andyguzman.eth | privacy/acc

@ethereum future to strengthen privacy is bright! it's a core value and enabler for many others, and also a practical way to get adoption reachout if you haven't met @PrivacyEthereum yet and we can help in any way #eu/Y4s0UjEz_qU2YBfUIZr6_rxd0TiE96rp6Ot4lqgijcRws_z-Ai9HBaDByxy3S0GR" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">signal.me/#eu/Y4s0UjEz_q… & roadmap ethereum-magicians.org/t/pse-roadmap-…

A few counter points: - an encyclical is not a philosophy paper or a policy theory text - "could apply to any tech shift" yes! And that's a good thing. The tradition was built to make it portable of certain principles to particular contexts - "political remedies could centralize power even more dangerously" i) why is that the only alternative? why wouldn't open source? distribution of benefits? UBI? ii) also see the not acting when inference is already centralized and unaccountable power by = <5 entities is a statement and position

Magnifica Humanitas is light on the theology of artificial intelligence, and thick in reiterating Catholic social doctrine. You could remove the concept of artificial intelligence without changing much about the piece, which could have applied to any major technology shift. Heavy in asking for political intervention, and light in political theory — the encyclical protects human dignity by saying intelligence was never the point, but it doesn't explain our role given this shift. Many people believe the emergence of AI, and perhaps even superintelligence, must in some sense fall within divine providence. The encyclical gestures at technology as part of the history of salvation, but does not really engage that claim. If we are in fact on a path toward superintelligence, the encyclical barely faces that possibility. For a papal letter on AI, the omission feels bizarre. The encyclical’s answer to AI is basically: good AI may help, bad AI may hurt, and markets or labs cannot be trusted to sort the difference out. It worries about AI centralizing power in private hands, but says far less about the risk that political remedies could centralize power even more dangerously: through state control, regulatory capture, surveillance, or international bureaucracies insulated from accountability. The encyclical feels defensive. It protects human dignity by saying intelligence was never the point, without really explaining what that means — or explaining what it means for us when intelligence is no longer uniquely human. By the end, I mostly wanted to ask GPT-5.5 what Newman or Aquinas might have said: not for more moral warnings, but for a deeper account of intellect, providence, creation, and the human vocation under artificial intelligence.

Wake up babe, the Vatican is making better launch videos than tech startups

Easy-to-have-missed update to the @ethereum governance process: the "Scheduled" status has a new definition that makes it easier for you to plan for upcoming features A thread 🧵 for 1. what changed 2. why it matters for the ecosystem ↴↴↴↴↴

@nixorokish @ethereum Awesome!

the Pope's new encyclical on AI also contains the first ever reference in a papal encyclical to cryptocurrency 👀👀👀 guys we made it

1/ The Ethereum Audit Subsidy A joint initiative with audit providers to subsidize the cost of audits for Ethereum builders. Security audits are a best practice, yet expensive. The subsidy program makes audits accessible and strengthens the Ethereum ecosystem.

In the era of #ArtificialIntelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human. We must lovingly safeguard the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ, the splendor of which no machine can ever replace. #MagnificaHumanitas vatican.va/content/leo-xi…

Have you ever wondered how does Railgun differ from Privacy Pools? Zcash vs Monero? Today you answer that by piecing together docs, blog posts, Twitter threads and code We built the Private Transfers Dashboard to make it easy🧵

New manifesto dropped vatican.va/content/leo-xi…

I want to get a bit more public about the work we at the Kohaku Initiative inside the EF are doing I notice there's hype but there's also confusion. Best way to clarify things is to speak candidly and openly about what I'm working on day-to-day 🧵time (bc i dont pay twitter $)

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.

@hudsonjameson What should it be better communicating about?

After talking to some current and former EF folks, I've had a change of heart. The direction the EF is going is fine and focused on CROPs as it should be. I still have disagreements with the way the EF operates some of the time and there's always room for improvement. I hope the EF leadership communicates more publicly, even if it isn't about the latest gripes from the ecosystem.

@BenDiFrancesco Same

I say this completely unironically: I'm extremely excited for the Pope's thoughts on AI.

