adamspitz.eth Profile picture
Been a software engineer for 20 years. Looking for work in the web3/crypto/blockchain world. Interested in coordination tools, public goods, social media.
Aug 18, 2022 25 tweets 5 min read
1) I'm excited about Balaji Srinivasan's new book, thenetworkstate.com.

I'm excited because many aspects of our civilization are broken and this may be a plausible pathway to something better.

The core question is: how might we start a new state? 🧵 2) I should say here that I have a very negative opinion of mainstream politics and activism. The politicians/regulators/journalists running our governments are not wise leaders. Elections are not going to fix this. (No, not even if Your Preferred Political Party wins.)
Jul 17, 2022 5 tweets 1 min read
Great question! I asked it on the zkSync discord, and as best I can tell, the answer is:

- Currently, they're using CPUs from the usual cloud services (like AWS, I guess?) to compute proofs.
- And they're actively working on making proofs doable by FPGAs and GPUs.

(1/5) That is: IIUC, they're not even *trying* to run on normal consumer hardware (or at least not yet?); they're actively trying to make use of specialized hardware to speed up proof-generation as much as possible.

(2/5)
Jul 16, 2022 14 tweets 4 min read
1) Various blockchains (#Ethereum, #Avalanche, #Cosmos, #Polkadot, etc.) use a "central thingy with a bunch of sub-thingies around it" model, for the sake of scalability.

They're not all equally secure, though.

Let me try to differentiate the good approaches from the bad ones. 2) (I should also mention that another intended purpose of this model, besides scalability, is allowing more flexibility/experimentation/sovereignty in the sub-thingies, which is cool too.)
Jul 15, 2022 16 tweets 5 min read
1) Here's my general summary of the #Ethereum versus #Solana debate.

I know much more about Ethereum than I do about Solana, and I'm definitely biased toward Ethereum; I'm hoping people will correct me where I'm wrong, and point out stuff that I'm missing.

🧵 2) In the Solana worldview:

Ethereum is low-throughput (i.e. transactions are expensive), and their plan for fixing that is this complicated "layer 2" idea that is super-confusing for users. Users don't want to have to care about which L2 their apps or assets are on.