Kirk Dameron

@james_xond 22 (actually just one week over 21; signed a mortgage on 1 Dec after graduating from university the previous May) The secret: spend less; save more (for the downpayment) Life is full of choices.

@mtb_karl @cyb3r_n1cky @cybertrexevents @cybertruck @kneubuehl @gregweik No. Had some grins watching those of you who did it; but pleased I got off the rocks and over to the sand several hours ahead of you. 😅

Anyone else having a weird urge lately to run Hell's Revenge in the wet again? 😅😳

@RichardAubrey11 @Tesla Cybertruck really is, just amazing. 15 mos. since I bought my AWD. Been to 42 states + 5 provinces so far. x.com/EmergenceKirk/…

@EmergenceKirk @Tesla Thinking of a Cybertruck to replace our current farm truck (very dependable Honda Ridgeline. The FSD would be thing I want plus electricity is dirt cheap here in Texas ($0.104 kWh). Cheaper than gasoline.

From the first pioneer wagons to cross-country trips on FSD Supervised in under 200 years

@peterrhague @michaelshermer We don't have enough precipitation where I come from to support your English hedges, but we still drive a lot of single-lane "roads" to get where we are going. This was a group of us one day a month ago. x.com/EmergenceKirk/…

@michaelshermer That’s a wide road by countryside standards! People fly down them at 80mph. Try the true single track ones with tall hedges each side so you can’t see what’s coming round the corner.

Daily Awe English country side driving the twisty narrow roads, 2 lanes but so narrow cars can’t get past each other and must find periodic turnouts. Crazy. These must have been horse trails at one point, maybe single track walking trails and one day past animal trails.

@robmsolomon @TrustlessState Thank you, Rob. Appreciate the analysis & taking the time to write it down & share it. I've read much and thought deeply, as well. Have come to the same conclusion. Letting those who are jazzed more by the money side and the price of the token just fade from my curation. 🤷‍♂️

I’ve been feeling impatient and disillusioned with Ethereum and saw @TrustlessState sold. Figured I’d do some research and maybe start to exit myself. After reviewing, I’m more optimistic than I’ve been in years and won’t be selling. I think the problem is that Glamsterdam, native rollups, preconfs, lean Ethereum, etc. are super boring. We all want to see some flashy use cases we can see and touch, but Ethereum isn’t a consumer product. It’s not even typical internet infrastructure like (Stripe and AWS). It’s digital bedrock (like DNS and HTTPS). CT reminds me of engineering demos where the non-technical audience would be more impressed with the junior dev’s flashy UI than the 100x backend engineer’s data pipelines. The trilemma (secure, scalable, trustless) is solvable and Ethereum still seems to be the best positioned to do so. The “marketing” used to be WAY better and the vibes have fallen apart but I don’t think that matters all that much. I’d rather the devs focus on delivering the increasingly logical and achievable roadmap. L2s were a mess and the “blockchain revolution” has been taking longer than anticipated but when is progress ever linear? In the future when nation states, corporations and ai agents are digitizing identity, ownership records, permissions, and contracts, what’s going to underpin it? Siloed servers with fragile APIs and janky data normalization? Paper still? I still think the “world computer” is IMMENSELY valuable and I still think Ethereum will be the bedrock that enables it. I plan to keep betting my ETH on it for now.

@wartranslated Perfect. They are doing it for us. Make Russia Moscovia Again! ❗️ MRMA ... the size of the Moscovia that began the imperial enterprise circa 1500 under Ivan III, Vasily III, and Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible).

While they were bragging about capturing Kyiv and all of Ukraine, the Kremlin is now closing the skies over its own capital and a massive part of Russia. A flight ban for altitudes up to 5,100 meters will take effect in July, affecting small aviation, business jets, and other civilian flights.

