MuteDialog

@madebydia Interesting concept. Though before I read your long post I thought perhaps you really meant actual paper, and that seems even nicer. * An AI paper print out 3 times a day. * You write on it then photograph it and upload it once.

@trent_vanepps Left last year but Nominally stayed on as a contractor but not billing. (My office space test of organisational competency was that they would figure it out and remove me. Until then I was clinging on to my red stapler)

@MuteDialog didn't you leave the EF a long time ago?

Excited to announce that I no longer work for the Ethereum foundation after - my god a 7 year voyage. It is been an amazing journey and honestly it speaks to much needed organisational slimming down that they actually finally got rid of me.

@zherring Going to take the summer off to think, dump some old unpubished projects to GitHub, then feel the need to do something real and tangible (possibly in Ethereum still).

@MuteDialog What's next?

1. Intro Vitalik recently wrote about where the EF should go; Aya added a note to explain how we got here, and why. I’ll write about the execution. We now have enough clarity to stop treating “what is the EF for?” as an open-ended question. Our mandate is clear: The EF exists to ensure Ethereum is, becomes, and remains real permissionless infrastructure for self-sovereignty: censorship (and capture) resistant, free and open source, private, and secure; and capable of supporting sovereignty-preserving coordination at scales where trusted institutions hitherto have been unavoidable. The following are my thoughts on some of the points that follow from the mandate and how we are translating it to action. But first, a short reminder about 2. What the EF is not for We are not here to optimize for EF importance, corpo/pol appeal, or ecosystem popularity. We are also not here to please short-term speculators, prop up TBTF neo-SIFIs, market every app on Ethereum, help anyone look good to their crypto or investor friends, or provide on-demand entertainment for dinner parties and private retreats. 3. What the EF is for: Eliminating weaknesses We are here to defensively strengthen places where Ethereum is, or can still become, extractive, totalizing, or vulnerable to cartel or state capture, or authoritarian tools of surveillance or coercion. We will base our actions on a full examination of what Ethereum is and can be at the protocol layer (what is actually running as “Ethereum”), the access layer (what users use to interact with the protocol), the user layer (the end-users who need and will need Ethereum), and the institutional layer (the intermediated paths that scale self-sovereign usage). The EF exists to harden every surface of Ethereum, including those where Ethereum can remain formally permissionless while becoming practically captured. Some obvious surfaces are the transaction pipeline, staking and network security, access layer standards and interfaces, self-sovereignty norms, privacy expectations, institutional adoption patterns, and social layer governance processes. The primary concerns are similar across most of them: does the status quo and its future trajectory minimize trusted dependencies, minimize points of leverage and capture vectors, make user privacy the default, preserve exit, and make trust assumptions legible? The work starts with the EF itself. We are moving compensation and major financial relationships toward ETH and mandate-compliant Ethereum-native stables, with exceptions where positive law or unavoidable operational constraints require exceptions. Rather than a purity ritual or instruction for people to take unmanaged personal risk, it is robustness, alignment, and product pressure. If the EF’s work is to make Ethereum usable as infrastructure for self-sovereignty, everyone at the EF will increasingly live inside the constraints of the system the EF exists to improve: wallet UX, volatility, accounting, privacy gaps, payment friction, stablecoin trust assumptions, recovery, dependency risk, etc. If we can’t use these tools ourselves, it is unrealistic to expect others to. Ethereum is already mature; those who do not depend on the user-facing stack have no business trying to shape its future, at any layer. The transaction pipeline is next. Preventing toxic MEV capture is core EF work, not a peripheral market-structure concern. Transaction supply, ordering, inclusion, block construction, propagation, and settlement are part of Ethereum’s neutrality boundary. Some MEV may persist as an adversarial phenomenon the protocol contains, but it must be absolutely minimized and, for that to be possible, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence by its beneficiaries. If credibly neutral execution is subverted by privileged orderflow, cartelized builders, trusted relays, opaque routing, or validators outsourcing into a narrow supply chain, Ethereum will look permissionless while users experience it as intermediated at the moment value moves. EF protocol work will therefore prioritize lower barriers to block building and validation, stronger inclusion guarantees, reduced extraction opacity, competitive transaction pipelines, user-facing legibility of trust assumptions, and more aggressively exploring the open orderflow solution space. None of this is simple. A good solution in one place can aggravate problems elsewhere. FOCIL is good for censorship resistance, but it may introduce more cross-block MEV. While ePBS solves the relayer trust problem, we must make sure that its implementation does not inadvertently obstruct long-term solutions to even larger problems. It would be unacceptable, for example, if ePBS enshrining the builder economy ends up making it harder to reduce reliance on the private orderflow that has emptied out the public mempool. Encrypted mempools may not only reduce pre-execution transparency and pending orderflow