tim-clancy.eth

@lex_node milady businesswire.com/news/home/2026…

what clavicular's popularity & lookmaxxing taught me about ethereum, and why Ethereum is the chain for certified HARDmaxxers, a 🧵

@boredGenius @FoglightPrivacy Is the privacy offered by your foglight thing going to be unconditional or permissioned?

I'm personally working on @FoglightPrivacy that directly addresses all of the issues mentioned above. Its vision is bringing privacy to 99% of onchain users. DM @zeframl on Telegram if you want to learn more.

It's awesome that privacy is finally getting attention and @ethereumfndn is pushing it via the Kohaku initiative. Unfortunately, Kohaku in its current form is deeply flawed and is unlikely to achieve the goal of bringing privacy to regular users today. Here are 2 reasons why🧵

Outside of the normal exit window thing, I think they'd also need to modify their current design so that the oracle updates for prices are bound to be reported within some range of values passed in via L1. Sorta like how the Rocket Pool oDAO limiter works. Would limit sequencer fund-stealing fuckery.

Lighter attaining stage 2 could heal me

@CarlotaFang77 i love you

Who's Milady, send me her eyes

@surfcoderepeat Coredevs are working much faster than historically. You can follow the pace of work on forkcast.org.

how is the ethereum foundation shipping quicker now with AI? weird the roadmap/testing isn't sped up or more ambitious rn

@kassandraETH @vdWijden Yeah. It's hard to advocate for in isolation because by itself it means very little and involves the least moral discernment. A BUSL-licensed centralized, custodial corposlop stablecoin with freeze functions has no CR, no O, no P, but if the contract works it's S.

@vdWijden valid point for sure. S is most underrepresented part of CROPS (bc taken as a given)

When people talk about CROPS they seem to focus on the CR, OS and Privacy part. The security part is in my opinion the most important! Without a secure L1 non of this makes any sense and we have taken Ethereums base layer security for granted by now.

@VitalikButerin @ethereumfndn @aerugoettinea milady

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.

@banteg Neither of you are wrong. Did you disagree with the Unreasonable Man framing?

"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%." — vitalik, after selling 11,703,994 eth

@dumbnamenumbers @0xz80 @lex_node @WalkDog1984 I think the note system is optional.

The hash isn't the issue; the proof system is not PQ regardless, but worse is the note encryption which bc of "harvest now decrypt later" means everything is exposed retroactively aka no exit window. Railgun ALSO might not upgrade to PQ proofs, but that at least could have an exit window.

Pulling back the “privacy “ mask that is $rail . They don’t try to hide it either . If you believe this is privacy then you need to study monero a little more . This is coming from Vitalik himself. This token is just like $zec PINO ( private in name only ) .

@dumbnamenumbers @0xz80 @lex_node @WalkDog1984 Poseidon is not known to be quantum unsafe.

@_Enoch @0xz80 @lex_node @WalkDog1984 Better check your source on that Railgun claim!

> you cannot promote a non-PQ privacy protocol I care deeply about FOSS and Q-day; I disagree with this statement. There are two failure modes to quantum-vulnerable privacy tools: 1) theft of assets and 2) retroactive deanonymization. Some designs are vulnerable to the former but immune to the latter; I believe Railgun's choice of Poseidon over Pedersen gives it these properties. This means users have an "exit window" to escape the system before Q-day, much like they would on validity rollups destined to die. They could avoid the Q-adversary stealing their funds and they would remain private. It is entirely valid to promote a system like that for today's use. Tornado Cash uses Pedersen. The Q-adversary can steal any unwithdrawn funds, but also retroactively deanonymize every deposit and withdrawal. This is strictly worse, but it retains the CRO part of CROPS missing from Railgun, so I also promote its use under the knowledge that running Schor's over every commitment and withdrawal will kill the privacy. Funds withdrawn before Q-day will at least be safe.

@0xz80 @_Enoch @lex_node @WalkDog1984 Q day also affects us right now currently; every day Railgun users post encrypted data on-chain that will be later exposed. I suppose they won't *feel the effects* until later, but even with FOSS you don't feel the effects instantly.

@kassandraETH @donnoh_eth @RailgunIntern @RAILGUN_Project kohaku has the momentum to create the uncensored anonymity set

@_Enoch @donnoh_eth @RailgunIntern @RAILGUN_Project in our libs ppoi is currently configurable/optional problem with this idea in practice right now is if you don’t use ppoi you dont get any anonymity (bc everyone currently uses ppoi)

.@RAILGUN_Project railgun.org -DEX only -No VCs -No admin keys -No bridges -No multisig -70%+ staked -Stakers control fees & security -12+ app integrations (3rd party) -PPOI -Kohaku -Ethereum privacy

@lex_node @WalkDog1984 I'll still stick with Tornado Cash because I have every (rapidly-eroding) legal right to do so and will never preemptively comply.

Vitalik definitely considers railgun to provide privacy so this is not the flex you think it is! he is just describing how it works, which is probably the better of the two potential implementations of proof of innocence...you know at the start whether you're in or out of the association set, and once you're in you can't be kicked out! what you're describing as somehow adverse is actually a safety feature for users, as forced-dissociation after the fact creates more risks for users!

@kassandraETH @donnoh_eth @RailgunIntern @RAILGUN_Project Kohaku's implementation of Railgun should default to using an empty ppoi list so as to be fully CROPS.

@donnoh_eth @_Enoch @RailgunIntern @RAILGUN_Project afaiu main railgun pool contract is upgradeable, personally not exactly sure what upgrade path looks like ideally it would become immutable

@RailgunIntern @0xcyp Calm down, I'm not even saying that is a bad thing. I'm explaining why Kohaku is more than Railgun. My criticism has been the same for years.

@_Enoch @0xcyp wow suddenly railgun markets? ive been spending like two years watching people say the opposite funny how narrative (and frankly criticism) follows price

i mean i love Railgun and what they stand for but privacy shouldn't cost 0.5% of your capital

@donnoh_eth At this rate you guys are going to evolve into generalized CROPSwatch.

man i wish there was an l2beat for privacy………

@RailgunIntern @RAILGUN_Project ??? there are admin keys

@RailgunIntern @donnoh_eth @RAILGUN_Project That's still not immutable.

@donnoh_eth @RAILGUN_Project Only thing that can touch it is the governance contract, don't say shit without doing your research.

@Ether_Gavin @dumbnamenumbers @0xcyp x.com/i/status/20584…

@_Enoch @dumbnamenumbers @0xcyp wdym it's not CROPS? in what way?