Yonatan Sompolinsky

sovereignty as a service

This isn't cypherpunk. This is just punk 🤷🏻‍♀️

@michaelsuttonil @KaspaHub Is this our first disqualified from chain dude?

@KaspaHub @hashdag The block-DAG can contain rejected transactions (if a miner insists on including them in his block by bypassing mempool validation). So this is simply a weird and obviously failing attempt to spend these utxos without a valid signature

Can someone explain this? It appears the burn wallet had some outgoing transactions, but they failed. Does that mean someone had access? Why? How? WTF 🤣 @hashdag @michaelsuttonil

@Chris_Hutch7 @0xJennn @chepurnoy not familiar with tao project, but afaik no-one implemented pouw yet. pouw is distinct from useful pow where the miner needs to convince the network that the work was useful to some public good. in pouw miner can choose own work/matrices/inference x.com/hashdag/status…

@hashdag @0xJennn @chepurnoy Mr Y have you looked into Bittensor $TAO?

Let agents to do GPU mining and build economies on top of that! $ERG

somewhat off tangent but -- i find it hard to marry d/acc with universalism. if you read vitalik's original blogpost it's almost explicitly a manifesto for the privileged - peoples fortunate to be born into swiss-like conditions, with mountain terrains that let you stay defense focused (extrapolated to other dimensions too ofc). this approach starts and ends in the privileged in-group, and the out-group needs to "get their hands dirty" with more aggressive methods to promote freedom -- and they gotta do it alone, bc the dacc swiss societies aren't too prepared or oriented to help them. it smells more elitist than universal. it's then almost impossible for daccs to recognize let alone celebrate a globally emancipating event that was achieved through anti-dacc means. freedom expands but "the world got darker"

my term for this is conservative cypherpunk. but it does have a lineage, in that cypherpunk has always had a Tim May crypto-anarchist libertarian streak that can tip over into (Americanised) nationalism / statism. the contrast is with Assange virtue ethics cypherpunk, more universal, more justice-oriented, where we would find @VitalikButerin @LefterisJP etc. (the spectrum is a little more complicated in truth, the Hughes angle)

@toly this is some alpha zero

Proof via diagnolization

Agree with this (1)/(2) framing, but your OP seems pretty off from it, it's a clear (2) deriving (1) -- V+friends politically interpreting recent specific world events, and then setting up the north star according to that interpretation. If sanctuary tech is/was your consistent directionality for ethereum -- something you’d focus the ecosystm on regardless of specific world affairs -- then more the power to you! I'm still not clear how load-bearing it is beyond the broader opensource manifesto, but even you rearticulating those values can move the needle morale-wise and attention-wise. But if sanctuary tech is, as your OP reads, downstream of a specific sentiment+interpretation of recent events this is off your own framework. -- Concretely: devs and builders with a non-dacc approach towards "enfranchising the disenfranchised" - who interpret recent global developments as freedom actually expanding, practically giving ppl previously marginalized or despotized a chance at integration - - - should they feel comfortable and aligned building sanct tech with you and ethereum, or should they settle for being free “to use Ethereum” the base decentralized protocol?

Sure, important question. There are two vectors of affecting global events: 1. Affecting the *structure* of the world in a way which is unopinionated on individual situations, but at the same time has clear tendencies that lead to desirable outcomes (eg. enfranchising otherwise disenfranchised people). This inevitably involves acting on some opinions about what high-level properties are good to see more of in the world. 2. Affecting specific individual situations. This inevitably involves acting on your opinions on those situations. I think the it's healthy for the Ethereum community as a community to conceptualize itself as doing (1) and not doing (2). The Ethereum Foundation is not Ethereum, but even the Ethereum Foundation should bias heavily toward (1). At the same time, each contributor to Ethereum is not some godlike avatar of Ethereum, they are a human being, and so they will inevitably have opinions of type (2), and various people will have various side projects (on the low end, maintaining an opinionated twitter presence, and on the high end, being actively involved on the ground) of type (2). And of course as a matter of statistical averages and clustering dynamics, different communities will end up having different aggregate leanings on various issues of type (2). We should not pretend that this does not happen, but it is wise to maintain a line of such leanings not being "official".

