SafeBlaster

Some have asked repeatedly why there's a legal case between the BLAST Chain (BlastChain.org) and the other BLAST chain (Blast.io). When building a long-term project, brand protection becomes a crucial part of the process to reduce the proliferation of bad actors. Here are some details for clarity and why this proactive opposition is more than necessary. 1. The easiest answer is: one platform is REAL and the other is a FAKE popular ponzi scheme, which needs to be exposed and stopped. Too many have been victimized. 2. Soon after announcing it was time for the BLAST chain on the SafeBLAST roadmap to begin, the fake platform used the BLAST name and likeness along with its good reputation to raise about $20,000,000 ($20M USD) for their fake launch. Imagine if those funds were directed towards the real BLAST Chain. 3. The fake platform was able to launch on a bigger scale and trick people into believing that it was the real BLAST, when there was absolutely NO connection whatsoever. 4. Many users also rushed to the fake chain because they were promised over 50% APR on staking and a bunch of other enticing fake rewards. I tried to stop it by reaching out to multiple platforms but no one will listen because they were mostly blinded by quick profit with false hype. 5. Soon after reality kicked in, I was getting emails and messages for help, instead of the victims going to the fake platform for recovery. So, I had to go after them to legally clear the real BLAST name. 6. BLAST is a fully Registered Trademark for the real BLAST Chain in this space. The fake imitators also tried to falsify an application for a Trademark. But it was short lived after an insider with a guilty conscience notified me of their scheme and I quickly stepped in with my attorneys. Their fake application is currently suspended with additional legal procedures to follow and stop them for good. 7. Many (not all) top crypto platforms who constantly preach BUIDL, HODL and all the DYOR crap are the same ones who like to promote junk imitators and give these scammers a bigger platform to thrive. Shamefully, when you don't have like "100k followers" on Twitter or whatever, this crypto space treats you like crap and with disrespect regardless of your knowledge or legitimacy. 8. You would think that crypto news platforms like Coindesk, Cointelegraph and others will write about a big Ponzi scheme like this, especially if they're not also beneficiaries of the scheme. But I'm still waiting to hear them speak up against such a deceptive act of scam. 9. Most of the stunting growth of small legit projects are created by some top platforms who make useless rules to benefit falsely hyped projects. This is how the fake BLAST chain was able to thrive so fast with top listings and integrations despite being a ponzi scheme. 10. Even now that some of these platforms know the truth, they're still reluctant to take swift action because they don't want to look foolish. But doing the right thing is not foolishness. 11. Simply put, the BLAST Chain in the SafeBLAST ecosystem is the REAL one and the other platform with the yellow / gold letter B logo is FAKE and a Ponzi scheme. 12. The case is ongoing. Their attorneys had 60 days to respond to the Trademark Board but did not. A default judgement was entered against the fake platform on November 27, 2025 and they had an additional 30 days to respond to the default judgement but did not. I'm not satisfied with a default judgement because I had all the tools to publicly expose their Ponzi scheme through a legal proceeding, especially with additional discovery. They created a big damage to the BLAST brand, many people lost their investments and these clowns should be held accountable for it. So, Yes, I'm moving the case forward with some special filings to execute certain actions against these scumbags. Many thanks for your time and understanding. #BLAST #BLASTChain #Crypto #Blockchain #buyingcontent

I'm so happy for the #Artemis2 crew wishing them all the very best. I live nearby and able to see history unfold. 🙏🚀 #ArtemisII #Space #Moon #Rocket #Fly #MissionToTheMoon

@OneWorldChain 🌐 #OneWorldChain $OWCT anything is possible and I agree with this image. #NFA #Blockchain

Meet One World Chain: The Blockchain for Everyone 🌍⛓️ ​Discover a fast, affordable, and transparent blockchain ecosystem designed with simplicity and efficiency in mind. From low gas fees to a powerful developer suite, One World Chain (OWCT) is built to scale for the future. ​Key Features: ​Blazing Speed: 3-second average block time. ​Ultra-Low Fees: Transactions for less than 1 cent. ​Secure & Decentralized: A robust validator system with over 300,000 OWCT staked. ​Rich Ecosystem: Access Bridges, DEXs, Staking Portals, and a L2 zkEVM chain. ​Developer Friendly: Full support for REST, GraphQL, and RPC APIs. ​Getting started is as easy as connecting your MetaMask wallet and adding the One World Chain network. ​Explore more at: mainnet.oneworldchain.org ​One World Chain. Transparent. Fast. For the People.

