This is a solid demonstration of Railgun's privacy pools mechanism ( papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… ) working in practice, allowing Railgun to avoid serving proceeds of crime without using any snooping / backdoors.
How it works:
* Anyone can deposit into Railgun.
* After you deposit, there is a 1 hour period during which various algorithms detect whether or not the deposit likely came from what the algorithms consider to be criminal activity.
* If your deposit passes the filter, then after 1 hour you can use ZKPs to withdraw privately (but ideally wait longer to get a good-enough anonymity set).
* If your deposit fails the filter, then you can only withdraw back to your own address. There is no risk that your funds will get frozen/seized, you just can't benefit from the privacy pool.
If you disagree with Railgun's filters, anyone is free to fork and make their own pool with their own rules, though if you can't get reasonably wide public support you're going to have a tiny anonymity set.
Ethereum distinguishes itself in two ways: a principled technological and social philosophy committed to decentralization, and real value already brought to millions of users.
L2s have made great progress, and this is a testament to Ethereum's ecosystem and development philosophy working in action.
The person deciding the new EF leadership team is me. One of the goals of the ongoing reform is to give the EF a "proper board", but until that happens it's me.
If you "keep the pressure on", then you are creating an environment that is actively toxic to top talent. Some of Ethereum's best devs have been messaging me recently, expressing their disgust with the social media environment that people like you are creating. YOU ARE MAKING MY JOB HARDER.
And you are decreasing the chance I have any interest whatsoever in doing "what you want".
SNARKs rely on "arithmetization": a way of converting a statement about a program into an equation involving polynomials (or sometimes vectors and matrices)
To keep numbers within reasonable sizes, the arithmetic must be done not over regular integers, but over structures called "finite fields". Modular arithmetic is the simplest example of a finite field, but there are others.
The Dencun hard fork has activated, and thanks to Blobscriptions the blob fee markets are now in "price discovery mode".
It has been well-understood for years that the future of Ethereum scaling depends on rollups backed by data space secured with data availability sampling. EIP-4844 is a key change that lays the groundwork for this future.
By popular demand, an updated roadmap diagram for 2023!
Here was the one from last year. Notice that it's actually quite similar! As Ethereum's technical path forward continues to solidify, there are relatively few changes. I'll go through the important ones.
The role of single slot finality (SSF) in post-Merge PoS improvement is solidifying. It's becoming clear that SSF is the easiest path to resolving a lot of the Ethereum PoS design's current weaknesses.
New monster post: my own current perspective on the recent debates around techno-optimism, AI risks, and ways to avoid extreme centralization in the 21st century.
First of all, technology is amazing, and there are very high costs to delaying it.
Climate change is an important exception to an "everything is getting better" story. I'm optimistic, but pessimistic outcomes could be quite bad so the problem is really worth our attention.
It's a reminder that tech solving problems is not automatic: we have to work for it.