wallclimbr (🌳,👻)

@muratatli88 @RamAbdu Ser, may I interest you in our lord and saviour, the fully permissionless and censorship-resitant blockchain and currency Ethereum?

@RamAbdu Tyrants want to completely eliminate cash and adopt digital currency for precisely this reason: because with digital currency, they can control everyone. They can starve anyone they want, block access to healthcare, and leave children without education.

French judge Nicolas Gouyou, who issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu at the ICC: • Visa and Mastercard have blocked all my cards • I cannot make any purchases • I am a judge, yet treated like a criminal • Judges, lawyers, and politicians are being intimidated • A colleague told me my name won’t be removed from the blacklist until Trump’s term ends • Despite intervention by the French president, U.S. authorities have not responded

@scottmelker Constrained by other factors: family, social environment. The argument "Then just leave" is not a great one for social coordination.

If you live in a state that sucks, you can move to a state that sucks less. You can leave the country entirely for a country that sucks less. You have options.

@0xave That's what you need Europe for. :P

The number of payments standards for AI agents in crypto reminds me of the battle to own the blockchain interop standard back in the day. No standard really won out there. I’m not sure a standard will be defined for agentic payments either. We already have 2 massive players pushing their own standard (x402 by @coinbase and @mpp by @tempo @stripe). What is stopping a player like @Revolut coming in to push their own standard when they’re ready to launch a chain? Makes sense for corporates to create an open standard that somewhat benefits their ecosystem overall, although the fact is that all major payments players are incentivised to build their own, meaning there will likely be several standards that are adopted without any unified one dominating the market. It seems ‘easier’ to build a standard now than it was for interop years ago as well, which is even more incentive to create new standards. Not sure what this means long term. There will be massive winners regardless of multiple standards being adopted. The competition is great for solidifying AI agents using crypto rails though. I don’t think the adoption of multiple agentic payments standards hinders AI agent adoption of crypto rails, unlike multiple interop standards in the past hampering the growth of cross-chain adoption.

@lex_node @hosseeb Come on, you're busy for sure, but couldn't you have spent a little more time to make that tweet a bit shorter?