A historic moment for crypto. Kraken Financial has been granted a Federal Reserve master account, making us the first digital asset bank with direct access to the U.S. payments system. A major step toward connecting crypto infrastructure with the core rails of global finance. blog.kraken.com/news/federal-r…

@LawMurrayTheNU This kid talks too much until reality hits. Let your actions speak louder and stop with the yip-yapping.

You may remember Bennedict Mathurin saying "He's going to have to show me he's better than me" about LeBron when he got drafted in 2022 Asked Bennedict Mathurin about unlocking an even higher level of competitiveness now that he's with the Clippers

The price of #Bitcoin is eyeing $55,700 within 10 to 12 days from now. This will mean a loss of over $70,000 for those who bought the top. Basically, there is no legit #BullRun until $BTC goes from $128k to over $150k. Anything else is just a recovery. #Crypto #Carnaval2026

Meanwhile, the automatically generated Liquidity in the SafeBLAST (BLAST) @PancakeSwap auto-lock pool remains locked since day one and the network continues to generate its own liquidity regardless of other users choice to add Liquidity or not. This is what you call Decentralization for life. Anyone can add or remove liquidity at anytime but the BLAST token will never loose its auto-generated liquidity. Plus the auto-generated liquidity will continue to grow with every transaction performed on @PancakeSwap or other @BNBCHAIN DEXs. No presale or ICO liquidity. Everything started from scratch for the people. #Respect the movement and transparency. 💯💯💯

@brian_armstrong I don't know why people are afraid of a little healthy competition. #Blockchains #GamingCommunity #L1 #L2

The US can either lead in financial innovation or watch it move offshore. State regulators fighting federal law isn't protecting consumers, it's protecting incumbents from competition.

Agreed. Variety is the spice of life and @VitalikButerin can't force people to love one brand when they can have choices that works perfectly for them. They all talk about scaling and expansion but almost never provide the resources to the right teams for this. It's a free market. Let people build and grow however they see fit as long as it's not junk.

@Cointelegraph & yet we have hundreds of - Brands in the bread isle Car manufacturers Phone/network providers L1 & L2 infrastructure L2’s on #Kaspa are Based Rollups that utilize the L1 as the sequencer and aren’t used to scale because it does so on its Base Layer. 158M Tx/24h on mainnet.

🚨 VITALIK: We don’t need more copypasta EVM chains, and we definitely don’t need even more L1s.

I don't think @cz_binance single handedly caused the 10/10 crash. However, some top CEXs and the #Binance ecosystem cannot escape some of the responsibilities. The biggest shock to me was when #CZBinance started bragging about his growing number of followers despite the concerns people had. The CZ we know will usually find ways to focus on resolution instead of bragging about crowd size like the US president. I'm not sure what version of CZ this is but something has changed and it's tough to say. I'm just hoping this phase will pass and he'll bounce back. 🤞🤷🏾‍♂️

You cannot manipulate the market, push utility to the side so you can list and over-price memes, then help the US government steal from the people by hyping up junk memes without facing the consequences. #Crypto is not dead but this #CryptoCrash could all have been avoided for sure. Time to wake up. #CryptoNews

