Zcash is winning. medium.com/@zooko/48579b8977… ⤵️

If we dismantle Jupiter and use its mass we can build up to ~370 million Earth-equivalent-surface rotating habitats.

RT @nate_zec: @zooko “standard lib” is dumb. - Constrain malicious transitive dependency blast radius - Replace a centralized namespace wi…

BTW years ago I bought a dinner with Peter Thiel. Big group not just us. But I got to sit across from him and ask him a ton of questions. He told me he thought Bitcoin had gone up a lot already. He was right, it went down a 80% from there. We also had an engaging chat about Eth going deflationary and what it might mean. We couldn't figure out if the price went infinite or something else. Fun to talk with a billionaire and both end up at "I don't know." Most useful part was me asking him why he doesn't donate more to charity. He had a few good reasons for it. One was that charity is iatrogenic -- I mostly agree with this today. Obviously he DOES give money away, look at Thiel fellowships which have been crazy impactful. But getting the framework right is important. If you ever get a chance to have dinner with someone like that and pick their brain I encourage it. Maybe even just to see they are a real human and not magic. Someone to learn from not to revere.

Increasingly concerned it might actually end up being the opposite: AI-enabled hyperbureaucracy at a scale previously unfathomable.

Meet Ulrich Haböck (@UHaboeck). Ulrich recently joined the Epoch team at Shielded Labs as Chief Cryptographer. He is a leading expert in zero-knowledge proofs and post-quantum cryptography. He joins from StarkWare, where he worked as a cryptographer, after earlier work as an applied cryptographer at Polygon Labs (Polygon Zero).

omg the Rust standard library does not come with a deterministic, stable RNG? That's dumb.

Thanks for the many kind words over the past week & for the engagement over my time at the SEC. Thanks to my many critics too. Vigorous critiques of government officials are part of what makes this country great. No more tweets from this account. Be careful out there: investor.gov/

The reason why so many have held on to zcash for years is because we understand the world gravitates toward and rewards capital that is placed in assets that create value. Long term, money that’s negatively persecuted against can’t do accretive things. Freedom money can. $zec

tell me your gems in London

zarvis + @openzcash are awesome projects on zcash:native full transparency and accountability on the zcash community/ecosystem, plus interactive education @michael2xl is doing an outstanding work with the projects he is building and i'm glad he invited me to help with much of all that

Sean Bowe (@ebfull) will be presenting about Tachyon at this year's Zcash Zummit, hosted by the Network State Conference on October 9th. We're excited to share new details about our shielded pool, its efficiency, and the roadmap going forward!

How fast can we make zcash? tune in to my lightning talk! Turns out really really fast

It’s important for your future that you understand Zcash. You can’t have zero knowledge about zero knowledge. Thus, this year's Network State Conference will include a Zcash Zummit, featuring Zcash leaders Zooko Wilcox (Shielded Labs), Sean Bowe (Tachyon), Eli Ben-Sasson (StarkWare), Josh Swihart (Zodl), Josh Lee (Vizor), Dev Ojha (Zakura), Evan Forbes (Valar Group), Maxime Desalle (Winklevoss Capital), and Tom Howard (Zcash Labs). In-person attendees will even receive some free ZEC. So: come to Singapore on October 9. ns.com/conference

How do you feel about AI? A common sentiment is that of a loss. This must be especially common among adults. If you are 50 and you have been programming in Python for the last 25 years... it is a shock to find out that an AI agent can code faster than you can. In a sense, it is like having lived on a continent all your life, where you hunted with bows and arrows... and then strange men come in with guns. There is a divergence in society. Some of us have been frustrated by the lack of progress. We don't like what has been happening to our civilization since 1970. We expected lunar bases, rejuvenation cures, cancer cures, space trips... and all we got was Twitter. When the Spanish arrived in America, they immediately found many allies. Cortés landed on the Gulf coast with roughly 500 men, mostly young men (Cortés was 34). They had a handful of horses, crossbows and arquebuses. He had no army to speak of. Yet this small band laid siege to Mexico, helped by 50x or 100x indigenous warriors from various tribes. This all happened within 2 years. It is hard to know exactly what happened, but it seems quite clear that many people were frustrated with the current state of affairs. I feel the same regarding AI. Finally, there is an opening. Don't get me wrong. I don't mindlessly jump on new technologies. I buy paper books, a paper newspaper and I carry paper notebooks. I only got a smartphone in 2018. I still code every day in C++ even though I am constantly told that it is obsolete. But what I care about is progress taken broadly. And I feel that this has been stolen from me. Far from getting cancer cures, the medical system in Quebec is still based on faxes. I feel that the people who love stagnation got enough of what they wanted and I hope that we are at an inflexion point where we finally break free from the oppressive rule of stagnation. Contrary to what you will hear, stagnation does not keep you safe. It puts you at risk. Both individually and collectively. Individually, the lack of progress means that you will die earlier than you could have. Collectively... stagnation makes you vulnerable as the Aztec found out. There is a political angle to the story. In Quebec, a major politician was recently 'caught'. He launched a book just prior to the campaign. And it was revealed that the book had been written by AI. Far from apologizing, the politician came clean and even said that we should use AI more. Much of the political sphere in the West is occupied by people who hold power based on a zero-sum strategy. There is no growth and there is possibly even a decline. It is all a matter of deciding how we share the fixed pie. There is another way, one where everyone gets more, much more. But it requires a different type of politics... one that is less adversarial and more permissive... with the downside that you have less control about who gets what. I think, I hope, that we are at a crossroads where the West will seek abundance, and we will renew with the pre-1970 approach that served us so well. Of course, they are monsters lurking. But I am up for the adventure.

I dunno man, it just doesn't sit right with me that there are public technical blog posts that Claude simply can't read or discuss because of "cyber risk". Who does this protect?

Zebra 7.0.0-rc.0 is here — NU7 arrives on Testnet 🦓 ⚡️ Blocks every 25 seconds instead of 75 🛡️ New shielded limits protect wallets from spam Activates on Testnet at height 4,465,026 (~Oct 6). Testnet operators should upgrade before then 👇️ zfnd.org/zebra-7-0-0-rc-0-nu…

This is a test of scheduled posts. 😈

What a glowing farewell for Securities and Exchange Commissioner Hester Peirce, and well-earned: sec.gov/newsroom/speeches-st…