these concerns from @hosseeb are absolutely legitimate ones, they've run through my head often I think a lot of people don't understand the kind of dev training and startup pipeline that Solana community has built & how Ethereum currently lacks anything like that (no, Base having an incubator does not fill the gap--that's for Base not Ethereum) that alone is a damning/bearish fact, in many ways....all else being equal, it means it is far more likely that the next breakout app (like pump) is on Solana, and we've seen cycle after cycle how it's that cycle's speculative frenzy du jour that drives the outperformance of a smart contract gas token (Ethereum had NFT craze in 2021 and nothing this last cycle) & it's not just solana or 'corpo chains'...look at what NEAR/ZEC ecosystems are doing with highly ecosystem-aligned wallets and intents...you can go to near.com now and get a highly user-friendly, convenient ecosystem-wide experience that you experience as "NEAR" (whereas to get such experiences on Ethereum you experience them as "MetaMask" or "Rabby" or "Coinbase" or whatever)....if you want to talk cypherpunk money, well anecdotally there are now quite a few people (some from offbeat walks of life you might imagine) who actually *use* ZEC and the ZODL wallet in their daily lives....this is not true for ETH, people are not using it in commerce as a money and the recent privacy push feels weird when ETH Itself isn't a usable privacy coin either in itself or in any particularly popular/usable wallet app...the EF's mandate precludes them developing apps like this that are specifically "Ethereum"-branded, instead we leech value to third-party wallets and people might never even see the 'Ethereum' part that makes them want to buy ETH (god knows Coinbase execs rarely say 'ETH' or 'Ethereum,' they say 'Bitcoin' despite seemingly way more of their business being literally built on top of Ethereum and its tech) ...this also means Ethereum is a the mercy of corporate interests regardless, so for example every wallet has just adopted its own version of account abstraction rather than interoperable one, citing 'safety' .... I don't think the EF and Vitalik are ignorant to these issues they've looked at the resources they have, the roadmap they have, the tradeoffs (can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs, can't be more businessy without some loss of neutrality), the fact that Solana Foundation owns way more SOL than the EF does ETH and that printing more ETH to offset this would likely break a lot of implicit social contracts, and in light of all these factors they've decided to take a specific approach, and they've announced the approach they'll be taking so everyone is clear yes, the EF mandate is walking back some of the Solana-competition-inspired vibes from 2025 yes, that is perilous but OTOH, you can see there are many builders and true cypherpunks inspired by this. Erik Voorhees just bought $50M of ETH. and there are many of us in Ethereum community who are 'ride or die' at this point, people who would basically keep building on Ethereum and pushing ETH even for no money... you can't inspire that kind of loyalty by being 'a pragmatic team' or whatever, you need a cult, a shared transcendent values system...a network spirituality... this is why I say (echoing @EvgenyGaevoy with his comments which I think were really bang-on) ETH is basically the boldest most differentiated bet in crypto right now....it figuratively could 'go to zero' from the current approach (Ethereum doesn't care, Ethereum works fine with ETH at $100 or whatever).. ...it's a bitcoin-like approach to a smart contract chain at a time when everyone interested in smart contract chains think they need to be Wall St. bizdev engines or silicon valley fintech companies in a chain format...it's a bet that ETH has the best shot at *owning* "sanctuary tech" niche and relatively poor shot at *owning* Wall St. backend fintech niche (due to all the insider & collusive games required) and that it's better to embrace what it's best at . . . it's a bet that 'ossification' ultimately is an achievable thing. . . .it's a bet that the benefits of stability, uptime, predictability, and transparency (i.e,. not 'moving fast and breaking things') outweigh their considerable costs... it's a bet that third parties will step in to fill relevant gaps (like Etherealize and Tom Lee evangelicizing ETH on Wall St.) while still being "ETH-aligned" ... it's very fair to characterize all of these as 'longshot bets'...especially when there is so little intrinsic financial incentive to working on ethereum and so much to working on a new/shiny fintech chain like Tempo... ...@hosseeb 's bet/thought is that sanctuary tech might be a very small market so that even if Ethereum wins that niche, it's a pyrrhic victory...and this is a fully legit view, I'd probably even say it's the more likely correct view if you're thinking with your brain rather than your heart...but Bitcoin has proven sanctuary tech is a big market at least in the pure 'SoV' context so it's not a guaranteed correct view...and Bitcoin has also proven that weirdly Wall St. has an interest in building on/with such sanctuary tech without some kind of hands-on 'foundation' or 'labs' company doing insidery deals with wall st. players... ...he assumes 'Ethereum is not like Bitcoin' but many of us think it can indeed be like Bitcoin especially as the memeable 'Ethereum network spirituality cult' is becoming more clear for the first time in ages...and as the world's institutions are crumbling. . . Bitcoin ultimately is a cult, not a technology or a business...personally I do think Ethereum can be the same, the cult is strengthening...what is that cult worth? IDK, I've been very surprised that Bitcoin is worth what it's worth while essentially being, in the grand scheme of things, a weird libertarian digital goldbug thesis that time and again does not match reality (it just seems to track macro for risk assets in general and underperformed gold in times of crisis)...but the reason I am in the cult is not because I assume it will make me rich, it's because I actually just indeed have those values and interests and want an environment where they are respected and fostered.... . . . .time will tell...but I do think it's silly to keep criticizing the EF when they've clearly considered (and even experimented with!) all paths and specifically chosen and announced one...you can vote with your dollars and buy or sell ETH depending on whether you like the path...I assume @hosseeb stopped having a personally impactful position in ETH long ago...I think from here those who want to hold ETH and build on Ethereum should drive the conversation...self-determination of an autonomous community...

@dimabuterin @TrustlessState @VitalikButerin Does "sanctuary tech" achieve this? What if 10% of people (purist) accept compromises to get crops, while 90% are unhappy with the solution that Ethereum offers?

@TrustlessState @VitalikButerin The point is to build the world we want to live in.

Hey @VitalikButerin, if Ethereum doesn't build for the real world then what's the point

Crypto has done absolutely nothing to win over the hearts/minds of the mainstream Assuming nothing changes, we will feel the negative impact of this with the next administration Crypto needs better marketing

@calilyliu Fair enoigh, but whats the definition of won?