@VitalikButerin 🙌🙌 Well Said 🙌🙌

There have recently been some discussions on the ongoing role of L2s in the Ethereum ecosystem, especially in the face of two facts: * L2s' progress to stage 2 (and, secondarily, on interop) has been far slower and more difficult than originally expected * L1 itself is scaling, fees are very low, and gaslimits are projected to increase greatly in 2026 Both of these facts, for their own separate reasons, mean that the original vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense, and we need a new path. First, let us recap the original vision. Ethereum needs to scale. The definition of "Ethereum scaling" is the existence of large quantities of block space that is backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum - that is, block space where, if you do things (including with ETH) inside that block space, your activities are guaranteed to be valid, uncensored, unreverted, untouched, as long as Ethereum itself functions. If you create a 10000 TPS EVM where its connection to L1 is mediated by a multisig bridge, then you are not scaling Ethereum. This vision no longer makes sense. L1 does not need L2s to be "branded shards", because L1 is itself scaling. And L2s are not able or willing to satisfy the properties that a true "branded shard" would require. I've even seen at least one explicitly saying that they may never want to go beyond stage 1, not just for technical reasons around ZK-EVM safety, but also because their customers' regulatory needs require them to have ultimate control. This may be doing the right thing for your customers. But it should be obvious that if you are doing this, then you are not "scaling Ethereum" in the sense meant by the rollup-centric roadmap. But that's fine! it's fine because Ethereum itself is now scaling directly on L1, with large planned increases to its gas limit this year and the years ahead. We should stop thinking about L2s as literally being "branded shards" of Ethereum, with the social status and responsibilities that this entails. Instead, we can think of L2s as being a full spectrum, which includes both chains backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum with various unique properties (eg. not just EVM), as well as a whole array of options at different levels of connection to Ethereum, that each person (or bot) is free to care about or not care about depending on their needs. What would I do today if I were an L2? * Identify a value add other than "scaling". Examples: (i) non-EVM specialized features/VMs around privacy, (ii) efficiency specialized around a particular application, (iii) truly extreme levels of scaling that even a greatly expanded L1 will not do, (iv) a totally different design for non-financial applications, eg. social, identity, AI, (v) ultra-low-latency and other sequencing properties, (vi) maybe built-in oracles or decentralized dispute resolution or other "non-computationally-verifiable" features * Be stage 1 at the minimum (otherwise you really are just a separate L1 with a bridge, and you should just call yourself that) if you're doing things with ETH or other ethereum-issued assets * Support maximum interoperability with Ethereum, though this will differ for each one (eg. what if you're not EVM, or even not financial?) From Ethereum's side, over the past few months I've become more convinced of the value of the native rollup precompile, particuarly once we have enshrined ZK-EVM proofs that we need anyway to scale L1. This is a precompile that verifies a ZK-EVM proof, and it's "part of Ethereum", so (i) it auto-upgrades along with Ethereum, and (ii) if the precompile has a bug, Ethereum will hard-fork to fix the bug. The native rollup precompile would make full, security-council-free, EVM verification accessible. We should spend much more time working out how to design it in such a way that if your L2 is "EVM plus other stuff", then the native rollup precompile would verify the EVM, and you only have to bring your own prover for the "other stuff" (eg. Stylus). This might involve a canonical way of exposing a lookup table between contract call inputs and outputs, and letting you provide your own values to the lookup table (that you would prove separately). This would make it easy to have safe, strong, trustless interoperability with Ethereum. It also enables synchronous composability (see: ethresear.ch/t/combining-pr… and ethresear.ch/t/synchronous-… ). And from there, it's each L2's choice exactly what they want to build. Don't just "extend L1", figure out something new to add. This of course means that some will add things that are trust-dependent, or backdoored, or otherwise insecure; this is unavoidable in a permissionless ecosystem where developers have freedom. Our job should make to make it clear to users what guarantees they have, and to build up the strongest Ethereum that we can.

I really don't see anything in these allegations that sounds like breaking news because many have known for years and did nothing about it. The only mistake she's about to make is trusting the US government along with the new #SEC who are all friends with JT due to his massive contribution to them and his position in their family business. They will take the information from her and bury it before threatening her to shut up about it. Good thing she has backups but it wouldn't help much because NO significant actions will be taken. Giving the insider info to a well respected independent journalist will be a good starting point. The #Crypto market manipulation is not going to stop but it can be reduced to limit the extreme damages we're all dealing with right now. 🤷🏾‍♂️

