pampening 🎄🇺🇸

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Bro, this is wrong. Lengthening the feedback distance between humans and AIs is not a good thing for the world. Today, it means you're generating slop instead of solving useful problems for people. It's not even well-optimized for helping people have fun. Once AI becomes powerful enough to be truly dangerous, it's maximizing the risk of an irreversible anti-human outcome that even you will deeply regret. The point of ethereum is to set *us* free, not to create something else that goes off and does some stuff freely while our own situation is unchanged or worsened. (And, as others have pointed out, the models are run by openai and anthropic, so the thing is not even "self-sovereign"; you're actually perpetuating the mentality that centralized trust assumptions can be put in a corner and ignored, the very mentality that ethereum is at war with) The exponential will happen regardless of what any of us do, that's precisely why this era's primary task is NOT to make the exponential happen even faster, but rather to choose its direction, and avoid collapse into undesirable attractors.

imagine fading this generational run

We spent 4 years building a payments network for the new internet. Entrepreneurs now earn $3.3B annually on Whop. Millions of people are clipping, labeling data, deploying agents, and starting businesses to get paid. Today we're opening Whop Payments Network to everyone.

a mountain goat farts in the middle of the swiss alps nobody: saylor: btc as the shimmering divine phoenix of digital unobtanium benefits from this both mathematically and philosophically

@ohawisepsyhuh flexa doesn’t give a shit bout small business yet ironically epically fail to win large business (no one will use flexa full stop); if ur tiny the trade off is fees 4 scale; if u want visa/mc network scale (everyone uses them) then the fees pay for that but also vice versa

@pampening You're not wrong but as a small business owner I still want to use flexa to save myself thousands each year. They have utterly failed in that I still don't have the ability to do so, seems like it would be pretty easy to get me an online form that lets people pay me like that.

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Amazon just published a blog on x402! It provided full reference architectures for integrating the protocol into AWS infrastructure for financial services TLDR of what it covered: - x402 revives HTTP’s 402 “Payment Required” status code as a programmable payment rail for autonomous AI agents, developed by Coinbase - The flow: agent requests a resource, gets a 402 response with a payment spec, pays via USDC micropayment on-chain, resubmits with receipt; sub-2-second settlement at roughly $0.0001 per transaction - No subscriptions, no API key management, no vendor contracts; agents pay per use on demand - Every transaction is recorded on-chain, giving a full audit trail by design - AWS published three reference implementations: 1) AgentCore + CloudFront + x402 (agent side) 2) CloudFront + Lambda@Edge + WAF (merchant/provider side), and; 3) a general guide for monetizing any HTTP app via x402 - FSI use cases highlighted: trading agents accessing real-time data feeds, compliance agents pulling sanctions lists, credit decisioning agents querying bureau data; all per-query instead of fixed subscriptions - McKinsey projects agentic commerce will mediate $3 trillion to $5 trillion of global commerce by 2030 Why this is notable: - This is AWS legitimizing x402 as enterprise infrastructure - They’re shipping reference architectures, sample repos, and integration guides that map directly onto Bedrock AgentCore (their managed agent stack) and CloudFront (their CDN/edge layer) - AWS is effectively telling FSI institutions: this is how your agents will pay for things. - The fact that the blog sits under their Financial Services Industries vertical, cites McKinsey’s $3-5T projection, and frames x402 alongside compliance and audit requirements, signals that AWS sees this as a production-grade payments primitive, as opposed to a niche protocol That’s a massive distribution and credibility unlock for x402 adoption - follow @KhalaResearch we have a full report dropping this week I’ll link the article below

Digital assets are entering a new phase. What once ran in parallel to existing financial systems is increasingly being applied to solve practical, real-world needs — often behind the scenes – from cross-border remittances to B2B money transfers. This creates new opportunities to add value in how money moves globally. Today, we introduced the Mastercard Crypto Partner Program — a global initiative that brings together more than 85 crypto-native companies, payments providers, and financial institutions. Together, we're creating a forum for meaningful dialogue and collaboration as this space continues to mature.

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.

newtonian physics is but an abstract study not technology itself so moore’s law cannot be applied — today’s llms on the other hand may as well be considered agi

My dad was tortured by the Gestapo for 4 days and thrown in a concentration camp for being in the Norwegian Resistance. Growing up, he would tell me things he learned in the Resistance. I thought, I'm never going to need this stuff. Here's some things of those things #Thread

@ABlastforever When BCH was created, I thought the market would route around BTC through BCH However, the market was tricked, with a biased use of tickers! Ultimately, the market did route around BTC, as the majority of activity is on SOL, HYPE, ETH, SIU & more The free market still works!

an unexpected takeway from my time in crypto is that visa and mastercard have insanely high moats. their banking and regulatory relationships as well as acceptance among consumers and merchants r so entrenched in global commerce that every new competitor ends up plugging into them rather than replacing them. would argue that their business is more defensible than even the largest tech companies in the world. and no stablecoins r not a threat at all but a rail they can easily wrap on top of.

what if bitcoin judaism zcash christianity

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(5. what makes america the greatest country in the world is not her might or majesty but her capacity for compassion — her propensity for redemption)

warren buffett always reminding us why he’s the goat 1. it’s never too late 2. humility is the key to growth 3. do the work 4. to serve is to lead

we finally healin