Zach Katz

Freer, fairer, more efficient global governance and finance for all. Announcing, thesovereignchain.com

I don't think enough people realize that Ben Goertzel is actually from the future.

With Bridge as one of our on and off ramp partners, we now support USD, MXN, BRL, EU, and GBP operations. With many, many more jurisdictions and currencies being announced shortly. thesovereignchain.com

At this point we all know that it's regulatory clarity which is driving the oncoming wave of crypto growth. So I built the most comprehensive regulatory dashboard to track global progress. 30+ countries: every regulation, law and guidance ever communicated. Links to government websites and practical analyses. 100% FREE, check it out. thesovereignchain.com/dashboard

It's simple; you don't need any flashy fintech to transact on blockchains, and to do it securely. Maybe a bit of coaching, max. That's thesovereignchain.com, power to the people.

@SimkinStepan Gotta get those ramps up brother, I got you beat and I just started.

Cypherpunk blog posts can only get you so far. Instead you can build something customers want and help them move off traditional banking to stablecoin rails. Our mission is to get to end to end stablecoin settlement across all businesses using Altitude because this is how pure velocity and efficiency of money movement is reached. But we have a lot more work to do before we get there. The reality is that most businesses today do require to settle via traditional rails for at least some of their payment volume and we are giving them that option, while they are holding 100% of their balance in stablecoins on the platform. A stablecoin account that connects you to local and onchain rails is how you bridge the gap and fulfill the mission. If you can’t see why this is the way to go, feel free to DM.

@chasef07 Yes dear ser GEL ramps coming your way

@__katz__ My bank kills me on fees. Can you help me transfer money from Georgia (the country) to USA?

Freer, fairer, more efficient global governance and finance for all. Announcing, thesovereignchain.com

You guys' little AI auditor arms race is cute

Top technologists need to coexist in wholesome, life-affirming environments such that their emotions are overwhelmingly positive and they deliver pro-social, well refined innovations. When powerful minds instead roam the crime ridden streets of New York City or San Francisco, self-preserving defense mechanisms and narcissistic instincts override altruism and they conversely deliver technologies that make them or their company more wealthy and powerful by innovating in ways that are uninhibited by the moral reprehension of exploiting others to achieve their goals. This is exponentially more important with the advent of artificial intelligence and we would be wise to learn from institutions of old like Aristotle's Lyceum or Ancient Nalanda when innovating on the frontier. @VitalikButerin @timourxyz

@dankrad Cringey AF. I hope Bitmine gains more power over Ethereum's future than the EF

Sounds like a fun cult to work for 🤔

@Jeyffre I'm with you except for the Iron Man thing. That's more of a gamer/athlete analogue; it doesn't translate perfectly to your knowledge work based thesis.