🚨 BREAKING: Explosive allegations against Justin Sun and $TRX A woman claiming to be Justin Sun's (@justinsuntron) former girlfriend, @tenten19901107, has publicly announced that she possesses internal evidence showing coordinated market manipulation of $TRX using @Binance accounts allegedly registered under multiple employees’ identities. According to her statement, Justin Sun allegedly used employees’ IDs and mobile phones to create numerous Binance accounts, orchestrating coordinated buying to inflate $TRX’s price, followed by large-scale selling that allegedly dumped on retail investors and generated massive profits. She claims she is prepared to fully cooperate with a U.S. @SECGov investigation and submit: • WeChat chat records • Internal employee evidence • Documentation of coordinated trading activity • Proof of large-scale cash-outs during 2017–2018 She further alleges that insider trading and predatory practices involving $TRX on @Binance were a major source of Justin Sun’s wealth. In an emotional statement, she says she remained silent for years out of fear of power and influence, but decided to speak out despite potential personal risk. She claims all evidence has been securely backed up and shared with trusted contacts, stating clearly that she will not harm herself. She also directly questioned why political and business elites continue to associate with Justin Sun, calling for U.S. authorities to investigate and intervene. ⚠️ These claims are allegations and have not been independently verified. If substantiated, they could represent one of the most serious market manipulation accusations in crypto history. This story is developing.

@PlayoffDude Anyone hating on #LeBron at this stage is just jealous because they know their own 40+ old self can't do half the stuff he's doing. Sometimes in sports, you just need to let go of the hate and respect the legendary moments that we don't get so often. #StarAcademy #Respect

LeBron’s decline is tough to watch, man. 🥹

I can't believe I just read through this whole thing. Maybe you can split it up next time...lol. Your thoughts on the future of immigration will only work if the next generation understands that not all high earners are talented and not all low wage workers are talentless. If a technology like blockchain/crypto can be used to create economic freedom around the world, most people will have the ability and choice to live where they see fit without concentration in a specific region or part of the world. But overall, your opinion is in line with most reasonable humans who see the world as a whole human race and not just fragments. Good people should never have to suffer for the actions of a few bad apples.

