Zatoshi

Day 448 of sharing @aztecnetwork memes until mainnet is live

it reminds me of when I first got started in web3 cryptography 9 years ago - back then the idea of an engineer tinkering with cryptographic algorithms was anathema - 'don't roll your own crypto'. we were the vandals and the derelicts trampling over sacred protocols to the consternation of the academics and the elite maintainers of canonical libraries. and now the wheel turns. vibe-coding crypto is as reckless as rolling it without insight back in 2017. @fede_intern are you rejecting its use entirely within cryptography or are you more concerned with its use by people with no cryptographic domain knowledge?

🛠️Azguard Wallet 0.12.0 now available! ✅New tool - TX Cancellation ✅Minor bug fixed ✅Performance improvement 🆕TX Cancellation allows you to cancel stuck or pending transactions directly from the wallet and regain control of your funds without unnecessary delays.

yes, i’m still very obsessed with the industrial party — and its cult industrial time-travel epic, The Morning Star of Lingao. i just published a Q&A with Ma Qianzu, the main author behind Lingao, now an influencer with ~2M followers in china (@danwwang described him as “quirky and dramatic”). the core idea of the piece: the industrial party has striking parallels with the Western rationalist community. both are online intellectual movements, and somehow built around a piece of fiction. the fiction recruits believers; the believers then rethink technology, politics, and institutions from first principles. (American rationalists gather on LessWrong and read HPMOR; the industrial party congregates on Guancha, internet forums, wechat groups, and reads Lingao.) but their obsessions diverge. the rationalists fixate on bayesian reasoning and decision theory, the industrial party is obsessed with marxist production relations, engineering rationality, and the problem of building state capacity. in this Q&A, Ma Qianzu and I talked about AGI, power, china’s media landscape, and the possible end of most jobs. if you want to understand a very different intellectual operating system shaping parts of china’s tech imagination — this is a good entry point. LINK IN REPLY:

Day 443 of sharing @aztecnetwork memes until mainnet is live

Congratulations! This is a huge accomplishment and a credit to the tenacity of you and your team. I’m looking forward to exploring this and finding ways to integrate the incredible work you’re doing into Aztec.

Day 440 of sharing @aztecnetwork memes until mainnet is live

Everyone is trying to figure out agent delegation right now. At the core of it: identity and payments. Every action an agent takes needs to be private and verifiable.

If I were raising a seed round and could choose just one person to be involved, it would be Charlie Songhurst. Charlie is the smartest advisor out there and at @join_ef, @Alicebentinck and I have been lucky to have him on our board for many years (though these days we have to share him with Zuck…) Alice and I sat down with Charlie to talk about what he’s learned about backing exceptional people - and why your 20s are more important than you think…

If I had a nickel every time I told Claude to hurry up because I am about to board a plane, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice.

Privacy for AI. It all might look hilarious, but i's upcoming reality

15/ And what of L2-land? @aztecnetwork, a privacy Layer 2, was in the works for almost a decade. Its complexity enables developers to build private smart contracts and dApps, with features such as end-to-end privacy and client-side proofs: aztec.network/projects

@ZyraV21 @aztecnetwork Looks fantastic, but why does this need a PR? It doesn’t look like it requires protocol changes

@aztecnetwork @Zac_Aztec Should I open a PR maybe? , excited to see how can this evolve

Just deployed the first restricted indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) construction on @aztecnetwork iO + ZK + Aztec privacy = nothing visible. github.com/Zyra-V21/black… devnet.aztecscan.xyz/contracts/inst…

@VitalikButerin I don't see the bottleneck as fee trauma, although I don't know if that sentiment was communicated at the conference. I think the bottleneck is the absence of a private state machine and the absence of private composability. If every privacy component is a custom ZK-SNARK on top of Ethereum, there is no shared programming layer in reality. Every application developer that requires privacy has to roll their own circuits - with their own state abstractions layered on top of Ethereum (and their own application tooling to create proofs) - and this breaks interoperability and composability. It's global *siloed* memory. Fixing this requires a lot more than standards, it requires a complete re-examination of the protocol to include an ability to read/write private state and query the private state of other applications. Such radical change to the state model creates a leviathan of problems with their own contradictions that must somehow be solved.

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.

wonderful to see my entrepreneurial alma mater thrive like this. thoroughly well deserved, @join_ef is a very special institution that accelerates, nurtures and connects truly exceptional talent.

Aztec is run by a global network of 3.9k+ sequencers and provers. As the first decentralized L2, this introduces some novel challenges in how security is addressed. Learn about the phased rollout plan, and what to expect for Aztec Alpha security: aztec.network/blog/alpha-net…

Decentralised, from day 1. That commitment has implications on how easy the network is to upgrade, and on how much users should trust the code in the early days. We believe these tradeoffs are more than worth it, but you should know about them:

Today, the SDNY prosecutors filed a letter to Judge Failla requesting a retrial date. They want to go again in October. The prosecutors want to retry me on 2 counts the jury couldn't unanimously decide on. A jury of 12 Americans heard 4 weeks of evidence and deadlocked: no verdict on money laundering, and no verdict on sanctions violations. The government's response? Try again to make writing code a crime. @realDonaldTrump declared the "War on Crypto is over." 🇺🇸 AG @DAGToddBlanche's memo: DOJ "is not a digital assets regulator" and won't target mixers for end-user acts. @USTreasury lifted Tornado Cash sanctions entirely. ✅ Also Treasury, March 2026: "Lawful users of digital assets may leverage mixers to enable financial privacy." — official report to Congress under the GENIUS Act. But the SDNY prosecutors — same country, same DOJ — just filed to retry me anyway. 🤔 ⠀ The 2 counts = up to 40 years in federal prison. ⛓️ For writing open-source code. For a protocol I don't control. For transactions I never touched. A jury already couldn't agree this was criminal. But the SDNY prosecutors want to keep trying with the hope of getting a different answer. ⠀ I have a daughter. I have a life in Seattle. I will never stop fighting for freedom. ❤️ But I need to be honest with you: Four weeks of trial. A hung jury. Now they want to do it all over again in October. I have basically exhausted my legal defense funds. And I'm staring down another full federal trial. 😔 Every dollar raised goes directly to keeping this fight alive — attorneys, experts, the full defense apparatus it takes to stand up to the SDNY prosecutors. This isn't abstract. If I can't fund a defense, they win by default. If you care about financial privacy, if you write code and believe that code is speech — this is the moment. 💻🔐 👇

safety is no accident

Simone wanted to be n°1. When we first met her, she was finishing her maths degree at St Andrews: top of her year, building a company on the side, competing at a national level in tennis. From the outside, it looked like the perfect setup. Then a long conversation with an EF talent investor reframed it: perfect can still be limiting. If she stayed, her growth would be capped by the arena around her. So she joined EF to reset her limits, and to surround herself with ambitious people who would raise the bar for what exceptional looks like. But the real reset came a few months later, when she moved to the US. Fundraising for the first time in San Francisco is not trivial. EF helped her feel like an insider from day one, and she raised a $5M pre-seed from Khosla Ventures in weeks. Today she is the CEO of Radical Health. She is building an AI oncologist so that someone's ZIP code does not determine whether they survive cancer. Simone wanted to be n°1. She just needed a bigger arena.