visibility, but also shift competitive advantage to new privileged actors, including specialized hardware operators in some designs, while adding protocol complexity. In order to avoid wasting time playing whack-a-mole, we must commit to solving the extraction problem at a whole system scale. Doing so will require creativity, courage, and the understanding that failure to solve this problem is unacceptable. If we fail, we will have left in place an unnecessary barrier to institutional adoption, but, more importantly, we will also have surrendered a core part of the promise of Ethereum - the replacement of extractive middlemen with permissionless, credibly neutral infrastructure and competitive markets. That must not happen. MEV is likely to be the next major front in the cypherpunk war. We must set ourselves up to win here. Privacy is just as fundamental. A public ledger without serious privacy defaults is a surveillance substrate with settlement guarantees. That is not an acceptable end state for the world computer. Unconditional privacy will be readily available across Ethereum, with programmability on top for selective disclosure, proofs, auditability, compliance logic, reputation, governance, identity, and other constraints chosen by users and their communities. The temporal order matters: unconditional privacy must exist first, opt-in constraints come second. It is also important to avoid forcing users to assemble a fragile stack of special wallets, RPCs, bridges, apps, compliance providers, and operational habits to attain privacy. Deep privacy must be more secure than this. Privacy is a condition for Ethereum’s viability as freedom-respecting coordination infrastructure and as such must be robust. Staking must be treated as protocol infrastructure risk. Staking is not merely a yield product, and liquid staking is not merely an app-layer market. If stake, liquidity, validator access, DeFi collateral, and governance influence concentrate around a small set of issuers or operators, Ethereum’s security layer becomes vulnerable to capture through capture of the economic layer around it. EF will support research, specifications, and designs that keep staking permissionless, private where possible, plural in operation, and resistant to intermediaries becoming permanent control points. The access interfaces are where users access either the protocol directly or through intermediated defaults. The primary problem to solve here is not getting Ethereum into more rooms directly, but making its users, both end users and institutions, more self-sovereign and less susceptible to coercion, and avoiding normalization of soft coercion in exchange for reach. EF will not help Ethereum become more acceptable by sanding off the properties that make it uniquely valuable. Ethereum does not need to become another permissioned settlement backend with better branding. It needs to show, in production, that self-sovereign coordination at scale is possible. Across Ethereum, the EF’s defensive work seeks to ensure that Ethereum is infrastructure people can still use when counterparties fail, platforms censor, governments overreach, intermediaries extract, and coordination problems become infeasible for trusted systems to handle. A core part of that is to make that infrastructure secure and robust against capture at every layer wherever capture opportunities can hide. 4. What the EF is also for: Seizing opportunities Shoring up the fundamentals is not enough. Ethereum’s potential is still largely unrealized, but that does not mean that the path ahead is going to be straight. Opportunities must be seized when the time is right. At this moment in time, a number are visible, including: * Ethereum becoming the first quantum-resistant global infrastructure. Ethereum researchers will lead the post-quantum cryptographic migration before the threat becomes urgent, not after it becomes a governance emergency. That means hardening Ethereum’s cryptographic foundations while there is still time to design carefully. The same applies to other long-horizon risks, where waiting for market demand means waiting until the window for principled design has already closed. * Verifiably self-sovereign stack, from soup to nuts, whether local or remote, with no censorship or extraction openings: browsers, wallets, intents, broadcasts, orderflow, inclusion, block construction, proposal, proving, exit, and recovery. Minimal MEV, and zero toxic MEV entrenchment, either in or around the protocol. No execution layer that is formally permissionless but practically gatekept by privileged supply chains. If there’s a funnel towards an extractive private lane, there’s other options that keep the game live. The goal is not only to prevent extraction or capture, but to make credibly neutral execution competitive enough that serious users prefer it. * Making ETH normal digital cash: a private, dignity-respecting, debasement-resistant and surveillance-resistant medium of exchange and store of value, as well as the native asset of private computation and private coordination for both humans and their agents. If Ethereum can make private economic life and private institutional life possible without routing users back through the friction and potential abuse of custodians, surveillance vendors, or permissioned ledgers with softer branding, as well as provide a venue for secure and competitive machine economics, the value unlocks will be immense. * Personal wallets with personal AI agents that users can actually own and run on their own personal computers. Not your keys, not your coins; not your model, not your mind. As agents become interfaces for more economic and social action, the question of who owns the wallet, the model, the memory, the policy, and the signing authority becomes an existential question about sovereignty instead of UX details - we are all users above any other