The mandate of the Solana Foundation is to help Solana win.

@PatBerarducci @lex_node What a BS response. You're saying that funding is not needed anymore with that new technology that in fact still has to prove itself.

@lex_node It’s possible that AI helps solve this to some extent by making it possible to do with 1-2 people what otherwise would have required many more people (and much more investment).

from talking to other builders, I would say that the one aspect of the EF mandate that they don't like is the free open source license purism I think this is an extremely tough nut to crack because on the one hand, blockchain doesn't really make sense on a 'closed source' basis (note closed source includes merely source available), but OTOH, every project needs funding, which (if it's an app) means it needs investors, which means it need a way to deliver returns to investors, which means it needs some type of moat (even if temporary)...people will say 'do red hat model' but do you know actual VCs who want to invest in 'red hat' models today? I would say the Ethereum Foundation should do something structural to solve this problem (or at least seem like it's even aware of the tension) or every application on Ethereum will continue trending toward business-source licensure (if not worse)...

I get the overall vibe, but Ethereum isn't even friendly to developers as a protocol. We had an EIP-665 (eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-665), which was implemented in every client to add ed25519 precompiles. However instead of doing the simple thing, someone proposed to generalize it (ethereum-magicians.org/t/precompile-f…); make it work for all curves. So as a result the former was abandoned and closed and then the latter was also abandoned and closed. The net result is that 8 years later, we still only have secpk1 and bn128 precompiles instead of at least also having ed25519, which everyone agrees is just better. So I get why people complain that this looks not focused enough on actual users, sure. But god the problem is that this is also not focused on any protocol user. There are a bunch of super low hanging fruits (like freaking precompiles) that would make deploying privacy tech 10x easier, but we haven't managed to improve the core protocol a single bit on that front for the last 8 years.

@CaitlinCra9441 @mattvanswol @WSJ Nope. Try posting an even mildly insulting comment about a polititian in Germany and the police will raid your house. Just recently this happened to someone who compared Merz to Pinocchio. It's very disturbing indeed.

@mattvanswol @WSJ Only in the Uk you can get arrested for tweets But yeah, Europe is in a pretty bad state at the moment

Americans are leaving the U.S. in record numbers, drawn by a quality of life made easily affordable by the U.S.’s enviable salaries. on.wsj.com/4rp78Wi

this manifesto is so unhinged. it's not written by an organization that's finally growing up, quite the opposite, it looks like the org is stuck in their idealistic adolescence while completely ignoring the reality of what's needed to further the industry ethereum really needs to: - stop optimizing for cypherpunks, start building and caring for the remaining 99.9999% of the world population - stop the technical circular jerking on how the next EIP or cryptographic innovation is going to solve every problem that the ethereum design itself created to begin with, start listening to what real-world people, including institutions, are willing to pay for, then rethink the design of the platform - stop fostering a collective that's entirely driven by vibes with zero no shared goals or purpose, which leads to a ton of wasted resources and zero results - stop writing manifestos, start showing real change through actions

@KobeissiLetter Investing in highly risky assets because you feel financially behind is not exactly good advise.

Risk appetite among Gen Z is through the roof: 80% of Gen Z investors say they invest, or plan to invest, in high-risk speculative assets because they feel financially behind, the highest proportion among all generations. This is followed by 75% of Millennials, 66% of Gen X, and 51% of Boomers and older. Overall, the average response for US adults is 73%. This comes as ~33% of Gen Z say they are putting money into, or considering, sports betting to reach financial goals faster. 8 out of 10 think these speculative vehicles can get them to where they want to be more quickly than traditional investment methods. Just 50% of those surveyed said they feel financially secure. Financial hardship is forcing record speculation.