Over the past year, many people I talk to have expressed worry about two topics: * Various aspects of the way the world is going: government control and surveillance, wars, corporate power and surveillance, tech enshittification / corposlop, social media becoming a memetic warzone, AI and how it interplays with all of the above... * The brute reality that Ethereum seems to be absent from meaningfully improving the lives of people subject to these things, even on the dimensions we deeply care about (eg. freedom, privacy, security of digital life, community self-organization) It is easy to bond over the first, to commiserate over the fact that beauty and good in the world seems to be receding and darkness advancing, and uncaring powerful people in high places are making this happen. But ultimately, it is easy to acknowledge problems, the hard thing is actually shining a light forward, coming up with a concrete plan that makes the situation better. The second has been weighing heavily on my mind, and on the minds of many of our brightest and most idealistic Ethereans. I personally never felt any upset or fear when political memecoins went on Solana, or various zero-sum gambling applications go on whatever 250 millisecond block chain strikes their fancy. But it *does* weigh on me that, through all of the various low-grade online memetic wars, international overreaches of corporate and government power, and other issues of the last few years, Ethereum has been playing a very limited role in making people's lives better. What *are* the liberating technologies? Starlink is the most obvious one. Locally-running open-weights LLMs are another. Signal is a third. Community Notes is a fourth, tackling the problem from a different angle. One response is to say "stop dreaming big, we need to hunker down and accept that finance is our lane and laser-focus on that". But this is ultimately hollow. Financial freedom and security is critical. But it seems obvious that, while adding a perfectly free and open and sovereign and debasement-proof financial system would fix some things, but it would leave the bulk of our deep worries about the world unaddressed. It's okay for individuals to laser-focus on finance, but we need to be part of some greater whole that has things to say about the other problems too. At the same time, Ethereum cannot fix the world. Ethereum is the "wrong-shaped tool" for that: beyond a certain point, "fixing the world" implies a form of power projection that is more like a centralized political entity than like a decentralized technology community. So what can we do? I think that we in Ethereum should conceptualize ourselves as being part of an ecosystem building "sanctuary technologies": free open-source technologies that let people live, work, talk to each other, manage risk and build wealth, and collaborate on shared goals, in a way that optimizes for robustness to outside pressures. The goal is not to remake the world in Ethereum's image, where all finance is disintermediated, all governance happens through DAOs, and everyone gets a blockchain-based UBI delivered straight to their social-recovery wallet. The goal is the opposite: it's de-totalization. It's to reduce the stakes of the war in heaven by preventing the winner from having total victory (ie. total control over other human beings), and preventing the loser from suffering total defeat. To create digital islands of stability in a chaotic era. To enable interdependence that cannot be weaponized. Ethereum's role is to create "digital space" where different entities can cooperate and interact. Communications channels enable interaction, but communication channels are not "space": they do not let you create single unique objects that canonically represent some social arrangement that changes over time. Money is one important example. Multisigs that can change their members, showing persistence exceeding that of any one person or one public key, are another. Various market and governance structures are a third. There are more. I think now is the time to double down, with greater clarity. Do not try to be Apple or Google, seeing crypto as a tech sector that enables efficiency or shininess. Instead, build our part of the sanctuary tech ecosystem - the "shared digital space with no owner" that enables both open finance and much more. More actively build toward a full-stack ecosystem: both upward to the wallet and application layer (incl AI as interface) and downward to the OS, hardware, even physical/bio security levels. Ultimately, tech is worthless without users. But look for users, both individual and institutional, for whom sanctuary tech is exactly the thing they need. Optimize payments, defi, decentralized social, and other applications precisely for those users, and those goals, which centralized tech will not serve. We have many allies, including many outside of "crypto". It's time we work together with an open mind and move forward.

