civil 🍄 💚 🫂💭 ⌐◨-◨

Good Morning & Happy Easter

ok it’s time for me to start teaching bodywork. the inferential distance between what I straightforwardly I do all day, and what’s considered possible by society and my immediate social group is getting uncomfortably high. but I think a 2hr class could meaningfully bridge it.

compliant! privacy! on the op stack!

Okay a few weeks ago someone posted a project where they evaluated thousands of UX patterns and designs and enabled it as a skill so you could say, "design onboarding like x" Anyone remember what project that was?

Fighting the good fight But its time to move onwards A gitcoin haiku

We are syncing up with @matteotambussi and @SpaghettEth to talk about growing community in Italy, Ethereum in the age of CROPS, and how GrowFi is built to convert onchain yield farming into the real world regenerative assets. ⏰Set your reminder and j oin us this Wednesday at 11am CET x.com/i/spaces/1qxvv…

I'm so so excited to be with this community <3 See yall in 10 days!

So excited for @Artizen and @agartha_one hosting residency for @JoinEdgeCity! Join us!

Incredibly excited to be collecting yet another country living amongst our friends in a pop up village! @agartha_one Magic is on the horizon! See you @JoinEdgeCity

Looking forward to this conversation. @matteotambussi and @spaghetteth has been a steadfast supporter of our work with @RifaiSicilia and now @higrowfi since day 1 💙 See you all there

damn this is some crazy lore 🤯 thank you @Sim_Pop & @MPtherealmvp for this treasure of a podcast episode

For our next Town Hall, we're joined by @maearthstudio. Their third quadratic funding round is launching this summer, with a $500K matching pool for community-led land and nature projects worldwide. 🌍 Come chat regeneration with us. June 2, 12pm ET luma.com/townhall-maear…

When people write about the crisis of creativity, they often forget that to be creative is to transgress, and to transgress one must have rules or standards to escape in the first place. This is what creation is all about, it is thinking about the same problem but being courageous enough to not solve it in the same old-fashioned way. It is the reason why, in their essence, all artists are conservative, as to engage in the act of creating one must have first masters he obeys and cherishes, idols he worships before destroying them. open.substack.com/pub/zinebribou…

Anyone that thinks they / their in-group are the “good guys” and immune to individual and collective incentive failure modes are eventually in for a rude awakening

Whenever I’m interviewing and meet an exceptional person (it’s obvious), I ask about their childhood. The single thread for almost everyone: a lot of independence growing up. Some people had circumstances that forced them to be independent at a young age (economic struggles, absentee parents, other horrible things, etc.), but a lot of ppl actually had fairly normal lives with loving parents who simply encouraged independence and independent thinking from a young age. These people had parents who: - gave them a lot of freedom to make their own decisions - talked to them about everything (no topic off limits) - took them and their ideas seriously, no matter how small - treated them like people not “children” These parents didn’t try to force outcomes (grades, resume padding, career path), and instead operated like an advisor whom the kid could go to to discuss their options. One person gave me the example of her mom sitting down with her and having a very serious discussion about how to talk to her 3rd grade crush. Her mom took her seriously even for something as trivial as that. Instead of telling her what to do, her mom listened, asked questions, and taught her that she was capable of figuring out what to do. If the kid was “good at school” it wasn’t because of parental pressure (or bribing 😂). (being “good at school” was all over the place though — some ppl were, some absolutely weren’t) These people also learned “financial independence” early on. i.e. the thrill of being able to earn money and purchase something they couldn’t have otherwise. Ultimately "independence" meant these people were practicing decision making and learning responsibility, integrity, and how to think for themselves from a very early age. These skills compound, and the 20 yr old who has never made a major decision for his own life due to (well meaning) fearful tiger parents just cannot compete. It’s kind of amazing that just trusting kids to make decisions (and mistakes) and talking to them about the world might matter way more than all these things we’re stressing about like getting into the right preschool. And it might actually lead to a happier parent / child dynamic and happier kid overall. Interestingly (as I think about how to raise my kid) almost everyone who grew up in the “attuned parent” form of independence spoke really fondly of their childhood and highly of their parents — their parents were people they genuinely admired, valued, and were deeply grateful for. You could hear it in their voice. Independence is easier said than done, but I’m convinced it’s both critically important and in short supply with kids these days. Btw things that didn’t seem to correlate w exceptional ability as much: type of school (public, private, all girls, etc), big city vs small town, money, number of siblings, parents’ job or education, parents married or divorced, immigrant or not, and pretty much everything else. Yes all of these factors affect people, but none of them were as consistent as having a lot of independence growing up. *Btw none of this is scientific at all, just a very curious person’s anecdotal ramblings. 😂

It's culture. It's the ETHos ✨

Bitcoin Pizza Day: reconnected w/ great folks while dancing & laughing amidst & around a precariously tall pizzabox tower to ❤️‍🔥 Berlin DJs*. T🙏🏼H🫡A😻N🍕K💥S @ZoeCatherineF & @joinwebzero @bitvavocom & @w3_hub 🍻 *not pictured: indoor skateboarding @zCase_ ;)

The main idea is simple: If you chase the biggest goal directly, you usually miss it. Most great things come from weird side quests, random obsessions, useless curiosities, and paths that looked stupid at the time.

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.

happy bitcoin pizza day 🍕🧡 today, 16 years ago a programmer Laszlo made history by completing the first real-world commercial transaction with Bitcoin he posted on bitcointalk: "i'll pay 10,000 btc for two pizzas" a random guy Jeremy saw it, ordered two papa john's, and got the coins 10,000 btc. $41 at the time. today it would cost $772 million 👀 fun fact: 12 days earlier Laszlo also invented a GPU mining. that one discovery grew bitcoin's hashrate by 130,000% by end of 2010 since the ordinals protocol gives every satoshi a serial number based on when it was mined, those exact sats laszlo spent are still traceable on-chain 💎 they are called pizza sats. their rarity comes from historical significance, not just scarcity. it’s like a coin collector finding a penny from a historic event. you can check if pizza sats are sitting in your bitcoin, buy or sell them on @Magisat_io and @satingio Laszlo has zero regrets btw 😮‍💨 celebrating this day with the bitcoin pizza challenge by @pizzaninjas 🍕🥷 what a good old times 🥺🫶🏻