@elonmusk Elon, My husband Ted and I share this X account, and we’ve posted together many times. But today I wanted to write to you personally, from my own heart. I want to thank you for creating tools that help me learn something new every single day, that make my life better, and that actually make me excited to live longer — because your inventions keep getting more amazing. I was born in 1942 in Normandy, France, under German occupation. In 1946, my family moved to the coast along the English Channel. So many towns and villages had been damaged or destroyed. As children, we played among the old bunkers and in cemeteries. Later in life, I married an American airman, moved to the United States with him, earned a doctorate in education, and spent my career teaching languages. Now I’m 84 years old, retired, and living in Alaska with my husband of 64 years. Not long ago I discovered you and your work. We recently bought a Cyberbeast, and I love everything about it — the comfort, the incredible technology, and especially FSD, which we use every day. We even installed a Starlink dish on our roof so we have reliable internet everywhere in Alaska. I use Grok every single day. Thanks to you, I’m now learning about AI itself — at 84! I also use X daily because it lets me see what’s really happening in the world, without media filters or propaganda, and connect with people from every corner of the globe. Instead of living in the past and reminiscing about the “good old days,” I wake up every morning excited to see what new invention or breakthrough you’re working on and what the future will bring. Thank you, Elon, from the bottom of my old heart. You’ve made this 84-year-old woman feel young and hopeful again. ❤️ Françoise Here we are with our new Cyberbeast !

@VladSaigau @peterrhague Agreed. It is the private spaceflight in NewSpace, and the taking on of direct entrepreneurial risk by private capital that makes it such a directional change. All the incentives are different. The pure play political incentives of GovSpace bring only sloth-paced innovation.🤷‍♂️

@peterrhague Hahaha this take is completely backwards. Rapid innovation achieving progress that state-backed programs don’t have the risk tolerance for is why people love SpaceX, not because its led by Elon. To think its purely for Elon is ridiculous and says more about the original poster…

Someone hasn’t witnessed everybody who cheers on Starship also cheering on New Glenn. Including Elon.

@peterrhague The question that seems to me to be missed in Europe is this: Why on Earth is the use of air conditioning in a private home a matter of public policy? Why should those who would be your betters have any say in the matter? 🤷‍♂️

The subtext here is that people should be made sweaty and uncomfortable, and in some cases risk their health, to properly motivate them to support the Good Policy.

@ApoStructura 😂

I thought I’d try posting some of my successful posts on Threads. Off to a great start!

@TesCamStudio , are you going to do a build that works on Android? or with the WinOS operating system?

Excellent articulation of where you are, and think Ethereum Foundation should go. I LOVE the ppl coming on saying they cannot handle longer reasoned arguments. I carefully curate my social networking service X to follow important topics & serious subject matter experts. Muting those who cannot or will not read to comprehend, & should therefore use the Instagram or TikTok SNS, is one of the very great benefits of account curation on X. 🤷‍♂️