Cyrus was great and all but the entire Achaemenid dynasty was Somewheres-friendly, didnt believe in human-enforced universalistic world order. And they were quite proactive about it, eg Artaxerxes I donating gold and silver to help restore the Israeli temple. I feel there's some sense of unease/suspicion of cosmopolitan liberals when noticing the kinship between Iranians and Israelis. I guess fundamentally Anywheres can’t process Somewheres forming deep bonds with other distinct Somewheres

There’s only one non-Israelite in the Old Testament who is called “God’s anointed” and that’s the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great, who ended the Babylonian exile and allowed the Israelites to return to the holy land and rebuild the Temple. His great act of generosity is also confirmed in the historical record. Sending prayers of strength to the Persians throwing off the yoke. May they get the chance to restore their nation to its greatness. (Isaiah 45:1-3)

100%. realtime is speed, and 'realtime decentralization' achieves it in a decentralized manner. but that's just the easiest application to convey. a broader implication is the scope of actionability that you can delegate to the realtime engine. for instance, assume we want to launch a VM capable of expressing real-world events or live indices as tokens, a similar token standard to prediction markets: vance_wins_2028, BNB_chain_stalls, iran_war_ends, cavs_nba_ring (beyond pure betting, the latter has dramatic consequences for the Cleveland economy). now, with single-leader consensus, or when a select committee can choose the contents of a block before mining it, you need to wait many consensus rounds before relying on the reports that committee provides. in contrast, realtime decentralization allows you to sample the fair and honest majority report, in realtime. admittedly, some usecases don't require realtime since they represent slow markets. but the majority of liquidity is time-sensitive esp in large swings, and to protect your funds' value - to actually **store** its value - you need to connect it to the market in realtime. BTW, the advent of LLMs increases the trading intelligence of the long tail, which implies that demand for automated vault handling will only grow.

@hashdag I feel like saying Kaspa is faster Bitcoin is a bit of an understatement. Kaspa's technology is far superior. It's like comparing a bicycle to an automobile. Sure the automobile is faster, but there's far more under the hood too.

Kaspa is real-time bitcoin, solving scalability is great but not the core value prop. Real-time bitcoin means achieving in a few seconds the same security guarantees that nakamoto consensus / bitcoin achieves after an hour; decentralizing each consensus round rather than chain quality achieved through a coarse aggregate of rounds. A clean definition anchor for real-time decentralization (RTD): The ability to sample the honest majority in real-time. (Note that even fast leaderless VRF-based proof-of-stake cant sample honestly bc the selected nodes get to choose the content of their blocks after they've been selected; pos=select then write, pow=write then select) -- RTD affects: txn confirmation, censorship resistance, secure oracle finality, MEV resistance. Eg censorship resistance, bitcoin is the most censorship resistant chain, but if 60% of the miners are censoring you (point in reference: OFAC abiding tornado censoring eth miners), your txn will pend for 30-40 minutes. For shady business payments that's not prohibitive, but for a real economy, for an asset aspiring to be at least a king of collateral even if not an MoE, this is unacceptable, esp under economic stress. Beyond censorship, all things finance benefit tremendously from pow density, from sampling the majority in real-time in a secure and honest manner. I wont get into MEV resistance now, but having a "conscious" stream of oracle attestations (not price oracles) finalized in real-time qualitatively upgrades the ability to encode informed risk, collateral, liquidity management, which is the lifeblood of defi. In context of conf times, increasing from 1 to 10bps saturates the latency optimization. But for pow density we need dozens of blocks per second, with the endgame of 100 bps: Under 10bps a 37% attacker can fake the majority signal with probability 12%. With 100bps this drops to 0.3%. Today Kaspa can't accelerate to >10bps w/o harming conf times, but DAGKNIGHT will be implemented hopefully by Q3 at least on testnet, by which we will push for 25-40bps. The cherry on top: RTD also implies netsplit resistance, as per the partial synchrony framework. WWIII cyberwar resistance. Hypothetically speaking ofc. (elaborated- hashdag.medium.com/in-which-it-wa…)

so this is where it gets interesting - i told you about my 100bps fetish. with that, you get a near constant pulse of the mining network: the DAG's ordering of blocks containing your txns pretty much reflects the local topology around you. at least for high-paying txns that escape mempool randomization

Really like the utxo->miner mapping, especially if there is a way to have miners commit to some identity w/ geo-locality. (The users UTXO's can "privately" commit, zcash style, so its only leaked in event of {situation} with no global consensus available. In that scenario your revealing that info anyway)

Exactly why we need to make currency locally transactable. P2P cash Do so via local forms of consensus from the mesh phone to phone peering you do have.

