westgates

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.

@cb_doge lier

> be elon > refuse the invite to the island > know emails can be misunderstood > know they can be twisted > still push to release the files anyway > choose transparency first > demand accountability > stand alone for what is right > be the only one calling for prosecution > be the only one asking for justice > choose truth over everything else > fight so justice prevails > be elon

@NikkiHaley Your neighbor just doesn’t want to be the 51st state of America.

Canada cozying up to China to welcome more investment puts all of North America at serious risk.

@FirstLadyOffice @FLOTUS Which language did she say?

"Today, I urge you to take action: use AI to unlock new parts of your imagination. Lead with your ideas, stay sharp, but remember - never surrender your thinking to AI." @FLOTUS

Good fucking gawd! We are now learning why the pedophile president was so desperate to NEVER release the Epstein files. 😳👇

Just checked and yeah $IBIT is now Harvard's largest position in its 13F and its biggest position increase in Q3. It's super rare/difficult to get an endowment to bite on an ETF- esp a Harvard or Yale, it's as good a validation as an ETF can get. That said, half a billion is a mere 1% of total endowment. Big enough to rank 16th among IBIT holders tho.

How could we have overslept an important date for Tornado Cash? Over the past few days, the total number of deposits in Tornado Cash has reached 5 million eth (4.1%). dune.com/tornadodao/tor… #ZKTech #Tornadocash #PrivacyMatters #ZEC #Ethereum

👉Move your fingers. After the sanctions were lifted, most DEXs allowed trading of $TORN, such as: Binance Wallet, Cow.fi, 1inch, Sushi, Kyberswap, OpenOcean, etc. @Uniswap so why aren't you? #TornadoCash $ZEC #Zcash #privacy #PrivacyMatters

HEY @Uniswap Why aren't we allowed to trade $TORN Tornardo cash? I thought the Case was dropped in 2025

@slowhandeth Use cow.fi or binance wallet to buy $torn

市场的最大魅力在于不确定性，这话真的不假。可能早在半年之前，或者更早， $torn 7u 的时候，我开始持续累积，但说实话，到现在没有挣到什么钱，几十个点，我现在基本不持有。 对于这笔交易，我觉得教育意义大于收益，原因是： 感觉的好处：我早早认为隐私一定会发力，那时候华语区没有人在聊隐私，必须要坦白的是，我不知道为什么是隐私，现在我也不知道，就是个感觉，也就是说目前看板块判断对了，但是最终币买的效果一般般。 其中有一次，应该是两个月前，@paradigm 组织了一个请愿释放 torn 开发者的签名，有几十个人还是十几个人签字，弄了个网页，这时候我觉得稳了，但过了几个礼拜，这哥们败诉了，然后他又上诉。我又觉得不稳了，其实这跟你的立场没有任何关系，他官司稳不稳，都是次要的。 关键是这个币真的冷门，dex 你几本买不到，我刚开始买还得是跟 @rickawsb 在 sushi 买，反正很折腾，过几天 ok钱包能买了，过几天又不能买了，总之太冷门。 这种事儿常有，我也不打算参与后续的隐私行情，也是一个感觉。人不要装逼，这都是感觉，你预判不到，你预判到了，大跌行情也会影响你，你也买不到。 总结一下：相信自己的感受、判断，其次就是在这个你选择的板块中，尽量找龙头，这也是我多次强调的。 $zec

@rstormsf @alex_pertsev You created Tornado in significant part because of my suggestion that it is something worth building. It would violate basic honor for me to do that, and then fail to support you in your hour of need. In Ethereum we protect our own, and uphold our honor. Milady

Bro, you’re comparing wrong. Tornado Cash has shielded more than 4 million ETH, about $13.2 billion today.

🚀 Privacy season is back. #TornadoCash TVL just hit a new all-time high, surpassing even the Ethereum Foundation’s holdings. The question isn’t if but which exchange will be first to relist.
#TORN $TORN $ZEC #Zcash #privacy

Tornado Cash is no longer just a protocol. It is a historical milestone in crypto privacy.

Looks like @RichardHeartWin just officially put in an ATH in the Tornado Cash 100 ETH pool's holdings

300k ETH in Tornado Cash. The GOAT of privacy — not Railgun, not Privacy Pools etherscan.io/address/0xa160…

My X feed $zec 🧐

#TornadoCash has almost 8 times higher TVL compared to #RAILGUN. At the same time, RAILGUN has a capitalization of $150 million, while Tornado has $70 million. If Tornado had the same ratio between TVL and capitalization, would the price of #TORN be $200?