I'll do the ill-advised thing and try to explain my own thought process and constraints (and possibly unadmitted cowardice) that guide when I do and don't speak on these kinds of political topics - and further down just say what some of my direct opinions are. It's 2026, the careful route isn't getting us anywhere anymore, might as well try being open. When it comes to hot political issues (not abstract questions like tax policy, surveillance, etc, which it's actually easy to talk about, I mean specific events that affect specific groups), I basically have three choices: 1. Talk about none of them 2. Talk about some of them 3. Talk about all of them Many people do (1). In crypto, many people talk about "decentralized governance", a "freedom", a "fairer economy without intermediaries", "cypherpunk", etc etc, and maybe talk about how blockchains and encryption and zero knowledge proofs can make these things happen. But they take care to avoid making the link between those values and any specific situation. This approach is "safe". But ultimately, it feels hollow, and I think it makes your mind hollow. It makes it really easy for you to think you're doing the right thing, because you're working on all the right technologies, but then because you never engage on any concrete issue, you don't even notice if you're not actually making any impact on the underlying problems - or worse, actively diverting idealistic talent and effort from actually-effective solutions. I think this applies both to individuals, and to whole communities. And so if you don't want to fall into this trap, you have to engage with the world. Note that this does not mean that *your work* can't be general-purpose and instead needs to be targeted to directly affect some specific situation in the world. Focused work is good. But I do think the world benefits from a decentralized public apparatus of moral conscience that extends beyond topics that you directly work on. Many people do (3). But there is a good argument against (3): if you are forced to take positions on everything in the world, then you're usually taking positions on things you had little or no prior understanding of, and your positions are motivated by a few emotional articles or posts that recently convinced you in one direction or the other. And if you have 100 topics, you can only devote 1% of the effort to tracking each one. It becomes easy for someone to convince you of a position that you would not even support if you were more informed about it. There is a reason why people hate the "omnicause", "everything-bagel activists", etc. Focusing on everything dilutes the message to the point where you're succeeding at nothing (or worse, having actively counterproductive postures on things as a result of low information). Hence, there is the option of (2). But (2) has a natural problem: once you talk about some things, it becomes easier for people to pressure you to talk about even more things, by accusing you of selective outrage and hypocrisy. (And, to be fair, selective outrage and hypocrisy are very real problems) To defend against this, you need to hold "a line". One very natural line is to mostly limit your attention to topics that relate to you personally. For example, I and my family are from Russia. When I see footage of the war in Ukraine, whether videos of soldiers getting ready for a military operation, or families expressing their anguish after their apartment building or hospital was bombed, they are often speaking in a language I have known since childhood. More importantly, and regrettably, I personally met Vladimir Putin and thus to some small degree helped legitimize him back in 2018. To me, these things mean this conflict relates to me and is my responsibility to do the right thing in (and not just be a passive bystander, perhaps saying "I am against war" exactly once and then continuing my life). Similarly, Canada is my responsibility, as it's the land where I grew up - both when the government financially deplatformed the truckers (which I criticized), and when the bumbling old man down south starts bullying and threatening its sovereignty (which I've also criticized). Meanwhile I've spent 0 days in Myanmar or Venezuela, less than three months in the Middle East, and have much less context in those and other places - I know what I know from reading second-hand sources and making my own judgements about which facts are true and false and which arguments are right and wrong, which is far from zero, but it still has limits. The United States is a special case, because historically politics in the USA affects the world so much, many people (though today much less than a decade ago) look up to it as an example, and it has massive influence through its economy and its centralized technology platforms. So sorry guys, the entire world has a right to blab about your internal affairs. Something something vaguely similar to "no taxation without representation". This approach that I outlined does have a weakness: regions of the world that are economically very poor will have very few globally powerful people that have close connections to them. Hence, a "take care of your own" norm leaves such people in the dust, vulnerable to being ignored or even outright predated on by others, with no one powerful sticking up for them. I personally try to address this by first making a judgement about whether a faraway situation is more like an internal conflict or more like eg. global public health, and apply the "take care of your own" norm in cases like the former and not in cases like the latter. This is the explanation I can give for why I've publicly said relatively more about Canada, USA and Russia, and relatively little about Venezuela, Sudan, Africa, Myanmar, China, or the Middle East, including both Iran and the various conflicts involving Israel. Basically, if I don't draw the line roughly here, what other line can I hold? *Maybe* there are some people who are closer to "pure devs" who can hold a different line, speaking *only* about abstract generalities, but I've always covered the full spectrum from pure tech to social issues, so I don't think I *can* hold that line. Hence, instead I have to hold slome further-out and more complicated line. Of course, it's also easy to construct a less self-serving explanation: I have some view of who my constituency is, and I am a coward who is afraid of offending them. I could respond by pointing to various instances in which I've been publicly brave (whether calling out Craig Wright, or visiting Kyiv, or running through 2km of rain to get to a conference panel on time etc), but maybe my critics can justly counter by pointing out that this is simply the old-as-time masculine tactic of "compensating for something". I will let readers make their own judgements. Now, my views on a few specific topics: Iran From what I can tell, the Iranian regime is: * Literally killing tens of thousands of people, in gruesome ways, in its crackdown on the current protests * Totally denying Iranian people access to the worldwide internet, in part to cover up the above, and there is a high