Blessed be America my people, and Persia the work of my hands, and Israel my heritage. Pax Persica Le'Chayim!

@TrustlessState @AnthropicAI counterpoint x.com/nic_carter/sta…

Any system where nodes communicate bits (could be blocks could be just raw messages) over a network to maintain and co-write to a shared state - suffers from nodes' ability to freely simulate the effect of different bits they send on the shared state (shorthand that you can ignore: 'select then write'), irrespective of the sybil resistance scheme - unless that is pow

I don’t want to go into lengthy discussion, also because I am not sure I understand the wording properly (comm problem from my side). Just want to explain what I mean. I do not see the two claims of not losing generality above are correct, possibly due to the implicit assumptions/paradigms how to reason about protocols. That leads to certain misconceptions about other than PoW principles of permissionless consensus (will all due respect, I just seek clarity). I am having in mind a protocol (based on pos-like sybilness) where holders selfishly write their canonical transactions (malleable ofc, no selection, own will) so that to maximize chances (optimal strategy) that the version of the ledger state they write tx to will become the consensus ledger state. It is exacly how miners “write” blocks in PoW. But it is not PoW

The term 'block' is without loss of generality, you can replace it with 'transaction' or generically 'protocol message'. 'select then write' is without loss of generality too, the generic equiv would be 'the effect of a message on the consensus state is costfree malleable by the node'. A correct exception to my claim though is schemes where transactions are time lock encrypted ("VDF"). I disregard this exception for two reasons. First, the "time" inside "timelock" is HW time hence misdefined for distributed consensus running on different HW. Second, it defers the revelation of the state, hence reopens the same problems it was designed to solve (hiding the state from everyone reintroduces MEV in other layers/rounds).

That 👇(quote) is not accurate because it assumes (1) blocks and block proposers and (2) something has to be ‘selected’. Neither of it is mandatory for the permissionless protocol. Just like “pos=select then write” is not true as a general statement. Unless PoS is narowly defined as BFT PoS, not a general Sybil resitance principle > Note that even fast leaderless VRF-based proof-of-stake cant sample honestly bc the selected nodes get to choose the content of their blocks after they've been selected; pos=select then write, pow=write then select)

@Vladcostea sure - bitcoin, programmable bitcoin, private bitcoin, real-time bitcoin. i can buy that. and keep doing what you're doing, your podcast is on another level

@hashdag With all due respect sir, Bitcoin is Linux The ecash that actually took off and started a revolution Most likely not the final form of money But everything that built on top of what Bitcoin started is a Bitcoin Different ticker, different optimizations. But still a Bitcoin