Some of my perspective on where the @ethereumfndn is going. First of all, this is only my own view. The board is not just me, and I have no extra special powers on the board that the other board members do not. @aerugoettinea is the one executing much of this transition. My input has been largely on technical questions. The board is in the process of expanding, and my own power within the org will continue to decrease, which is honestly what I want. The 2025 era brought many important improvements to EF and its ability to execute. Many issues were resolved, and EF continues to benefit from its improved efficiency and greater focus on concrete goals to this day. And so with those problems resolved, early this year, the largest remaining hole that I perceived was something different nagging at me: I would regularly spot people saying things like "vitalik says these beautiful things about ethereum needing to be decentralized, and have privacy, and be a sanctuary technology, but why do the EF's actions not reflect that?" Now, you may have been hearing something different. You may not have been sensing a feeling of crisis at all, and maybe were hearing people saying that finally we were taking execution and BD seriously and the main task for us is to keep going that way and be even better and faster. Then probably there is genuine difference between you and me, in what kinds of criticism I take most seriously, and what kinds of critics through their criticism are most able to make me feel pain. As an analogy, let's briefly switch over to a different domain. One belief you can have about Google is that it is a success story, and has brought a lot of good to humanity in organizing the world's information. Another belief you can have about Google is that they had a beautiful idealistic beginning, but at some point the corruption of mainstream corporate attitudes seeped in, and they slowly bit by bit completely abandoned the "don't be evil" slogan. My belief on Google specifically is probably somewhere between the two. BUT, if you had taken me back in time to ~2008, and offered me a button to press to make Google one or two standard deviations more "dogmatic", eg. give Richard Stallman permanent veto power over some key policies, I would immediately press it. Why? Because a choice for one company is not a choice for the world, or even one country. Google existed and exists in the context of a technology industry generally drifting away from early idealistic don't-be-evil roots and toward greed for financial gain, totalizing visions of accelerated superintelligence, infiltration by sociopaths, and craven capitulation to (or worse, active participation in) government pressure for ideological control, surveillance and war. And so *one company* doing something different, positioning itself to be what George Bernard Shaw calls the Unreasonable Man, resisting the trend of the times, would have been better for freedom, balance of power and stability of society as a whole, than *all* large companies bending to dominant trends. This is a part of my version of pluralism. This line of thinking is not just mine, but I also is not too far off from what Aya and others had in mind with the Mandate. Now how does this all get to the role of the EF? EF is not a "center of Ethereum", rather EF is "one node, with a defined purpose, alongside other nodes". We've always said that the EF should be the latter, but many in the Ethereum ecosystem (and even within the EF) wanted us to be the former. Now, we are taking action to ensure that we will be the latter. This is particularly important because EF is a limited organization, with limited resources and limited organizational capacity. The EF has only ~0.16% of all ETH (less than many other individual ETH holders), whereas among other blockchains it's common for "the central foundation" to have 10-50%. Fiscally, the EF was originally designed to fulfill a limited work scope defined in the token sale docs and other pre-launch materials (building the chain software; getting through Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity), which was fully completed in 2022; it was not designed to be an eternal steward. And so today, the EF is choosing to use its remaining resources to pursue longevity over breadth (yes, this means we sell less ETH). The EF focuses *specifically* on those activities critical to the success of ethereum as a censorship/capture-resistant, open, private and secure system, that would not happen otherwise. This means making hard choices, and in some cases even activities that we highly approve of and people that we highly respect becoming outside of the EF. People of great technical talent, public respect and even alignment with the mission and CROPS being outside of the EF is in fact necessary if we want important tasks to be able to attract outside capital. This also means the EF taking opinionated stands culturally. This is all intended in cooperation with all other parts of ethereum. We recognize that many other parts of the ethereum world highly respect CROPS and related values. But highly respecting is not the same as choosing to specialize and totally dedicate to a domain (Compare in a different domain: I think reducing animal cruelty is important, and I like vegan food, but am not full unconditional vegan myself) EF is still in a transition period, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize over the next few months. What are the guiding principles of this new form? Again, I am only one person, but I can give my answer from a technical perspective (there are also critical non-technical aspects). At the core, *Ethereum must be impressive*. We are living in an age of highly intelligent AI and all kinds of other technological acceleration. "Status quo EVM, with a hard fork or two a year to optimize for short-term needs of users" is not interesting. To some, "impressive" means: 250ms latency and 1M TPS. I think Ethereum trying to go that route is a mistake. Being as fast and as scalable as possible, and only a small epsilon more decentralized than the others, is a route to mediocrity, and if we try it we will lose. I think Ethereum should scale. But I think Ethereum should strive the hardest to be deeply impressive in a different dimension: the CROPS dimension. This means things like: * Provably bug-free Ethereum. This is a goal that all cybersecurity researchers would have thought is absurd and impossible, up until roughly 6 months ago. Now, it's on the cusp of being possible, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification. So we should be frontrunners in doing this. * Available chain consensus. Ethereum is, and with lean consensus will cotninue to be, the ONLY chain that has both (i) traditional-BFT style properties that it's safe under asynchrony up to a high level of fault tolerance, and (ii) the bitcoin PoW-style property that under synchrony it's safe up to 49% attackers. As far as I can tell, literally no other chain has this or is planning for it; bitcoin goes for (ii) only and most other chains go for (i) only. Some will remember I fought hard for this, Unreasonably insisting that it is not OK for ethereum to rely on social consensus and hard forks to rescue ethereum from 34% of nodes going offline. It's OK for chains like hyperledger, bnb, solana, tempo, etc. It's not OK for bitcoin or ethereum or eg. zcash. * Intermediary minimization. The fact that smart contract wallets, protocols like railgun, etc have to send transactions through intermediaries to get included onchain is honestly embarrassing, and it's a constant point of fragility. Hence the work on FOCIL and EIP-8141 (and 7701 and years of work before) to make transaction sending intermediary-minimized with public mempool and strong inclusion properties, in a truly general-purpose way, that covers not just eg. secp256r1, but also privacy protocols and much more. Kohaku is pushing intermediary minimization at the user layer, pulling Ethereum away from the dystopian status quo world where our wallets don't even verify the chain, send our private data out to a dozen third-party servers, and toward a brighter CROPS future. Some of these goals are Unreasonable - maybe Ethereum would be "fine" getting only 50% of the way - what if we depend on intermediaries, but make it easy to switch? But going 50% of the way would not make Ethereum Deeply Impressive in the CROPS way. So we push for 100%. Fortunately all these goals are compatible with high TPS, this is a major focus of research (esp. on scaling the state). Well-designed L2s can also help, especially L2s optimized for specific applications (eg. high-volume trading, privacy...). These goals are even compatible with significantly lower slot times, thanks to Raul's work on erasure-coded P2P, and many other optimizations. The most high-value "product" of the ethereum blockchain, financially speaking, is ETH the asset. Ethereum secures $250 billion of ETH. The types of properties of Ethereum that I mentioned above are very good for ETH the asset. Nearly 90% of my net worth is in ETH, and most of the remainder is ~$40m of onchain fiat of which every dollar has already been allocated for some open-source biotech or software or hardware initiative. That said, there are aspects of supporting ETH the asset - *necessary* aspects even - that are outside the scope of the EF. This is where we need other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than the EF does) to step in and help. EF has been recently thinking more about how it will relate to other such organizations, and give them needed initial support. EF will be a smaller ship than in previous years, a more opinionated one - in some cases more opinionated in ways that might be difficult to comprehend - but a longer-lasting one, and one suited to making sure that ethereum brings something meaningful to the world. We are grateful to all those inside and outside the EF who are helping to make this happen.