chance that the regime intends this situation to be permanent. * In the longer term, doing more generally awful things like imposing what clothes women have to wear, providing military support to Russia's invasion, publicly wishing death to various groups on official channels, etc These things are unambiguously awful. They're not a "eh, what can we do" normal level of awful, they are totally awful. Even if global public condemnation accomplishes nothing else, simply reducing the regime's social status to the point where it equals that of North Korea's gov seems like part of the bare minimum that should be done. Though hopefully, the protests will succeed and expand and Iranian people will get freedom. I hope that the crypto space finds a way to be useful by exploring more options to restore access to the global internet to Iranians. Furthermore, there is another important point to make: many people say "this is awful", but then still maintain an attitude of disapproval toward overly "impolite" ways of dealing with the problem, eg. using physical violence against the Iranian leadership. I see the value of a "suggesting violence is impolite" norm in maintaining civilization, but IMO that norm should be focused on *initiating* the escalation to full-scale violence; it's fine to respond with violence when violence is already being used in the other direction on a large scale. Being overly pacifist is a good way to feel self-righteous while doing nothing effective to prevent the people you sympathize with from being rolled over. Nothing in those above paragraphs is "anti-Islamic". But there is the question: if we analyze the situation, and ask *what causes* the Iranian government to be abnormally brutal, then might the conclusion be that those causes include cultural values that are core to Islam? I personally don't understand Islam enough to comment. But I can say two things: * There's plenty of extreme evil that happens without Islam. the invasions carried out by Russia are one good example, there's plenty of extremely dangerous political megalomania worldwide that is 100% secular * In my experience, the anti-Islam hate that I see in our world often goes beyond cultural criticism, and turns into attacks on people and condemnation of entire ethnic groups (see eg. post 9/11). Culture can and should be criticized, including by outsiders. This includes banal things, like my view that miles, feet and pounds are stupid units of measurement and SI units are more civilized (I have much less confidence on 'F vs 'C). It also includes deeper things like moral values. But there is a way to do this that does not turn into personal attacks on people. I do often see anti-Islam discourse failing at this (though some criticize effectively and humanely). Israel/Gaza My moral view on the situation is: * The attack on Oct 7 was a brutal unjustified war crime that killed around a thousand innocent people, and should be condemned without qualifications * The response to the attack has killed ~50-100x more people than the original attack, the majority of them civilians, and has destroyed the homes of over a million Gazans and traumatized the entire population. This level of total devastation in response to an attack of a much smaller scale exceeds all reasonable bounds of self-defense, and itself is a brutal war crime * There are various statements made by high-level officials, actions by soldiers, etc, that I've seen that suggest that the mental state involved in the Gaza operation is less "a principled effort to protect people" and more "classic pre-modern revenge psychology" * Hence, the ICC was right to charge both sides of this * The Israeli government is on the whole a lot more rights-respecting and better to live under than the Hamas one. However, the Hamas government already has social status worse than North Korea. Meanwhile, the Israeli one often gets treated at the highest official levels as a special valued ally, in a way that I fear deeply undermines moral norms, and thus creates room for eg. letting Putin get away with his crimes in Ukraine. This is an imbalance, and I think this is something that many people are reacting against. * What happened in 1967, 1948, and arguably even the late 2000s is honestly not very relevant to this moral analysis. The majority of the population was not even alive when those things happened, there's no good moral reason why the fate of a 14 year old kid who is seeing their home or family destroyed should depend on arcane debates about the previous century's history * The biggest heroes in this situation are probably people quietly working in the background to reconnect people and lay the ground for peace that will hopefully shape itself over decades. I don't think the world can respond *only* by doing this, because it's also important to defend norms ("injustice anywhere is a threat to justice anywhere"), but I'm really glad these people exist and morally support them. I strongly oppose anti-Semitism. To me, this is a special case of the broader moral principle that one should not judge entire ethnic groups by the decisions of a few elites. In other worlds, "hate the government, not the people". One important corollary of this, of course, is that criticizing the Israeli government does not count as anti-Semitism. Principles vs details of the situation I should note explicitly that these moral views above are very "principles-driven" and not "details of the situation" driven. I think this is the correct level at which to approach this. The reason is that while "details of the situation" thinking often can acknowledge subtle important facts that would otherwise be ignored, nevertheless: * It has very low galaxy brain resistance ( vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/1… ). It's too easy to cherry-pick details that favor your side, and appeal to particularism ("you outsiders can't understand...") to shield one's local bullying from external pushback * It's not something you can build norms around. Peace and humanitarianism in the world depend on moral norms: the fact that the whole world recoils in disgust at certain unconscionable outcomes, and that it can do this in lockstep, and can't be divided-and-conquered by arguing arcane points about third-order game theory or history. Some say "norms are fake anyway, we're in the law of the jungle, you have to protect your own". To anyone who sincerely believes this, all I can say is: YOU HAVE NO FRIGGIN IDEA HOW MUCH EVERYONE, EVEN THE VILLAINS, ARE HOLDING THEMSELVES BACK BECAUSE OF MORALITY AND NORMS EVEN TODAY, AND HENCE, HOW MUCH WORSE THINGS COULD GET * Outsiders to a situation have more understanding of principles than of situational details. Hence, if it's valid for outsiders to express views on things at all, they should focus on their relative expertise, which is the principles. ICE and Immigration The other big thing happening now, that I've been silent on, is ICE turning into a full-on police state and now shooting protesters in broad daylight. The immigration issue is complex and it is important to separate two aspects: * Whether less or more