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Mustafa Al-Bassam Profile picture
Mustafa Al-Bassam
@musalbas
Co-founder @Celestia
2 subscribers
Apr 17, 2023 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
How I think about comparing levels of security for data availability verification for light nodes

Comments welcome

forum.celestia.org/t/security-lev… 🧵 Thread generated by GPT4 summarising the post:
Oct 18, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Crypto has a serious problem.

We're stuck in an endless cycle of new L1 smart contract platforms. Each purport to fix the problems of the L1s in the previous cycles.

These L1s rinse and repeat the same bizdev strategy of prior L1s, building copy-cat DeFi & NFT ecosystems. However, we can break free from this endless cycle of new monolithic L1s.

With rollups, we can build modular blockchain networks, removing the need to spin up new L1 smart contract platforms just to deploy incremental improvements.
Jul 7, 2022 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
Rollups are far more than just a scaling solution for L1s.

Rollups are also powerful ways to deploy independent, sovereign blockchains in their own right, like any L1 chain, but with less friction.

Thread. 🧵

(Post: blog.celestia.org/sovereign-roll…) The most important layer in blockchains is social consensus. Blockchains are fundamentally tools to allow communities to socially coordinate in a sovereign way. This means treating upgrades via hard forks as a feature, not a bug.

May 25, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Today, we launched the new Celestia "Mamaki" testnet, bringing us closer to our vision of enabling anyone to deploy their own chain with minimal overhead.

This will lead to an abundance of shared security and verifiable computation.

🧵👇 For years, crypto has been held back with a cycle of new monolithic L1 smart contract platforms, each racing to the bottom to sacrifice decentralization and security for cheaper transaction fees, yet still not delivering.

Web3 cannot go mainstream under these conditions.
May 14, 2021 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Thread: debunking common myths about proof-of-stake from non-cryptocurrency people Proof-of-stake myth #1: proof-of-stake is a system where the rich get richer.

No. Everyone gets a roughly equal return, regardless of how much they're staking. It's like a bank savings account with the same interest for everyone. It has to be that way or it wouldn't be secure.
Oct 2, 2020 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
This is a nice validation of @lazyledger_io design. V proposes a different path for Eth 2, where it becomes a scalable data layer for ORUs. Exciting to see Ethereum look at this approach. This is what we're building at LL with some key differences. ⬇️ Whereas Ethereum 2.0 phase 1 is a data availability layer for Ethereum/EVM-compatible ORUs, LazyLedger is a *general-purpose* data availability layer. Our goal is to enable people to build ORU blockchains with any *standalone* execution environment.
Aug 25, 2020 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Thesis: app-specific chains with their own consensus that do one job, e.g. Bitcoin

Antithesis: general-purpose chains that run every apps on a shared "world computer", e.g. Ethereum

Synthesis: app-specific chains that share a secure consensus layer, e.g. Cosmos + @lazyledger_io We can draw the same parallel with how web developed.

Thesis (90s): run a web server on your own physical machine.

Antithesis (00s): run a site on a shared web server, e.g. DreamHost

Synthesis (10s): run a site on your own virtual machine, on a shared physical server, e.g. AWS
Aug 6, 2020 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
The not-inventor of proof-of-work (which was actually invented by a woman called Cynthia Dwork in 1993), along with a few other boomer OG cypherpunk mailing list members, have sadly become senile conspiracist nutjobs that are toxic parasites to the field. Adam Back is a particularly good example of this. When Satoshi emailed him about Bitcoin in 2008, he never thought it would work. He first got involved when Bitcoin reached it's ATH at $1000 in 2013, opening his first GitHub account the next day.
Nov 25, 2019 • 15 tweets • 6 min read
I think many tweets in this thread are wrong. Let me go through some of them. Layer two scalability solutions are not an alternative to scaling the base layer. If every Facebook user maintained a channel once a year with an on-chain transaction, you still need 70 tx/s, 20x higher than what Bitcoin does. And not to mention UX issues.
Sep 30, 2019 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
Holy shit. @toholdaquill and I were wondering why Twitter exposes psyops operations from countries around the world, but not the UK or other Five Eyes countries.

It turns out a senior Twitter employee is a part-time officer in the UK army’s psyops unit. middleeasteye.net/news/twitter-e… @toholdaquill For some context, we've known that UK intelligence agency GCHQ has for many years engaged in online disinfo campaigns/psyops through fake Twitter and social media accounts: vice.com/en_us/article/…
Jun 25, 2019 • 25 tweets • 7 min read
Thread: as the only research co-founder of Chainspace that did not join Facebook (the blockchain scalability startup that Facebook acquired), people have been asking me about my view of Libra. Here's a thread about it. cheddar.com/media/facebook… I don't have any doubt that the Libra team is building Libra for the right reasons: to create an open, decentralized payment system, not to empower Facebook. However, the road to dystopia is paved with good intentions, and I'm concerned about Libra's model for decentralization.
Nov 29, 2018 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Ian Levy of GCHQ has released an essay on how law enforcement should get access to end-to-end encrypted communications. Here is the critical bit to pay attention to.

They're proposing to exploit the fact that users don't verify each other's public keys, and inject bad keys. We've been fortunate enough to not have a global active adversary that is willing to manipulate packets on a large scale, so end-to-end encrypted chat systems didn't have to focus much on the key verification problem. That looks like it's going to change:
Jul 16, 2018 • 9 tweets • 5 min read
So British Airways is asking for people's personal data over social media "to comply with GDPR", and some people are even replying directly in the public feed.

uwotm8 People started taking the piss out of British Airways by also asking for their customers' personal details, so they had to add an addendum 6 hours later to clarify that the customer should send the info over DM.