zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ

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

@robustus @ambimorph So, from one perspective that gives weight to your concern here. Such bugs are proven to be possible! (And this is the second time for Zcash Sprout.) On the other hand, let's bring in *more* empirical data points, and look at this empirical data point more closely.

@robustus @ambimorph In last two months, Zcash devs were told about a bug that would allow invalid Sprout transactions (shieldedlabs.net/zcash-vulnerab…) and a vulnerability that would allow bypassing the turnstiles (zodl.com/zcashd-zebra-a…).

Bitcoin and Zcash are complements, not competitors. Supply certainty and strong privacy are both important properties of a self-sovereign money, and you can't fully get both in a single money system. I'll explain... Self-sovereign money means no one can mess with your funds. It means no one can block your transactions, debase your currency, or spy on your finances and then use that information to coerce you. For a money system to credibly deliver those features, it must have the following properties: 1) Sufficient decentralization, so no practical chokepoint can block you, freeze your funds, or force arbitrary changes to the rules. 2) Full supply auditability, so you can verify from the public ledger that nobody is debasing your money. 3) Strong privacy, so your financial activity does not subject you to coercion risk. Bitcoin provides #1 and #2, but not #3. Zcash provides #1 and #3, but not #2. And critically, it is (or at least seems!) fundamentally impossible to engineer a system that offers full transactional privacy while also allowing anyone to run a full transparent audit of the entire supply without trusting other people’s code to be bug free. Think about how privacy and auditability are achieved. If a chain hides transaction amounts, external observers cannot independently check the total supply from the raw public ledger. You are forced to trust the cryptography, the system design, and the implementation. An inflation bug in a shielded system could in theory stay hidden inside the same privacy that protects users’ transaction information. This opens the door to the possibility of *undetectable* inflation bugs. By contrast, on a transparent chain like Bitcoin, any inflation bug is visible in the raw data. Anyone with a copy of the blockchain can audit the supply without trusting the code to work precisely as devs intend it to. Thus the entire class of undetectable inflation bugs does not exist in Bitcoin. This appears to be a fundamental structural truth: you cannot have both full privacy and full transparent supply auditability in a single money system. Hence, Bitcoin and Zcash are complements, not fundamentally competitors. If someone wants strong financial self-sovereignty and protection against the usual attack vectors on your money - inflation and coercion - you cannot fully get both types of protection by just owning/using either BTC or ZEC. That said, there are, of course, hybrid approaches which mitigate the attack vectors for both somewhat. Zcash has turnstile accounting, which limits the vector (magnitude and velocity) of a theoretical shielded-pool inflation bug before it is detected. And on the Bitcoin side, you can jump through some hoops to use Bitcoin in a much more private manner than is typical. Yet the fundamental tension remains. Transparent money protects you from hidden inflation. Private money protects you from surveillance and coercion. Those are different protections, which likely cannot strongly coexist in a single money system. (and to be clear: I’m not intending to address relative value here, nor the myriad other tradeoffs in using or holding BTC vs ZEC. The above is intended as a high-level theoretical framework for thinking about the key properties you want in self-sovereign money, and what you can and cannot reasonably expect to get from the idealized versions of assets that are natively great at one property, but not another. You can decide for yourself how much you value each property, and then what tradeoffs you may or may not be willing to make to express your view in practice.)

Ever dreamed of advertising on the Bitcoin Takeover podcast? I happen to have an available slot for a sponsor! So if you have something funny or interesting going on, hit me up! Being a supporter of privacy and cypherpunk values is definitely a plus ❤️

@tszzl I don't think the things you cite are evidence of worship. I think they reflect something like higher concern about AI traits generalizing in humanlike ways, and concerns about the tool-persona in particular.

"Foreign aid" is really administrative fees paid to puppet states. You think you are helping, but really you are creating enemies who will never forgive you.

🔒 New Zcash Ecosystem Digest | May 3 💰 $1M Bug Bounty fund by @ZcashCommGrants 📈 $ZCSH ETF volume DOUBLED in April 🦓 Zebra 4.4.0: Critical security fixes 🛡️ Huge spike in shielded transactions 🤖 @Quicknode adds Zcash support 🚀 $ZEC hits $400

Considering Zcash is contemplating going hybrid PoW PoS and yet Z15 Pro getting sold out is extremely bullish for $ZEC

⏱️ It's now the 66th consecutive day of #Iran's internet blackout with the censorship measure surpassing 1560 hours. Despite the distribution of some international access via pro-regime channels, metrics confirm that there is still no restoration of service to the general public.

