Its the weekend and I have grant proposals to write, but need a distraction. So here's a crypto meme crudely edited to accurately summarizes the state of privacy techniques on blockchains.

collaborate privately

She has your IP address and a copy of all your connection metadata - "nothing to hide"

So Brexit was to let the UK enact when more retarded regulations than the EU?!

My uninformed take on Glamsterdam headliners. tldr: cypherpunk/acc Ethereum is at risk of institutional capture in next few years, so make CR and light clients real ASAP. No one will object to faster blocks or 64bit opcodes later. But many won't want to give up juicy orderflow.

Here are two numbers I currently think about every day: There are over 100 billion stars in our galaxy There are over 1 trillion galaxies in the visible universe These numbers are so absolutely insane, there is no way SciFi is too far off from reality somewhere out there.

People who prefer “pragmatic” privacy over maximal privacy, or argue that decentralisation doesn’t matter in Web3…they don’t need blockchain. People who are creating abundance and increasing the total value in the world need blockchain for products and services that can't exist without one, and that requires decentralisation. That's what Aztec's doing. @aztecnetwork couldn't exist in a centralised ledger. Privacy-preserving systems need to be decentralised because they need to be credibly neutral, similar to the internet. It can't be responsible for the traffic going through the network, or have the capability to restrict it. If a project doesn’t have an incentive to decentralise, that means their unique value proposition doesn't require it, which is fine. But then why use blockchain at all? Why are you here? You're not creating fundamental value for the world. You're just moving wealth around in a very public and unsovereign manner. You're not enabling anything new. There’s no shame in wanting to make money, but don’t build a blockchain project and then say that decentralisation doesn’t matter. The intention with blockchain was to recreate the world's financial infrastructure in a permissionless, self-sovereign manner, where we are custodians of our own funds, free to transact without third-party intermediaries with misaligned incentives. That can’t be accomplished without programmable privacy.

Reminder that decentralized indexers are an unsolved (and I would say: forgotten?) problem in the EVM space Every major project is spending countless engineering months on indexers. Let's please get back to fixing non-moon-maths problems and find web3 worthy solutions!

Has anyone built an extension that just clicks and engages with every ad it sees? Seems like a maliciously compliant way for users to just mess up ad reporting metrics so that advertisers end up spending more and getting less information about which campaigns are doing well.

Good interview from Roman Storm. His trial is coming soon in 10 days. Privacy of messaging without backdoors is now widely accepted, and many in business and government regularly use tools like Signal. Given the extremely regular hacks of centralized databases that we see today, improving privacy in other domains (including payments, identity, AI) is not something to be "balanced" against security, it's a necessary _part_ of our security. I hope 🇺🇸can lead the way in making a more secure world with stronger freedoms and fewer data leaks a reality. The first step is sending a clear signal to developers that this important work is welcome. #FreeRomanStorm