#prozcash 🦓🛡♥️

On the filter fork topic. I don't usually have time, but this morning listened to one of the twitter spaces from earlier in the week, with some well meaning relative bitcoin newcomers, that humanized them, and their concerns and thoughts for why they thought that made it logical to support 110. My feeling after listening, is if these are the people with #110 in their handles, I'm sad to see them about to fork off and get disillusioned without understanding why bitcoin rejected 110 robustly. So here's a more empathetic, constructive higher level version of explaining why not. I hope it's high-level and first-principles enough that everyone can follow. They seem to want to understand what makes people tick, and are suspicious of intent. So, if someone asked me why is Bitcoin important and what is it, I'd say my (personal) mission and hope for bitcoin is to build the cypherpunk future, that "Snow Crash" was a blueprint, and work backwards from there. Bitcoin I hope leads to fully free markets via bearer unseizable, hard mathematically dependable money. Not everyone is comfortable with that level of freedom, but that's my view. And at this point, I believe that surprisingly, even now many governments have come to understand and value bitcoin's gold-like mathematical assurance, a positive development. Others may have milder views than myself, but still like hard censorship resistant money. Because of motive suspicion, if it's not obvious: I hate spam with a passion, that's how I came to design hashcash while researching decentralized bearer money with others, and running nodes in privacy related cypherpunk p2p networks nearly three decades ago. People seem upset about the default op return policy change in bitcoin. I will just assert, there are extremely robust and simple reasons for bitcoin changing default relay policy, and most just didn't do their research, so don't know what those are, or maybe not technical enough to fully understand though there have been 1000s of posts trying to explain in various simplified ways. So that lack of understanding lends itself to shared build-up of false narratives. So here's my back-to-basics higher level explanation. The decentralization needed to create cypherpunk money has implications a: side effect of decentralization is that you can't impose your views on others. The very decentralization mechanism that helps that, is working against what BIP 110 wants, which at it's most basic is a quest to police other people. I understand supporters don't see their intent like that, but introspect deeper. You can modify your software, but not anyone else's. Another critical and incredibly robust technical bitcoin immune system is bitcoin can't have people who don't understand technology basics insist on eroding security, decentralization robustness and core properties. That would end badly, fast, and so people will fight you on that. So the message is Bitcoin respectfully says "no" to what you want. Sorry, and bitcoiners do genuinely understand and empathize that you mean well, have high level thoughts that make emotional sense, and articulate sensible bitcoin-defensive high level ideas, but they are not grounded and without you seeing it, the way you propose to achieve your ideas, hard-conflict with free cypherpunk permissionless money. My advice is to listen to more experienced people who understand the system and why it works the way it does, to whatever detail you want to understand the grounded reasons for why this is the implication of decentralization and cypherpunk money. I guarantee you the developer and protocol ecosystem shares and exceeds your views on bearer hard money (and dislike of spam). You may not agree with individual developers choices, views, way of expressing themselves etc, BUT you also need to understand the IETF-like decentralized technical consensus process creates a protective change resistance, that is highly effective at protecting bitcoin mission. The implication of which is no developer can change anything without technical consensus from hundreds of other developers and protocol observers who are pedantic and extremely knowledgeable clever people who won't let any unaddressed technical question past. The protective change resistance is robust and decentralized in an amplifying way because of this technical consensus. And the many highly technical mainline developers' cypherpunk mission mindsets are probably far more determined than you can even handle on clarity of understanding and views about freedoms on permissionless networks, as many of you are probably still subconsciously inured by the matrix, where they have transcended that, and grew up immersed in it decades ago. They think natively in this space, while you are just grappling with the surface. Many wont have internalized or have the experience to know how this internet physics works, where there is no policeman, no policy authority, just mathematics, free market and hard money. That has implications for your views also, unfortunately. Now the tough pill, which is unfortunately true: If you won't listen to reason, educate yourself, learn, the same radical freedom applies to you: your permissionless recourse is to club together and create a fork. But bitcoin won't be joining it. (With respect and no sleight intended.) Please rejoin bitcoin now, or later if you're not convinced and need to experience 110 forking off and fizzling for yourself to start that journey of introspecting and learning. It would be sad if bitcoin lost people disillusioned due to simple lack of understanding of what's going on there, we're all trying to defend bitcoin and keep it on mission. Including btw the 110 technical promoters, just they wandered off plot somehow. Join the cypherpunks on bitcoin, come cypherpunk summer🌞 in a few weeks.

New ZECstats metric: shielded velocity ratio. - 26% of coins are currently shielded - 37% of transactions are in the shielded pools - divide the two and you get 1.46x as shielded velocity It's nice to see this number > 1, it means people are using the private pools relatively more than they use transparent. But I don't think the number is too useful as an adoption metric just yet -- it's driven more by massive swings in transparent pool transactions than it is by adoption of privacy. When price picks up, lots of transparent transactions happen and push the ratio down. The number might be useful for trading. zecstats.com/chart/shielded…

If you're looking for an active ecosystem building top notch privacy preserving technologies without bullshit, look at @Zcash. The energy within the ecosystem is as good as in the startups shipping products in production to their clients. I've rarely seen a coordination like this, mixed with expertise across multiple teams and skills. Zcash gave me back my motivation of being in crypto, mixed with engineering and research. I believed that I wanted to move back to maths as nothing was exciting anymore, but I was wrong. My love for engineering and code is back. I'm listening to as many as possible conversations in parallel, grabbing all the knowledge I can have, while still working. And I love it. And the people are serious about the vision. It's motivating to be around them.

If you're looking for an active ecosystem building top notch privacy preserving technologies without bullshit, look at @Zcash. The energy within the ecosystem is as good as in the startups shipping products in production to their clients. I've rarely seen a coordination like this, mixed with expertise across multiple teams and skills. Zcash gave me back my motivation of being in crypto, mixed with engineering and research. I believed that I wanted to move back to maths as nothing was exciting anymore, but I was wrong. My love for engineering and code is back. I'm listening to as many as possible conversations in parallel, grabbing all the knowledge I can have, while still working. And I love it. And the people are serious about the vision. It's motivating to be around them.

Your name for receiving private unstoppable money. Try the beta on @EdgeWallet @ZingoLabs @cakewallet Powered by $ZEC

Introducing a limited preview of GPT-5.6 Sol, our next generation frontier model, as well as GPT-5.6 Terra, a balanced model for efficient, everyday work, and GPT-5.6 Luna, a fast and affordable model for high-volume work. openai.com/index/previewi…

Zcash's new Ironwood pool is being formally verified to rule out all undetectable counterfeiting bugs, up to the underlying cryptographic assumptions. tachyon.z.cash/blog/detecting…