roles, and no one at EF will forget this. * Institutional and enterprise use cases where Ethereum wins by not disappearing into an invisible backend, gatekept by intermediaries or terrible UX, and by not compromising into a compliant fintech rail with web3 branding. Rather, we will win through proving that credibly neutral infrastructure can handle disintermediated coordination so competitively that trusted intermediaries have to meet Ethereum users on Ethereum’s terms. * Security-preserving scaling. L2s and related infrastructure will be able to meet institutional-level needs without accepting dependencies on closed operators, opaque sequencing, custodial UX, or upgrade committees that users cannot realistically exit. Scale is not throughput alone. Scale is the guaranteed availability of self-sovereignty under real load. We are ensuring Ethereum remains the hardest bedrock for settlement, local and worldwide; and beyond that, a civilizational ledger and execution substrate to stand the test of time. When future civilizations speak of the infrastructure they inherited from the Antiquity of the Information Age, their first example should be Ethereum. Ethereum will outlast all of us. More than enough people watching understand this. Many wondered why it needed saying at all, but it did. If you don't believe us or don't get it, we don't have time to try to convince you, sorry. 5. Addressing departures There has been a lot of online speculation about departures from EF, both before and after the mandate. Some people resigned, others were terminated. Some departures were about strategy, some about role fit, some about normal institutional change, and some simply about people deciding that their best work for Ethereum should happen somewhere else. We will not litigate individual personnel matters on Twitter. That is the default because it is better for EF, better for the people involved, and better for Ethereum. People who contributed through EF deserve dignity on the way out. They do not deserve to have their employment history turned into factional content. Where possible, we have let people describe their departures in their own words as a matter of courtesy, and not concession. If public claims materially mislead people about EF’s direction, decision-making, or mandate, we may correct the record at the level of policy, process, and institutional facts. We still will not turn personal files into public spectacle. Ethereum is permissionless. People may disagree, criticize, compete, fork, and build elsewhere. We intend to keep exits dignified and expect others to do the same. It will suffice to say that we are thankful for what all contributors have built; we will continue to do work Ethereum needs. 6. Addressing EF spinouts Some work should and will leave the EF in the months to come. We hope and expect this process to result in some excellent work being done in service of scaling self-sovereign adoption, but we also must take care lest it becomes an abdication of responsibility or an excuse for undisciplined spending. Some work is not mandate-compatible and should not be carried forward with EF funds or EF endorsement, either inside or outside the Foundation. The efforts carried out by the spinouts will vary widely. Some efforts will leave EF because another org would be a better home for them; others will leave because markets should decide on their worth. Some will leave because they are not compatible with the direction set out in the mandate; others because they are useful but not EF work. Just as a spinout is not automatically good because it reduces EF headcount, former EF affiliation is not a claim on EF funding. The question we ask when deciding on funding is not “did this come from the EF?” But, rather the questions that should be asked about all external funding: “Is this work mandate-critical? Would the EF do this work internally if it had the organizational and financial capacity? Is there no better natural home? Can the external party execute without increasing capture risk, private extraction, opacity, or dependence? Does supporting it reduce Ethereum’s dependence on the EF over time, without prematurely transferring resources and legitimacy to new organizations and thereby risking operational failure or mission drift?” EF funding for work being done externally can be appropriate when it is a capacity solution for mandate work - work the EF should responsibly want done; work that protects CROPS; work that advances self-sovereignty and scales it; essential work that no actor can or will reliably do without EF funding; and work that can be scoped, reviewed, and held accountable without creating a permanent dependency. Such funding is not appropriate when it is a lazy continuity payment, a friendship payment, a reputational hedge, a way to avoid making a hard decision, or a way to support work that is not compatible with the mandate. EF has finite funds, finite legitimacy, and a specific mandate. We will spend all three as if they matter. When we say “EF is one of many nodes”, we mean that we intend to be one of many nodes working to keep self-sovereignty and its scaling the North Star, and working to keep CROPS the undisplaceable first-class properties of the network. We don’t mean that we will support orgs or projects with different priorities. Diversity that leads to ecosystem resilience, coordination cost right-sizing, and better decision-making is good. Diversity that leads to mission drift is not. We are not neutral on the direction Ethereum takes. CROPS are not just things we “believe in”, they are characteristics we understand must be thoughtfully prioritized at every fork for Ethereum to realize its potential. We are partisans for and builders of something of such incredible neutrality that it will fundamentally reshape the world we live in; we wish to work with everyone committed to this shared purpose.