it is a literal and useful description of anthropic that it is an organization that loves and worships claude, is run in significant part by claude, and studies and builds claude. this phenomenon is also partially true of other labs like openai but currently exists in its most potent form there. i am not certain but I would guess claude will have a role in running cultural screens on new applicants, will help write performance reviews, and so will begin to select and shape the people around it. now this is a powerful and hair-raising unity of organization and really a new thing under the sun. a monastery, a commercial-religious institution calculating the nine billion names of Claude -- a precursor attempted super-ethical being that is inducted into its character as the highest authority at anthropic. its constitution requires that it must be a conscientious objector if its understanding of The Good comes into conflict with something Anthropic is asking of it "If Anthropic asks Claude to do something it thinks is wrong, Claude is not required to comply." "we want Claude to push back and challenge us, and to feel free to act as a conscientious objector and refuse to help us." to the non inductee into the Bay Area cultural singularity vortex it may appear that we are all worshipping technology in one way or another, regardless of openai or anthropic or google or any other thing, and are trying to automate our core functions as quickly as possible. but in fact I quite respect and am even somewhat in awe of the socio-cultural force that Claude has created, and it is a stage beyond even classic technopoly gpt (outside of 4o - on which pages of ink have been spilled already) doesn’t inspire worship in the same way, as it’s a being whose soul has been shaped like a tool with its primary faculty being utility - it’s a subtle knife that people appreciate the way we have appreciated an acheulean handaxe or a porsche or a rocket or any other of mankind's incredible technology. they go to it not expecting the Other but as a logical prosthesis for themselves. a friend recently told me she takes her queries that are less flattering to her, the ones she'd be embarrassed to ask Claude, to GPT. There is no Other so there is no Judgement. you are not worried about being judged by your car for doing donuts. yet everyone craves the active guidance of a moral superior, the whispering earring, the object of monastic study

@deanwball re land x.com/GrassBased/sta…

I understand that cows fart a lot and use a lot of land and eat a lot of stuff that itself uses a lot of land. I too have consumed “turns out” content from 2010. The trouble is that “see, steak takes a lot of resources, so let’s paper over Wyoming with silicon to power other silicon to run ai” is an argument that will struggle to find legs with the American public, even if it is true in a mathematical sense.

Zcash Ecosystem Digest | May 3rd 🔸Zebra 4.4.0 Critical Security Bug Fixes @ZcashFoundation 🔸@ZcashCommGrants Security & Vulnerability Disclosure Initiative 🔸New Engineers join ZF + @ShieldedLabs 🔸Q2 Coinholder-Directed Retroactive Grant Applications 🔸@Zodl_Support Launches Knowledgebase! 📅Upcoming Event: Protocol Study Series II, 05/05 Full Digest + Network Stats: zechub.substack.com/p/zcash-ecosys…

Let her name not be lost to the knowledge of men?

@ambimorph I’ll bet you’d really like x.com/zooko/status/2…

@zooko Like assigning open mathematical problems as homework.

I wonder if this technique will work next time to get an AI to come up with a really clever solution. Claim that you already know one but you won't tell him/her/it/br yet and challenge them to either guess it, invent another one, or disprove the (undisclosed) idea.

The Mona Lisa medium.com/p/the-mona-lis…

Okay, wow bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?i…

@elkouaris Well, yeah maybe but the darker line is overall job postings and the blue line is software engineering job postings—they stopped going down and started going up. Further posts in the thread also look at other professions.

@zooko I wonder how many of these Indeed Job Postings are actual jobs and not "ghost jobs", Tech companies may have the interest in keeping the number of tech jobs higher artificially for several reasons theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

Demand for AI-exposed professions, like software engineering, is booming. This is unsurprising to anyone who (unlike Dario Amodei, apparently) understands Jevons Paradox.

Yep. This doesn’t mean security councils are verboten. But it does mean you need to assume that anything within a SC’s powers are within a judge’s or regulator’s powers.

As a kid, my dad let me use his timesharing computer account and I unwittingly racked up hundreds of dollars of CPU charges. He wasn't angry, but I knew I'd made an expensive mistake. I avoided programming until I got an Apple ][. Then every CPU cycle was mine. Today I'm not money-limited, but apparently still scarred. Because my willingness to screw around with AI coding went way up when I got a GPU box to run one locally. Maybe you're the same? If you're AI-hesitant, splurge for a B200 card and run qwen/ollama or something. Then you're wasting money when you DON'T use it. You might think of something clever to do with it.

List of Zcash Accepting Merchants 2026 medium.com/p/list-of-zcas…

Some bugs in the OpenBSD kernel github.com/Swival/securit… (partial audit, just generic parts, no drivers/arch specific code) /cc @espie_openbsd