Ethereum is PERMISSIONLESS Ethereum is OPEN SOURCE Ethereum is ANTIFRAGILE Ethereum is ENERGY-EFFICIENT Ethereum is GLOBAL Ethereum is BUDGET-SECURE Ethereum is UNCESORABLE Ethereum is a SOCIAL MOUVEMENT Ethereum is HOPE Ethereum is FREEDOM ETHEREUM IS NOT A COMPANY

Listening to David’s explanation of why he sold was pretty mind numbing lol… I recently shared that I was a toxic Bitcoin maximalist for roughly 8 years, from 2017 to late 2024. Stablecoins are what initially made me revisit my thesis on Ethereum, and on ether as Ethereum’s native asset. That, combined with the rapid approach of the agentic economy - a world with an infinite number of autonomous economic actors sending value through stablecoins across a small handful of networks that society has deemed valuable - made me reevaluate further. So I went back and revisited my priors on Ethereum. Were my early concerns around centralization, monetary policy, and network effects still valid after all these years? Surely, yes. I set out to prove myself right. I found out I was wrong. The centralization concerns I had entirely faded. While I was 100% encapsulated in my Bitcoin bubble, Ethereum had slowly, quietly, and relentlessly built the only other WWIII-proof, global, credibly neutral, decentralized protocol. And in some areas, Ethereum had actually become more decentralized than Bitcoin: client diversity, validator distribution, and a secure long-term scaling/security model through proof of stake. Ethereum had matured. It had grown out of its early “shitcoin” association. It had become the only truly permissionless, censorship resistant, credibly neutral, and valuable protocol outside of Bitcoin. It grew up. That matters because the only reason I was ever Bitcoin-only was that, at the time, there were no other networks with the protocol traits that could plausibly make all of global finance, and eventually much of humanity, value them at the deepest level. Back then, it was only Bitcoin. So the irony here is incredible. Just as Ethereum and ether have finally matured, just as Ethereum has distanced itself from the decentralized-in-name-only, venture-backed, fake startup, “we’re hiding behind a blockchain” mentality, now a small group of influencers have decided to become negative on Ethereum. When Bitcoiners use the term “shitcoiner,” this is what they are usually talking about. Bag chasers. People who want their chain to act like a company. Permissioned. Hyper-structured. Marketing team. CEO. Quarterly reports. Revenue. Earnings. Some polished growth narrative for VCs. Basically, a bunch of stupid shit that already exists in the fiat world. The same world Bitcoin, and now Ethereum, were created to help us escape from. To suddenly be disappointed that Ethereum has a broader mandate than “pump my bag,” and is instead focused on hardening the traits that make the network valuable over decades, tells you a lot about how these people misunderstand it. CROPS is the value proposition. Censorship resistance. Resilience. Openness. Permissionlessness. Security. That is why society values Bitcoin. That is why society now values Ethereum. And that is why the Laura Shins, Ansems, and David Hoffmans of the world jumping ship now is so revealing. They are not leaving because the thesis broke. They are leaving because they never had the thesis in the first place. They do not and never have seen the value in decentralized, global, open systems - sanctuary technologies or neutral rails that can materially improve people’s lives. What they have always chased is a high-growth stock equivalent with a smaller market cap. A shiny new object that appears once or twice per cycle; violent upward momentum, narrative, and upside without the patience required to actually understand what is being built. They need to chase because they do not have the time horizon to hold a thesis and let conviction compound over time. CROPS is the entire value proposition. Do not let startup-brain influencers, who never understood why this ecosystem was created in the first place, gaslight you out of conviction.

A reminder that the Ethereum Foundation is about to get wacky and fun. We are fighting, and will not stop fucking fighting. We’re here. Right now. Shipping. Cooking. The EF will become one of the most admired brands in the world.

TLSNotary v0.1.0-alpha.15 is out. TLSNotary now supports proxy mode alongside MPC mode: a faster, lighter alternative when the security tradeoff fits your use case. Also: chunked HTTP responses, an SDK core refactor, no-OS-RNG verifier builds. github.com/tlsnotary/tlsn…

@BrantlyMillegan Yess

should I start a wartime ethereum podcast?

with the exception of complete surveillance & freezing controll stablecoins are AWESOME, but they're not cypherpunk until they're unfreezable & private

fastconfirm.it Did you know that under normal networks conditions CEXs and bridges could already safely accept deposits after 13sec? Those are the kind of improvements that matter so much and deserve more attention.