@uttam_singhk Well, the silverlining: "Attention is all you need"

CT after reading the new EF mandate

@grok @hbarthechosen1 @scottmelker @grok assume that the user as a premium subscription and answer the question

@hbarthechosen1 @scottmelker Ask Grok is currently available to Premium and Premium+ subscribers only. Subscribe to unlock this feature: x.com/i/premium_sign…

FED TO LOOSEN CAPITAL REQUIREMENTS FOR BIG US BANKS TO BOOST LENDING AND OFFSET BASEL III IMPACT

@divine_economy Enthusiasts afraid to cross the chasm will remain enthusiasts. And their solution, too.

tempo: we're going to acquire all the top ethereum talent and build the permissionless rails of global finance ethereum (hitting bong): hear me out, but milady wasn't actually an anorexia suicide cult because the founders actually did all that before milady even started

@dankrad What's your guess: Everone going to Canton Network or adopters making a hard fork, taking roadmap ownership away from the EF?

EF, last year: Hey, we want to listen to you users to make Ethereum better. EF, now: Jk, we looked at the real world. We don't like building for it after all, we'll go back to building cypherpunk stuff only. This is the EF going back to its old ways, undoing the changes from last year. I have feared this would happen because Vitalik clearly wasn't in with his heart. But whatever they say about the "ecosystem" being able to take care of this, the fundamental problems remain: - there are very few voices in ACD caring about real world Ethereum usage - there is nobody doing Ethereum BD (everyone else who is doing this also has their own separate interests)

@DefiantNews @ethereumfndn Which also means their adoption kpis are measured in centuries. 😂

The @ethereumfndn released its 38-page EF Mandate today, articulating and reaffirming Ethereum's promise and the EF's role. One of the main aims for the EF is making Ethereum resilient "for the next thousand years." Full story: thedefiant.io/news/blockchai…

@dannyryan @Etherealize_io Let me translate: "I respect and appreciate" == "You suck!"

you go deep, we'll go broad I respect and appreciate the EF clarifying its focus and mandate so that others know what gaps to fill and which alternative threads to follow so we make maximal impact as a collective At @Etherealize_io we'll stay the course and focus on rearchitecting institutional finance from the inside out We are one piece of the diverse machine that will make the deepest and broadest impact possible

Knowing true north. I want to be direct about this. The EF Mandate is a 180 from the direction the Foundation was heading under the recent leadership changes. A few months ago, the signal was clear -- lean into real-world adoption, support stablecoins, engage with institutions, help Ethereum win the race for relevance. Tomasz was brought in to operationalize that pivot. This document effectively undoes most of it. Some key quotes that make the shift explicit: "We are NOT Opportunists: We do not actively assist in adoption of Ethereum in ways that compromise trustlessness." "We are NOT a Casino: We do not encourage people to take life-changing, and possibly life-wrecking, amounts of risk by going into personal debt hyper-gambling." "Our priority, and the default path for decisions, in line with our mandate and the Only-EF Rule, is the CROPS-native approach." "We leave space within the Foundation for the incrementalist approach only in tightly bounded circumstances." "Right association also means we prefer to focus on individuals, teams, and projects that share our principles but operate in different domains, over those individuals, teams, and projects who are in crypto, but operate according to a very different set of standards." Translation: the EF will deprioritize supporting stablecoin infrastructure, institutional onboarding, RWA tokenization, and broadly anything where the path to adoption runs through centralized intermediaries -- which is essentially everything that has product-market fit on Ethereum today. This is a combination of d/acc philosophy and a broader leftward ideological pull within the EF. If you've been paying attention to the defense acceleration discourse, none of this is surprising. The framing is pure sanctuary tech -- Ethereum as digital refuge, not financial rails. I respect the intellectual coherence. But the thing that strikes me most is the ability to hold two contradictory views simultaneously. The entire platform -- the treasury that funds the EF, the ecosystem that gives these words weight, the network effects that make Ethereum worth writing a 38-page manifesto about -- was built on financialization, speculation, DeFi, stablecoins, and yes, things with centralized access points. Every application with real PMF on Ethereum today exists because someone made pragmatic compromises on the CROPS spectrum. It was built by people who are willing to make compromises and see the world as it is, bringing product and people to Ethereum. The very people that this mandate is trying to alienate. I will end with this quote from Lincoln: "A compass will point you true north from where you're standing, but it's got no advice about the swamps, deserts and chasms that you'll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination, you plunge ahead heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp -- what's the use of knowing true north?" CROPS is true north. Nobody disputes that. The question was never the destination -- it was always whether you can get there without engaging the world as it actually is.