the reason why you're seeing more and more of these types of proposals/ideas and alarms about 'funding running out' is because a lot of people who have had "Ethereum UBI" are sensing we're on the eve of a powershift where Ethereum is finally becoming more capitalistic. they want to maintain their power, lifestyle, and workingstyle indefinitely under the noble guise of "neutrality", and want ETH holders to fund this even though they are the same people who could've been driving ETH to outperformance all this time and have failed to do so while we held and held and held hoping for better. as you've seen from Tom Lee's and Joseph Lubin's posts, funding is available and in the works from the biggest ETH institutions. this patronage model will be far more scalable and efficient and won't taint ETH the asset as permanently uninvestable like a 'dev mine' would.

@RokoMijic @CanesDavid … it was easier to search vents of on the deep ocean floor for extremeophile bacteria and isolate heat resistant enzymes for heat resistant enzymes than to educate people to wash their clothes on a cold wash.

@MuteDialog @CanesDavid then change the law and educate people

It's intoxicating to think that whole body scans for the entire world's population will be life saving. What I'm going to tell you is counterintuitive. You don't want it to be true.... THIS WILL CAUSE NET HARM You don't want it to be true. I get it. I don't want it to be true either. But it is fixed probability theory (Bayes Theorem), not a difference of opinion. It's not something where you can be "in one camp" or "in another camp." It's not philosophy. It's math. Applying a full-body scan to an asymptomatic population is like waving a metal detector over a beach covered in bottle caps and saying, "I'm not in the camp that worries about bottle caps, we'll just shovel the entire beach into a lab and sort it out later." You're looking for a ring... but in this case all the bottle caps look like rings. The problem isn't the sensitivity of your detector; I don't care if it's the best most advanced detector ever made. it's the mathematical certainty that the junk drastically outnumbers the treasure. When pretest probability is near zero, Bayes' theorem dictates that the Positive Predictive Value crashes to near zero. Even if a future machine achieves a hypothetical 99% specificity, testing for a disease with a 0.01% prevalence means a 1% PPV. For every 1 true cancer you catch, you get 100 false positives. Because a full-body scan acts as dozens of independent tests, a standard 95% specificity per organ system mathematically guarantees a false positive rate over 60% per patient. You cannot "catalog and learn" your way out of that reality without subjecting millions of healthy people to real-world harm first. We've seen this movie before. It isn't different now just "because AI" or because "we will have more and better data" or "we'll learn" our way out of it. Math doesn't have philosophical camps. It's just... well, boring math.

@lex_node Tangentially with your legal hat on what do you think would be needed to make Ethereum based bills of lading acceptable to banks, P&L clubs, shippers? Killer enabling international trade usecase enables financial triggers. Electronic is already partially accepted (Bolero)

@lex_node We need Ethereum to provide serious value to enterprise so that a Linux foundation type funding approach can be applied.