This whole "stay up to date with AI advances/tools" is a load of engagement-farming nonsense to me (as an AI believer). Thought experiment: you go head-to-head with an experienced lawyer who is semi-decent at using AI himself. You are an AI pro but know nothing about practicing law. Who is going to win in a head-to-head court case? Not you. Thought experiment: you and an experienced contractor are tasked with building the same apartment building. You are an AI pro and the experience contractor is semi-decent at AI. Who will get the house done faster and cheaper? Not you. I think you get the point. The number one driver of success with AI is not "AI Skills" but domain expertise. A lot of software engineers nowadays got into a panic after they experienced coding with Opus 4.5. Think about it -- engineers who are good at code but not necessarily AI suddenly 10x-ed overnight. They think "this software is so powerful, now I'm useless." But this fear is misplaced -- *you* are the one who became powerful -- the tool wasn't the powerful one. Can a non-techie build an app on their own now? Yes. But could they build a *better* app than an experienced software engineer who is also using AI tools? That's extremely doubtful, especially as the code turns into slow spaghetti. Think about the Iron Man (Tony Stark) character. Without the suit, he doesn't stand a chance against the enemies he normally fights. But if someone other than Tony Stark wears the Iron Man suit, they aren't as effective as Tony Stark wearing the suit. People think "learning how to use AI" is like "learning how to operate an Iron Man suit" which is wrong. No, what makes Iron Man Iron Man is his rapid tactical thinking, fearless risk taking, and advanced engineering chops. These are not "Iron Man Skills" but rather "Tony Stark Skills." In his own words "If you're nothing without the suit, then you're nothing at all" applies to AI. If you're nothing without AI, then you are nothing with AI. The number #1 skill to for AI is domain knowledge. There is no substitute for lessons learned from getting figuratively punched in the face in the real world as you deal with real world problems. Only by actually working with subcontractors can you get a 6th sense for when projects will get delayed. Only by regularly talking to vendors can you start getting a sense that certain materials will not be available in time. AI cannot shortcut this process and generally cannot anticipate issues like this. The #2 skill is clear communication. I'd say if your communication skills are top notch and you compete with a domain expert whose communications skills suck, you might actually stand a chance against him if both of you use AI. AI can only do what you tell it to. If you can't articulate your complex goals as actionable steps, AI can't help you. Finally, #3 is the actual AI skills. Stuff like how to set up agents, prevent context from rotting, planning before acting, knowing what tools to use, managing knowledge cutoff dates, benchmarking, etc. That stuff is not hard to learn. But learning those skills without domain expertise will not help you compete against a domain expert. Some people post things like "look! I had AI run my ads and I made $50,000 in 30 days." Buddy, $50,000 is chump change. That's not enough to hire a domain expert. What you really discovered is "competing in a niche that AI unlocked for you." Once you get into the bigger leagues, good luck going head to head in ad campaigns against someone who knows what they are doing (and using AI). Same thing applies to these mostly fake posts about using AI to make profit on Polymarket. Polymarket doesn't do enough volume to get the attention of serious quant firms and there enough degenerate gamblers distorting prices to make easy profits. Again, AI isn't giving you superpowers here, you just aren't competing against that many domain experts. Try vibecoding a trading bot for US treasury interest rates (one of the most competitive financial markets out there) and let me know how that goes. What AI did is help non-techies gain "baseline competence" in a field they aren't trained in. They make a huge leap from incompetent to semi-competent. Then they think that they can extrapolate the curve -- they'll be even better in that domain if they study AI as opposed to the domain itself. That's not how it works. You can't extrapolate small-scale wins with AI when you have no competition to a larger scale. What really happened is that AI unlocked value that was previously too costly to unlock, which is great! But "learning how to use AI" can only get you relatively small wins like that. So yes. If you are a domain expert, you'd be crazy to not use/learn AI. But you'd be even crazier to try to do competitive domain specific work beyond a small scale without domain specific expertise.

@benhoneill @Stablecoin DM'd. Thanks 🙏🏻

If you have issues or feedback on Bridge (@Stablecoin) or see it in the wild. Tag me and I’ll respond or help you get routed to the right place. We want to build with you!

@VitalikButerin And can pre-program to share specific details about the issue to the police so they can respond appropriately.. armed robbery, domestic dispute, individual or group etc.

One tool that seems to me would lead to large wins for safety at very low cost to civil liberties, is that everyone should have easy and deniable on-hand ways of calling the police. Think: you pre-select a few secret words, and when your watch or phone or local device in your house hears these words, it silently auto calls 911, and temporarily streams to the police your real-time location. This could work very well for eg. crypto holders who are worried about getting kidnapped / robbed. If we create an environment where if you rob someone (whether at home or outside), there is at least a 20% chance that the police will be on their way immediately, so you won't have time to take anything from them and you don't even realize whether or not the alarm got triggered, then that type of crime flips to being very non-viable. And because this requires deliberate action from the victim in order to function, the risk that this can be used by the government against people seems relatively quite low.

I checked the forecast and saw a huge Agentic Finance swell coming. It may not last very long and it may be tough to ride, but it's certainly coming.

I'm curious where you think the opportunities lie. My bet is boring old payments will be the only thing to write home about for the next 5 years.. and then DeFi will gradually catch on. To most people building means launching a protocol and some are excited about privacy. I'm not convinced these are really big opportunities yet.

If you've ever been thinking about starting a company in crypto, now is the time. Companies that start when the money is excessive tend not to build sustainable business models. If you can survive in this market, you know you have a real product. Validation in a down market is not the same as validation in an up market.

@ethanyish Yeah the data is still valuable but the difference is the transactors are explicitly making it harder for you to have it, which is their right. Have you noticed any patterns of digital asset holders purposefully obscuring their volume and auditability today?

@__katz__ great qn - ultimately if there are stakeholders in the private network that still need to interact in non closed systems, they still need the data And also, there’s a lot of data processing that needs to happen on top of private data too

Won a battle with customer service, feeling like a demigod.