For the first time ever, I am not convinced that Bitcoin will return to its previous all-time high The reason is simple: there is no bullish narrative Store of value/digital gold/reserve asset? It all imploded once institutions got cold feet because of quantum computing risks Freedom money? The project didn’t undergo any upgrades to scale better and receive better privacy. You can only get high throughput & anonymity on ruggable federations, mints & other centralized services. Unconfiscatable wealth? Not so long ago, we witnessed unironic conversations about freezing dust UTXOs. Some people also talk about freezing Satoshi’s coins in the post-quantum future. Both are dangerous precedents that threaten the network’s main value proposition. Permissionless money? There’s an ongoing debate about gatekeeping certain transaction types which an army of religious zealots describes as “spam”. Also, the BitVM builders are already frowned upon for bringing “shitcoin tech” to Bitcoin and filling the block space in unorthodox ways. One coin to rule them all? The current Bitcoin maintainers are against adding anything controversial to Bitcoin. CTV, CSFS, CAT, GSR, BIP300 will probably never happen for as long as there is one popular voice that opposes activation. Which only lends legitimacy to altcoins trying the tech. Beautiful stories about the noble and pure money system that fights against central banking? The Epstein files have effectively tainted the reputation of Bitcoin in the eyes of many normies. Biggest devs were under MIT’s paycheck, some folks even visited Epstein’s island in a time that was crucial for the project’s development. Reputations were destroyed, hopes were broken, new conspiracies emerged. The cyber hornet hivemind that brings peace, unity & laser eyes? The Bitcoin community has never been more divided and hostile – even to people who have been around for many years and brought significant contributions to the project. The purity tests have become so ridiculous that any sane person would purposely fail them. Retail grassroots adoption? People still remember FTX, BlockFi, Celsius, and the other failures of the previous cycle. Lots of money was lost, harsh lessons were learned, the likeliness of having these people embrace decentralized internet money is lower than ever. Hedge against inflation? Oh please, Tether has never been more popular world wide. To third world countries, USDT is the inflation hedge and the most desired medium of exchange. Even in the US the stablecoins are hotter than Bitcoin. The great power grid stabilizer? US miners are pivoting to AI because it pays better. Chinese ones are doing it too. Proof of Work mining is becoming less popular. The uncorrelated asset to protect you and your family from a total financial collapse? Oh please, Bitcoin trades like a tech stock. People invest in it because they hope it will one day fulfill its potential as a global digital cash. So when the stock market crashes, Bitcoin follows the trend. Will Bitcoin survive the reward halvings with empty blocks? Are people willing to pay $100 per transaction? There is still a looming uncertainty concerning these situations. Mostly because a bunch of loud gatekeepers shunned away all experiments that could turn into valuable use cases. Also remember: with the exception of last year’s bubble, every massive bull market has been precedes by a notable network upgrade. Bitcoin needs a new philosophy which embraces innovation in cryptography and computer science, nurtures experimentation & encourages builders to stick around. Arrogant close mindedness won’t work again this time.

@KaspaWarrior69 @kaspavoices @michaelsuttonil @emdin @CryptoAspect @chargrysolle @OriNewman @hus_qy I suppose u know I'm not a fan of L2-meme-labs tokens. if u want to support vprogs u can send donations to this address and I'll use them transparently to fund/accelerate vprogs kaspa:qqq4gy4cdgfwhdk6va4rmh22nfsmkrjrhr62qe2nypnsfvswvd237mdhu8v06

Yes yes! I thought about exactly this a few weeks ago!! We launch a vprogs token like a fair launch but with allocation to core. I know this sounds silly but tokens are silly and they still have value that can fund core team @hashdag @michaelsuttonil @orinewman @hus_qy @cryptoaspect @freshair08 wdyt?

while butting heads with @CryptoAspect on panic failures in zkVMs I received this newsletter from @chargrysolle. i saw this as a divine calling to braindump my pov before implementing full night sleep. for any VM system that implements metering - and for any zkVM system that implements provable metering - panic is a (non) special case requiring no special treatment. sure, one can architect a system which safely handles panic w/o metering, but not the reverse - and since based (rollups or the superior) programs / vprogs necessitate provable metering, panic/abort is "solved" or correctly wrapped for free. as @Max143672 @CryptoAspect point out, SP1 as a single layer zkVM doesn't support (provable metering and doesn't support) panic handling - while this can be patched at the compiler level, this would guarantee safe abort of programs compiled using their toolchain only, whereas permissionless onchain registration of programs requires a more robust guarantee. the implied conclusion is that based (rollup or the superior) program systems can either use bespoke VMs such as Polygon's and Scroll's zkEVMs, or the slower and less performant nesting of general purpose VMs, which would enable runtime analysis of the guest program. but researching this I discovered a much neater alternative by @StarkWareLtd - the Sierra raw byte format, which iiuc achieves provable safety (and metering) via compile time static analysis. if true this is very very cool! cc @VolokhIlia tldr CairoVM>>SP1 -- this discussion is orthogonal or at least complementary to the based vprogs design, a zk variant of Solana's design - the link is somewhere on kaspanet's github - which insists on sync composability on the program layer while allowing programs to live and maintain their own state - their own mini zkVMs. vprogs optimize for dapp sovereignty, and will obviate the inherently parasitic L2 network/rollup entities which seek to lock and suck all dapp activity under their umbrella. hopefully kas builders will optimize for sovereignty too. cc @michaelsuttonil