daniel

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We strongly oppose the Unified Attestation initiative and call for app developers supporting privacy, security and freedom on mobile to avoid it. Companies selling phones should not be deciding which operating systems people are allowed to use for apps. uattest.net

One man mass-predicted the future of technology for 35 years and nobody repriced their worldview. In 1999, Kurzweil said AGI by 2029. Stanford organized a conference to discuss it. They polled several hundred AI experts. 80% said it would take 100 years. Geoffrey Hinton was among them. Kurzweil was the only person in the room who said 30 years. By 2024, Hinton publicly said he was wrong. Metaculus prediction markets moved from 2060 to 2036 to roughly 2028. Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Jensen Huang all converged on 2028-2029. Elon said 2026. The consensus moved 70 years closer to Kurzweil. Kurzweil didn’t move at all. What separates his method from the experts who kept updating: he never predicted AI breakthroughs. He predicted compute trajectories. His 1999 model tracked the exponential growth in calculations per constant dollar since 1939. A 75 quadrillion-fold increase. He just followed the curve forward. The experts at that Stanford conference were reasoning from the state of the art. Kurzweil was reasoning from the rate of change. That’s why they had to update every 5 years and he never did. 86% accuracy across 147 predictions. 35 years of receipts. And the next prediction on his list is the one people still laugh off: singularity by 2045, where machine intelligence merges with human cognition. The track record says stop laughing.

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.

We are pleased to share that using Gauss, we have completed a ~200K LOC formalization of Maryna Viazovska’s 2022 Fields Medal theorems on optimal sphere packing in dimensions 8 and 24. This is the only Fields Medal-winning result from this century to be completely formalized, and is the largest single-purpose Lean formalization in history. We are honored to have assisted @SidharthHarihar1 and the rest of the sphere packing team in this achievement. math.inc/sphere-packing

For anyone wondering how a third-grader can complete six years' worth of math in a single year. This knowledge graph spans 3,000 math topics, from 4th grade to the university level, providing the perfect basis for mastery learning. Students can go as fast or far as they want! There are no restrictions whatsoever. The only requirement is that they must demonstrate mastery of each topic before moving on to the next. Kids are capable of incredible things when given that kind of freedom and support.

For adults, especially creative or entrepreneurial types, I want you to genuinely imagine sitting through an entire typical school day. Follow the schedule. Change classes when bells ring. Ask permission to use the bathroom. Sit still and face forward while someone talks at you about something you already know or don't care about. I promise you will suffer if you actually do this experiment. The boredom will feel like physical pain. That's what we do to millions of children every day who have the same kinds of minds you have. We're destroying the people whose thinking the world needs most.

We love them but currently it requires trust for Visa to access your stablecoins. We do this non-custodially on our own credit card network (not Visa). The signature that comes from the card at the terminal is used to transfer your stablecoins to the merchant. We can drastically reduce merchant fees, keep your funds self custodial, and remain kyc/aml free.

I love opening this app, seeing a banger xeet, and then seeing it snapped out of existence by automatic reload /s

New research from @TheOceanCleanup 5m kg of plastic now, near 0 in a few years from now!

Have been following reactions to what I said about L2s about 1.5 days ago. One important thing that I believe is: "make yet another EVM chain and add an optimistic bridge to Ethereum with a 1 week delay" is to infra what forking Compound is to governance - something we've done far too much for far too long, because we got comfortable, and which has sapped our imagination and put us in a dead end. If you make an EVM chain *without* an optimistic bridge to Ethereum (aka an alt L1), that's even worse. We don't friggin need more copypasta EVM chains, and we definitely don't need even more L1s. L1 is scaling and is going to bring lots of EVM blockspace - not infinite (AIs in particular will need both more blockspace and lower latency than even a greatly scaled L1 can offer), but lots. Build something that brings something new to the table. I gave a few examples: privacy, app-specific efficiency, ultra-low latency, but my list is surely very incomplete. A second important thing that I believe is: regarding "connection to Ethereum", vibes need to match substance. I personally am a fan of many of the things that can be called "app chains". For example I think there's a large chance that the optimal architecture for prediction markets is something like: the market gets issued and resolved on L1, user accounts are on L1, but trading happens on some based rollup or other L2-like system, where the execution reads the L1 to verify signatures and markets. I like architectures where deep connection to L1 is first-class, and not an afterthought ("we're pretty much a separate chain, but oh yeah, we have a bridge, and ok fine let's put 1-2 devs to get it to stage 1 so the l2beat people will put a green checkmark on it so vitalik likes us"). The other extreme of "app chain", eg. the version where you convince some government registry, or social media platform, or gaming thing, to start putting merkle roots of its database, with STARKs that prove every update was authorized and signed and executed according to a pre-committed algorithm, onchain, is also reasonable - this is what makes the most sense to me in terms of "institutional L2s". It's obviously not Ethereum, not credibly neutral and not trustless - the operator can always just choose to say "we're switching to a different version with different rules now". But it would enable verifiable algorithmic transparency, a property that many of us would love to see in government, social media algorithms or wherever else, and it may enable economic activity that would otherwise not be possible. I think if you're the first thing, it's valid and great to call yourself an Ethereum application - it can't survive without Ethereum even technologically, it maximizes interoperability and composability with other Ethereum applications. If you're the second thing, then you're not Ethereum, but you are (i) bringing humanity more algorithmic transparency and trust minimization, so you're pursuing a similar vision, and (ii) depending on details probably synergistic with Ethereum. So you should just say those things directly! Basically: 1. Do something that brings something actually new to the table. 2. Vibes should match substance - the degree of connection to Ethereum in your public image should reflect the degree of connection to Ethereum that your thing has in reality.

