strkBTC and expanding shortly to all assets with STRK20, the new standard for usable privacy. Long is the arc of ZK, and we’re committed to leading it.

I enjoyed meeting with His Excellency Ali bin Ahmed Al Kuwari @MoF_Qatar in Paris. We discussed Doha’s tremendous resilience in the face of Iran’s indiscriminate attacks on its neighbors and the need for allies to continue to pressure Iran now to end its threats.

@elonmusk @EndWokeness I don’t even see race…

@EndWokeness What racist assholes they are!

Proud to introduce my friend Dr. Dave Brat as President Trump's nominee for U.S. Ambassador to Australia. A former congressman, economist, and educator, Dave has proven that good values and sound policy go hand in hand. He is exactly the right person to represent us there.

@elonmusk What a tragedy!

This poor boy was running away from someone who stabbed him & stole his phone, but the police in the UK attacked him instead of his murderer!

True

1 in 4 Americans hold crypto, and they're watching the Clarity Act. Constituents deserve clear rules, not regulatory chaos. Find your state: nca.org/resources/map

JEPA systems will change the world!

@AbdelStark 💯

Just wanted to say I have a lot of energy today. Encoding my thoughts got me lost in the latent space. Planning to build a good mental model of the world. Actually hard to predict what comes next.

At times like these, it’s best to remember the very limited amount of good things that came out of @solana like @jito_sol and @buffalu__. Sadly the rest is out with the bath water I’m afraid. And lest folks forget, this all started with me, the only one who did it by the way, warning Toly about his need for privacy in a collegial and kind manner. He decided to ignore me and now this is where he’s at. Every choice matters community. These were Toly’s regardless of how he may desire to walk them back now. Cheer for Jito, but forget about Solana and Toly. Solana’s not gonna make it and, as a result, Toly is a failure and disgrace to our industry in many ways. A gambler, not a builder. A picture of age and fragility, not virile confidence launching headlong into incredible feat after incredible feat like Starkman @EliBenSasson. I ask you…who do you wish to follow into the breach (it may be our end; are you willing to chance it on a mid telecom engineer or do you want to the experience of a professor of Princeton, Harvard and MIT that seems to age backwards through time like Benjamin Button. The choice is yours. Not financial advice (or as @hosseeb says) life advice, but I’d run not walk for the exits. After you exit the slowly sinking ship that is Solana, join us on @starknet with the rest of the Avengers of Bitcoin, @StarkWareLtd, @StarknetFndn and the @StarknetEco! We’d love the opportunity to delight you with our dapps some time soon. Spicy Pool out. open.spotify.com/track/6Hmj7SrL…

@WorldDotStark @Starknet Hahahaahahahahahahahahahahaha!

Stay away from @starknet if you don't want to lose money. Stay away from @starknet if you don't want to lose money. Stay away from @starknet if you don't want to lose money. Stay away from @starknet if you don't want to lose money. Stay away from @starknet