zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ
148.2K posts

zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ
@zooko
Freedom maximalist. Good vibes only.



The Zcash Dev Fund is viewed as a tax on miners, but given that miners participate in the network voluntarily, perhaps it should be seen as a donation from them toward network development that would ultimately benefit them.






This article by @avi_press describes why he switched some of his company's (new) code from Haskell to Python, and he makes a lot of great points. The relative value of the Haskell type system has diminished in this AI world, and the slow build times hurt more than ever. It would be interesting to imagine a world where they had switched instead to Lean, retaining many of the advantages of Haskell but now gaining significantly more value from the type system e.g. being able to use AI theorem provers to prove formal properties about your code (or aid the AI synthesis of code with formal properties). Build times may still be an issue, but I suspect sufficient mitigations could be developed. And before you kick my head in, I've been using Haskell for 36 years and I am a huge fan. avi.press/posts/2026-07-…


This is the kind of narrative that gets pushed while the actual architecture centralizes and leaks. Onion routing hides the full path. That part is real. But the protocol has built in leaks that have been known and documented for years: - Same payment hash on every hop →trivial correlation. - Balance probing recovers up to 89% of public channel balances. - Timing analysis: the single most central node can observe timing on 50% of payments. Top 4 nodes cover 72%. Meanwhile the “decentralized L2” part: - Public capacity hovers between 2.7k–5.6k BTC. - Top 10 nodes control 62% of all public liquidity. - Gini coefficient for node capacity: 0.97. - Top 10% of nodes hold 80% of the locked bitcoin. This is not decentralization. This is a hub and spoke system with a few very powerful hubs. Who runs these hubs? Mostly exchanges and LSPs: Bitfinex, ACINQ, Binance, Kraken, OKX, Wallet of Satoshi and similar. If you’re not running your own full node and managing your own liquidity, you’re almost certainly routing through these entities. They see sender, receiver and amounts. Privacy collapses. This isn’t a bug. It’s the predictable result of a design that prioritizes routing efficiency and capital efficiency over actual decentralization and strong privacy. Powerful adversaries (state level or well resourced) don’t even need to break onion routing perfectly. They just sit on or near the big hubs and watch. Lightning can move small payments faster and cheaper than on-chain. That’s its actual use case. But calling it incredible privacy by default while the liquidity and routing are this concentrated and while these attacks exist, is dishonest. Real privacy requires an additional layer on top (Chaumian ecash like Cashu is one attempt). The base Lightning protocol does not deliver it. Bitcoin was supposed to be a tool for financial sovereignty and resistance to control. When the dominant scaling solution creates new centralized chokepoints that are easy to monitor and potentially censor, we’ve traded one set of problems for another that serves power better. Data doesn’t lie. Narratives do.

There is no escaping jet fuel It is truly the pinnacle of chemistry, the best thing to come from the periodic table yet Nobody has yet faced the carbon single bond chain and won