turns out all you need is dprint with its typescript plugin. formats deterministic newlines and clean imports github.com/tabcat/zzzync/…

dprint.dev pretty cool. have been trying to find a formatter i like. was using biome but i really wanted deterministic newlines. prettier was aight but couldn't format imports like I wanted. trying dprint with biome plugin now. plugins are wasm binaries 😯

Fed "independence" is a myth, a story. It is the moral cover which justifies its grotesque state-sanctioned near-monopoly power over the most important market in the world: money. The Fed is never "independent" of the banking establishment. It is of, by, and for the banks. The Fed is the banking establishment's greatest accomplishment. And because modern banking is an appendage of the state, so too is the Fed its most potent tentacle. Nobody should really care about how much the Fed spent on its building renovations. What a distraction! The Fed's crime is not an embellished construction project, but the systematic coercive distortion of money rates across the global economy for the past century.

I agree with maybe 60% of this, but one bit that is particularly important to highlight is the explicit separation between what the poster calls "the open web" (really, the corposlop web), and "the sovereign web". x.com/tom777kruise/s… This is a distinction I did not realize until recently, and I must admit the bitcoin maximalists were far ahead: a big part of their resistance to ICOs, tokens other than bitcoin, arbitrary financial applications, etc was precisely about keeping bitcoin "sovereign" and not "corposlop". The big error that many of them made was trying to achieve this goal with either government crackdowns or user disempowerment (keeping bitcoin script limited, and rejecting many categories of applications entirely), but their fear was real. So what is corposlop? In essence, it is the combination of three things: * Corporate optimization power * An aura of respectableness of being a company with sleek polished branding * Behavior that the exact opposite of respectable, because that's what's needed to maximize profit Corposlop includes things like: * Social media that maximizes dopamine, outrage, other methods of short-term engagement, at the expense of long-term value and fulfillment * Needless mass data collection from users, often followed by managing it carelessly or even casually selling it to third parties * Walled gardens charging monopolistic high fees and actively preventing people from even linking to other platforms * Hollywood releasing the 7th sequel to some tired franchise, because that's the most risk-averse thing to do * Every corporation that rallied around slogans of diversity and equity and the need to overturn society to fight racism in 2020, and then publicly mocked those causes for engagement in 2025 This is all digital corposlop; there are big and important analogues to this in the physical world too. Corposlop is soulless: trend-following homogeneity that is both evil and lame #how-we-fear-big-business" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/1… These are things that appear to serve the user, but actually disempower the user. I have many qualms with Apple, but aside from their monopolistic practices, they actually have many non-corposlop traits. They serve users not by constantly asking "what do users want this quarter", but by having an opinionated long-term vision. They have a strong emphasis on privacy. They resist and create trends rather than following them. I just wish they could take the brave step of ending their monopolistic practices and switch to an open source first strategy. It may damage their market cap, but man must live for something higher than market caps. Zac from Aztec was also early to recognize the importance of this, with a post that is on the whole very pro-freedom, but at the same time does not shrink back from labeling what is essentially corposlop a primary enemy, even when it does not violate the libertarian non-aggression principle. x.com/Zac_Aztec/stat… In 2000, the understanding of "sovereignty" largely focused on avoiding the iron fist of government. Today, "sovereignty" also means securing your digital privacy through cryptography, and securing your own mind from corporate mind warfare trying to extract your attention and your dollars. It also means doing things because you believe in them, and declaring independence from the homogenizing and soul-sucking concept of "the meta". These are the kinds of tools that we should build more of. Build tools like: * Privacy-preserving local-first applications that minimize dependence on and data leaks to third parties * Social media platforms and tools that let the user take control of what content they see. Appeal to people's long-term goals, not short-term impulses * Financial tools that help users grow their wealth, and do not encourage 50x leverage or sports betting or taking out a loan to pay for a burrito * AI tools that are maximally open and privacy and local-friendly, and that maximize productivity from merging the power of human and bot, rather than encouraging the user to sit back and let the bot do all the work, so they learn nothing * Applications, companies, and physical environments that take an opinionated view on the kind of world they want to see, and have an opinionated culture * DAOs that can support organizations and communities that steadfastly pursue a unique objective, and do not all get captured by the same groups. Privacy-preserving and non-tokenholder-driven voting can help here Be sovereign. Reject corposlop. Believe in somETHing.

@Jrag0x setting up clear definitions for a prediction market resolution has to be so hard

Down in my bunker as radioactive ashes rain down on my city. I check my Polymarket "Yes" shares for "Atomic bomb detonation in 2026?" using the last remnants of internet. Worth $0. UMA resolved it as 'No' because it was technically a hydrogen bomb and not an atomic one.