@NicholasLissack @TousiTVOfficial It's all (apparently) a part of Trump's "Madman Theory of Geopolitical Relations." Listening to this podcast has helped immensely w me understanding Trump & his geopolitics. x.com/jamesdboys/sta… ... while continuing to loathe the man personally.

@TousiTVOfficial The mixed messages have me utterly confused.

🇺🇸 BREAKING: As both U.S. and IRGC claim to be close to reaching a deal, President Trump has decided to post this.

@peterrhague The short-lived name "Interplanetary Transport System" (ITS) for the win! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITS_launc…

I do miss the brief Planet Express phase of the program

@yarotrof The world, and the Ukrainians in partcular, will continue to tell the story and commemorate the failed public policy (by Soviet Russian communist regime) that led to the Chornobyl nuclear disaster! ... no matter how hard Russia may try to erase it. Russia is a terrorist state.

First the Kremlin caused the Chornobyl nuclear disaster, and 40 years it bombed a museum commemorating it.

Monarchies, juntas, or failed states lecturing the one place in the Horn of Africa that actually works. Irony level: Nuclear.☢️ • Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Absolute Monarchy • Arab Republic of Egypt Military dictatorship • State of Qatar Absolute Monarchy • Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan Monarchy • Republic of Türkiye Authoritarian / dictatorship leaning • Islamic Republic of Pakistan Fragile military state/ (failed state vibes) • Republic of Djibouti - Authoritarian dictatorship • Federal Republic of Somalia Classic failed state • State of Palestine Virtual non-state / perpetual failed project • Sultanate of Oman Absolute Monarchy • Republic of the Sudan Failed state / military dictatorship • Republic of Yemen Failed state / war zone • Republic of Lebanon Collapsed failed state • Islamic Republic of Mauritania Authoritarian / hybrid dictatorship

@ApoStructura @peterrhague Perhaps @peterrhague may find a use case for the excellent mini-split heat pump technology that has come out of (mostly, Japan & South Korea) in the past couple decades. Truly life-changing difference in our house, which had no A/C when we bought it in 2011. (in Denver)

@EmergenceKirk @peterrhague Sadly I’m not allowed to drill the walls :/ but thank your for the suggestion!

When I show fellow Brits my portable AC unit

@ApoStructura @peterrhague You'll love the mini-split and the cooling it provides. I just asked Grok: "Teach a European about mini-split air conditioners." It did a great job. Try it.

@ApoStructura @peterrhague A mini-split is not a window A/C. Rather, the condenser unit is mounted on an outside wall, the evaporator unit is mounted on an inside wall, and only two small copper lines and a few wires need penetrate the wall. Does not require any changes to your windows whatsoever.