immigration is good (and what kinds). If the highest acceptable level of immigration is less than the level that would naturally arise in the absence of either walls or deportation, then walls or deportation are in principle required. * The fact that ICE is acting like total assholes about this situation. These things can and must be separated. There are immigration systems far more restrictive than USA, whose implementation is more humane. The second needs to be strongly opposed, full stop, no counterarguments admitted. Once the police state apparatus exists to this extent, it *will* keep finding new targets. Even today, it has already expanded its violence from illegal immigrants to obviously-American defenders of immigrants. [insert Niemöller poem here] Today, this second issue (the cruelty) is the more important one in the USA, and its morality is pretty cut-and-dried simple, as described above, so nothing more to say about it. So now, on to the first issue (ideal levels of immigration). I am generally persuaded by Bryan Caplan-style arguments that the answer is "very high". To summarize: (i) the bulk of economic evidence suggests that high-skilled immigration is pretty close to no-downsides good, high-volume low-skilled immigration *slightly* depresses wages of low-wage locals, but it also means consumer prices go down for everyone. The $3 falafels in Berlin (which in turn support the city's status as an affordable home for various artistic and cultural activities) are only possible because of the Middle Eastern low-skill labor (ii) in the USA, even illegal immigrants (!!!) on average commit less crime than the native population. In Europe though this is not true. I also add my own bespoke point (iii): if you are worried about change to *culture*, then I believe that the larger driver of culture change is not foreigners but technology. The real great replacement is the kids growing up on TikTok. (also, much of cross-country culture spread happens through the internet, not via farm workers or Uber drivers) And so actually I believe that if you care about stopping the great replacement, the right thing to invest in is ... longevity technology, so that existing human beings and their generations with unique cultures can survive through the ages as human beings, and not just as history pages. That's right: making everyone live 10x longer is a *conservative* technology. (To the counterargument that this will also make evil dictators live 10x longer and prevent their societies from ever escaping: if we get into that world and a dictator gets too awful, then yeah I'm ok with droning them, I already said so above) However, the downsides to public safety and government welfare expenditure from some types of immigrants are real. Personally, I think that we're very far from exhausting the opportunities we have to solve this problem without deporting people at all - I regularly see stories of criminals getting freed after committing three murders and then quickly going out and committing a fourth. We should stop doing this. Every act of lenience against a violent criminal saps public acceptance for immigration, and thus leads to ten acts of anti-lenience toward peaceful foreigners. Hence, true long-term empathy would withhold lenience from the criminals, and apply that lenience to peaceful foreigners instead. But there is a larger problem behind this problem. Western morality is very dominated by "out of sight out of mind" bias. If you are on the inside of the wall, then you're part of the family, all human beings are equal, let's sing and dance in a circle. If you are on the outside of the wall, then you get performative thoughts and prayers, but in terms of substantive support, well, hang on we'll get right back to you. This is where I think the social role of the "illegal immigrant" category in the USA comes in. It is a strange category, because we're saying that legally there are tens of millions of people who are violating the law on a mass scale, but we're not _doing_ that much about it. Requiring employers to verify immigration status of employees frequently gets shot down. But from the perspective of "Western society hacking around its own broken moral code", it makes perfect sense. We believe in "all humans are equal", that "second-class citizenship" is a bad and dystopian idea, that everyone deserves "good" working conditions, etc etc. But the economic reality is that the wage level that maximizes (not only local economic, but also humanitarian) gains from hiring foreign labor is lower than the level that is acceptable to locals - if you force the wage for low-skill foreigners up to the same level as locals, then you end up hiring much fewer of them, and so even the total humanitarian benefit you bring to low-income foreigners by giving them more economic opportunity is lower. So how do we solve this? Well, we invent the "illegal immigrant" category, and so the moral baseline becomes "well technically you don't even have the right to be here, and so really, anything you get here counts as an extra bonus". This is the moral self-arbitrage. The problem is that wealthy countries by default are exactly in the position of the space colony from the movie Elysium: they're gated communities for the global rich, where everyone outside is a second-class citizen on a global scale. So if we say "we refuse to exploit foreign labor, they can all stay outside", we're not actually being moral. Hence, to me the principled solution seems to be, to be more willing as a society to say "you're welcome in the land and you can work, but you're not part of the family", and to create visa categories that reflect this fact. Paths to become part of the family should continue to exist, but it's okay for those paths to be much more difficult than paths to simply come in and work. This is a model that already works well in many places in the non-West. And today, I find many non-Western countries increasingly opening themselves up to foreigners, while Western countries close down, add more ESTA and visa bureaucracy, border guards become more annoying and insufferable, etc. The grand sacrifice: take less seriously the idea that "once you're within the walls, everyone is part of the family and is equal". This mentality was more sustainable in the 20th century, when people's identities were mostly bound up with a single country and most people did not even see anything outside their home country, but it is incompatible with the 21st, where information is global and our identities are plural. Unless we can achieve equality across the whole world, saying "within our home we are equal, outside our home go away" is ultimately a larp morality, and we should move on to something better. This *should* be a major task of the next generation of compassion-driven political philosophers. If we do this, it opens the door to greater openness to the outside world, which will ultimately be a human rights boon to everyone by giving people much-needed second options. (special thanks to @ameensol for pushing me to be more brave even though I predict he will disagree with ~1/3 of the above)

