I’ve been asked if I could prep for an interview with Vitalik at EthSP, so I did my best. In the end his schedule couldn’t fit it so I ended up with some very fun but useless VB trivia, so all I can do now is dump it on you:

🥓 Vitalik has an Erdős–Bacon–Sabbath number of 11 🥓 Let’s start with easy part. Erdős number of 3: Vitalik co-authored a cryptocurrency paper with Ittai Abraham, who wrote a geometry paper with Leonard J. Schulman who published with Paul Erdős.

Over the weekend, the loneliest man in the world has been found dead inside his home.

He lived the last 30 years of his life under surveillance in a 80km wide, government enforced, exclusion zone, created specifically around him.

This is the true story of the Man in the Hole. This is not, of course, a story of some super powered dangerous hermit living in a fancy prison. There are terrible crimes, but he was the victim of.

The Man of the Hole was the last survivor or a tribe whose existence we were only made aware after they were all murdered.

There’s no OFAC fork, social consensus slashing or UASF needed. We’ve gone through this on the DAO wars already.

If too many validators refuse to add a transaction they can be DDOS’d.

If they refuse a valid block then they’re the ones forking and risk slashing. How to DDOS a censoring validator: flood the network with very complex transactions that, by the end of them, touch Tornado Cash.
Because of the Halting Problem, the validator can’t know what they do without executing them fully, so they’re forced to do unpaid computation work.

ENS is a complex system made of multiple contracts (I found 16 so far). This ensures we can freeze some parts and update others, limiting the scope of the damage a single error can do. The downside is that it’s very hard for one person to get a grasp of the whole.

Until now. I spent the whole of last week developing it a map of all contracts I could find that are directly related to ENS. I might still find and add some with time and I’ll publish all of that as a new documentation page. Let’s break them in parts: there’s the Protocol and the DAO.

ENS aims to be both a decentralized domain and identity system and as such needs to be built to be censorship resistant and neutral. But to get there it needs an including community of builders in which all are welcome.

That path is neither easy nor without its own conflicts. Long before Brantly joined ENS, there had been multiple other contributors, many of them queer, at least two were Trans. I only knew that the same way I found out about Brantly’s own deeply held beliefs: casual conversations over dinner in conferences around the world.

Suppose you wanted to turn an old token in an nft collection. Which would you prefer?

🪂 take a snapshot of token holders at a given block and mint NFTs for all

🔥 create a system in which you mint a nft for sending a token to a burn contract 🪂 advantages of an airdrop is that it simplifies the mint process. Boom, single merkle tree and everyone has their nft. But it makes the token sort of useless after that day.

Here’s a DAO governance system that I would llove to try out:

1) All proposals are in the form of a stream, containing a max budget and time period

2) Voting is continuous, there are no voting periods, at any point anyone can signal support or opposition to an active proposal 3) All active proposals are listed by amount of support

4) DAO principal is invested and the interest is then streamed out to the most supported streams at the moment.

More similar to a company that hires and fires top contributors than a grant system.

Oh, FFS, it’s not that hard:
🔑 have client side keys for all users account
🔐 cryptographically sign all posts
✋ each platform decides which posts to carry, how to order and display them
🏛 archivists can keep a fuller historical data (and as evidence if needed) This effectively breaks down the social media oligopoly in two pieces:
🗣 content and accounts are a common good, interoperable and freely interchangeable among websites
📢 apps that access it become a highly competitive market to filter and sort the firehose

Unilogin is out of gas: we’re unfortunately shutting down the project. Many factors contributed to it, but mainly: gas prices, DeFi gentrification and being collateral damage in a war of between the tech giants.
link.medium.com/WaRCbL1qU9 First, the war: Apple’s fight against ad trackers (ie: Facebook, Google) means they’ve greatly reduced the utility of browser local storage. It forced us to rethink our flow, ironically, having to store MORE information about our users like email and encrypted wallets.

In 2016-17 the Ethereum Foundation hired @cure53berlin for a security Audit of Mist. The process was eye opening and contributed to the discontinuation of the project. The report was never publicized but it might still be valuable for builders today: drive.google.com/file/d/1LSsD9g… Mist was a brainchild of Gavin and Jeff but I took the lead of it when I joined the foundation in 2014. We had grand plans for it being the realization of all web3 technologies we were building and it was planned as the main software release of Metropolis

This text is not really about the game “Dark Forest" as much as it's a general description of the principles I use when approaching User Experience design, which just happens to apply to the zksnarks ethereum game for anyone interested in improving UX: medium.com/@avsa/a-dark-f… But since I'm not paid anything to get you to click medium links I'll make a short summary in this thread. Anyone can "redesign” something that it already simple to use. The most interesting work happens when you see a software the is compelling concept but terribly confusing.

This is a bitter post to announce, but we are discontinuing Mist. You can read the full post here but for your convenience I will try to summarize in a few tweets: medium.com/@avsa/sunsetti…

There are mainly two reasons a good and a bad one: ecosystem and security Security is the bad one: there's no way around electron security, it was never meant to run arbitrary code. Brave has long moved past it, we tried alternatives but they were all underwhelming. We feel we can't recommend anyone running a crypto browser on electrum at this moment.

So, about the Petro.. Venezuela released a white paper.

elpetro.gob.ve/Whitepaper_Pet…

And it’s sooo good.