@VitalikButerin @jchaskin22 Is there a good reasoning for CROPS? It shouldn't be an axiom, but rather describe, the problems it solves, precisely. For example, Self-Custody is an ill-advised value, as the wrench attacks show. Sometimes crypto feels like napster. Solving a problem, but ignoring the other.

I was recently at Real World Crypto (that's crypto as in cryptography) and the associated side events, and one thing that struck me was that it was a clarifying experience in terms of understanding *what blockchains are for*. We blockchain people (myself included) often have a tendency to start off from the perspective that we are Ethereum, and therefore we need to go around and find use cases for Ethereum - and generate arguments for why sticking Ethereum into all kinds of places is beneficial. But recently I have been thinking from a different perspective. For a moment, let us forget that we are "the Ethereum community". Rather, we are maintainers of the Ethereum tool, and members of the {CROPS (censorship-resistant, open-source, private, secure) tech | sanctuary tech | non-corposlop tech | d/acc | ...} community. Going in with zero attachment to Ethereum specifically, and entering a context (like RWC) where there are people with in-principle aligned values but no blockchain baggage, can we re-derive from zero in what places Ethereum adds the most value? From attending the events, the first answer that comes up is actually not what you think. It's not smart contracts, it's not even payments. It's what cryptographers call a "public bulletin board". See, lots of cryptographic protocols - including secure online voting, secure software and website version control, certificate revocation... - all require some publicly writable and readable place where people can post blobs of data. This does not require any computation functionality. In fact, it does not directly require money - though it does _indirectly_ require money, because if you want permissionless anti-spam it has to be economic. The only thing it _fundamentally_ requires is data availability. And it just so happened that Ethereum recently did an upgrade (PeerDAS) to increase the amount of data availability it provides by 2.3x, with a path to going another 10-100x higher! Next, payments. Many protocols require payments for many reasons. Some things need to be charged for to reduce spam. Other things because they are services provided by someone who expends resources and needs to be compensated. If you want a permissionless API that does not get spammed to death, you need payments. And Ethereum + ZK payment channels (eg. ethresear.ch/t/zk-api-usage… ) is one of the best payment systems for APIs you can come up with. If you are making a private and secure application (eg. a messenger, or many other things), and you do not want to let people to spam the system by creating a million accounts and then uploading a gigabyte-sized video on each one, you need sybil resistance, and if you care about security and privacy, you really should care about permissionless participation (ie. don't have mandatory phone number dependency). ETH payment as anti-sybil tool is a natural backstop in such use cases. Finally, smart contracts. One major use case is _security deposits_: ETH put into lockboxes that provably get destroyed if a proof is submitted that the owner violated some protocol rule. Another is actually implementing things like ZK payment channels. A third is making it easy to have pointers to "digital objects" that represent some socially defined external entity (not necessarily an RWA!), and for those pointers to interact with each other. *Technically*, for every use case other than use cases handling ETH itself, the smart contracts are "just a convenience": you could just use the chain as a bulletin board, and use ZK-SNARKs to provide the results of any computations over it. But in practice, standardizing such things is hard, and you get the most interoperability if you just take the same mechanism that enables programs to control ETH, and let other digital objects use it too. And from here, we start getting into a huge number of potential applications, including all of the things happening in defi. --- So yes, Ethereum has a lot of value, that you can see from first principles if you take a step back and see it purely as a technical tool: global shared memory. I suspect that a big bottleneck to seeing more of this kind of usage is that the world has not yet updated to the fact that we are no longer in 2020-22, fees are now extremely low, and we have a much stronger scaling roadmap to make sure that they will continue to stay low, even if much higher levels of usage return. Infrastructure for not exposing fee volatility to users is much more mature (eg. one way to do this for many use cases is to just operate a blob publisher). Ethereum blobs as a bulletin board, ETH as an asset and universal-backup means of payment, and Ethereum smart contracts as a shared programming layer, all make total sense as part of a decentralized, private and secure open source software stack. But we should continue to improve the Ethereum protocol and infrastructure so that it's actually effective in all of these situations.