Because too many people are fearful of being called 'Islamophobic' Remember: Islam is not a race - it's an idea In the West, we freely critique other people's ideas. It's a fundamental part of a free and well-functioning society.

@TansuYegen Great tricks but only a few will work in real life games especially trapping control. The closer the ball is within reach, the more control he will have. If he can trap like @10Ronaldinho and have the speed like Diego Maradona, then he is a legend in the making.🏆⚽🥅

A 13-year-old boy named Valeri Kostov, who plays football by doing 3 training sessions a day, is attracting the attention of world giants, while one club that wants to sign the player has made an offer of 10 million euros per year.

@brian_armstrong I was LMAO yesterday when I saw some so-called crypto "experts" and KOLs praising and calling for the bill to pass. "We’d rather have no bill than a bad bill. Hopefully we can all get to a better draft." - Brian Armstrong of @coinbase Well said Brian, well said. 🤝

After reviewing the Senate Banking draft text over the last 48hrs, Coinbase unfortunately can’t support the bill as written. There are too many issues, including: - A defacto ban on tokenized equities - DeFi prohibitions, giving the government unlimited access to your financial records and removing your right to privacy - Erosion of the CFTC’s authority, stifling innovation and making it subservient to the SEC - Draft amendments that would kill rewards on stablecoins, allowing banks to ban their competition We appreciate all the hard work by members of the Senate to reach a bi-partisan outcome, but this version would be materially worse than the current status quo. We’d rather have no bill than a bad bill. Hopefully we can all get to a better draft. We'll keep fighting for all Americans and for economic freedom. Crypto needs to be treated on a level playing field with the rest of financial services so we can build this industry in a safe and trusted way in America.

I couldn't agree more. This is absolute 💯 and I'm glad to know there are people who truly understand these simple facts. NAILED IT and a direct BULLS EYE. Sounds like a mind reader because this is one hundred percent how I feel. I don't need social media validation to know my value. I'm not insecure and definitely prefer valuable content over quantity. I'm not shy but I'm very self aware, and definitely enjoy some privacy. I'm well travelled and prefer dealing with people in Real Life. It's OK to post pics here and there but not "20 times" a day about every little thing you do. 🤝

People Who Never Post Pictures On Social Media...

@brian_armstrong Now you're speaking my language 💯. This is the absolute number one focus for mass adoption. #Facts #StarAcademy #Simple

You don't need to understand electricity to use a lightswitch This is what we’re trying to do with crypto. Give users better financial services, while hiding the complexity