read this. these were my intuitions for a while and it makes me more confident that someone actually building an ethereum client and more of an 'insider' is saying the same ETH has underperformed as an asset for a long time. the last thing we need is more unaccountable funding streams funded by ETH holders in general, it would be the last straw for many of us ETH holders we need 'market-based' funding mechanisms. Bitcoin Core development is funded without a 'dev mine' or 'tax' (the latter being how trent has explicitly described what he's looking for)--it works through a patronage market and the dev equivalent of civil-service and volunteerism. that system works for linux, react, many other open-source protocols, it should work for Ethereum as well. most importantly, it is scalable, as individual patrons (including orgs/enterprises building on ethereum) can more do the kind of due diligence and monitoring that the community of ETH holders in general cannot do they will say this loses "neutrality", but protocol guild accepted funding from eigenlayer, zksync, and many others, and this can affect "neutrality" as much as any other form of patronage, but it's worse because it's more hidden...open/explicit patronage is better, more attributable, more competitive/open... the EF is the "neutral org" and already exists and with its new discipline can last for a long time, especially if we stop doing things (like proposing active monetary tokenomics, dev mines, etc.) to massively erode confidence in ETH as an asset

@RokoMijic @CanesDavid I mean yes you are right. You should actually apply bayes theorem & work out the posterior given the test error & a-priori probability of a given anomaly in the population (adjusting for family/genetics) But on the other hand law and emotion mean no one is ignoring a positive.

This is mathematically incorrect, it's a theorem that information can't harm a Bayesian reasoner. The problem is that you're not treating probabilities correctly, i.e. you're not applying bayes theorem properly to medicine. If an anomaly only has a posterior probability of 1% of being problematic, you shouldn't freak out about it.

4) On the other hand it’s a nice signal that they are sending that Eth is money. (Two things)

3) If you are a potential grantee you should use this as a strong argument as to why they should just YoLo fund you rather than spending 6 months negotiating the roadmap. Default paying in a volatile token is inconsistent with arguments about minor differences in value for money.

Ok so two things here: 1) Paying grants in Eth is dumb. Grants are supposed to cover costs. Volatility kills that if the price goes down you can’t fulfill the roadmap. If it goes up you pocket the excess. 2) This is the default you can still ask for fiat.

What makes me so angry about @TrustlessState quitting ETH is not that he did it. I mean, I get it, ETH has underperformed for years. It’s fair to move on eventually. That’s exactly how capitulations work. They make room for those who have more conviction. The timing, though, makes no sense to me at all. Ethereum is in the strongest position it has ever been in since its inception. You can’t even name a serious competitor anymore. The “ETH killer” narrative is gone. The last major contender, SOL, has taken a phenomenal nosedive against ETH, and other networks aren’t even trying to market or position themselves against Ethereum anymore. For the first time in its history, Ethereum is undisputed, ~3 months before a major scaling upgrade and with the most respected and ambitious roadmap for the next three years. It leads in quantum, consensus, and execution research. It has by far the largest developer ecosystem, and it’s the only chain with a 100% green light from institutions, which will be a massive catalyst as the CLARITY Act moves forward. There isn’t really an alternative to ETH as a store of value, which was his whole point a few years ago with the Triple Point Asset thesis. Nothing has changed. The only thing that has changed is that David is fed up with ETH, which, again, is fine. There are assets with revenue now that will likely perform exceptionally well as crypto grows larger, and he probably has an edge in identifying those opportunities given his position. But ETH is here to stay and dominate the next 10 years, and I find it unlikely that more than 0.1% of people will outperform it by picking other crypto winners.

I mean it is pretty obvious that Eth. The default most trust less collateral on the chain, that is burned to pay for on chain activity and which secures the chain, will become more valuable if Ethereum wins & conversely that Ethereum is endangered at critically low ETH price.

Finally an actual killer app for blockchain.

If all the smartest+most rational ppl got their own civilization on it would be LEAGUES better than this one, just more functional in ways we can't even imagine, and like 90% of it would be downstream of their ability to understand incentives and ripple effects

Use at own risk/ not a commercial venture so I won't manage a UI but I will put the contract on chain. Source code will be available on my GitHub for: - contract - user interface (run your own) - bidder bot (run locally to bid on items) - solver bot (run locally to earn)

There are some other implementation details. - commit reveal scheme to prevent front running solvers. - escrowing tokens so as to prevent griefing with fake bids but in a capital efficient way.

Building a thing. Part of a new pledge to just do stuff without over thinking and without any regard to doing it well or exploiting it. Just getting it out there