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zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ Profile picture
zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ
@zooko
Freedom maximalist. Good vibes only.
Aug 25 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
Look, I really hate speculating about this spy-vs-spy bullshit, but it is really bothering me to see the great and the good of my tribe (Balaji, Vitalik, Roman Storm, Noelle Acheson, Josh Swihart) treating Pavel Durov as an oppressed hero. Please consider the following facts: ⤵️ 1. Telegram is built on lies. Its entire brand is freedom, and yet it is deliberately architected to make all of its users subject to the surveillance and control of Durov, while keeping those users in the dark about that. ⤵️
Apr 16 • 23 tweets • 4 min read
Okay, I’m getting excited again by this whole “uninventing money”/“post-money” idea that Chris Goes, Ethan Buchmann, and Andrew Miller have been on about for years.

(WARNING: long rambling thread ahead with no “TLDR” summary.)

⤵️ It’s heady stuff and I’ve struggled to understand it, so I’m going to post my simplified and possibly mistaken version here as a way to learn from others:

⤵️
Feb 6 • 40 tweets • 7 min read
I asked the hostess if she ever takes payment in Bitcoin. She sighed and said yes sometimes.

⤵️ Image I asked if it was a hassle. She explained (English is not her first language) that they do it on their phone and sometimes it doesn’t print out the receipt and then they have to do a whole lot of story. (?)

⤵️
Sep 16, 2023 • 21 tweets • 4 min read
Had a really good conversation with Vitalik about Privacy Pools. I was embarrassed that I had failed to understand a couple of things in the paper but he was gracious about it.



Thanks to Paul Brigner (Pretty Good Policy podcast) and Josh Swihart!

⤵️ Here's my “angry, firey hot take” thread which precipitated this conversation:



I had three points, and here is my update to my beliefs after the conversation with Vitalik:

⤵️
Image
Sep 16, 2023 • 18 tweets • 4 min read
Had a really good conversation with Vitalik about Privacy Pools. I was embarrassed that I had failed to understand a couple of things in the paper but he was gracious about it.

Thanks to Paul Brigner (Pretty Good Policy podcast) and Josh Swihart!

After watching the recording of this conversation, I realized that a big source of misunderstanding is whether we’re talking about using Privacy Pools in the law (e.g. OFAC) or in consensual relationships.

⤵️
Apr 30, 2023 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
Reasons to prefer BLAKE3 over SHA256: SHA256 was designed by the NSA. BLAKE (the original) and BLAKE3 were designed by Jean-Philippe Aumasson and others (including me, but Jean-Philippe and the other contributors did a lot more of the cryptographic heavy lifting than I did).
Apr 2, 2023 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
A long-serving OG crypto builder reached out to me to ask if Signal was compromised and he should switch to a different app for secure comms.

He had two reasons to worry:

1. CFTC citing information about CZ’s Signal chats ()

⤵️ … and

2. the Biden economic report on crypto citing Moxie as an authority on the limits of decentralized systems ()…

⤵️
Mar 31, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Hm…thinking about this a bit more (), I really hope this doesn't actually lead users to a false sense of security!

The Chainalysis-type companies currently use an arsenal of off-chain data and “dirty tricks”, such as…

⤵ … web site watering hold attacks (coindesk.com/business/2021/… — note that these leaked slides from Chainalysis also claim to have provided actionable intelligence in 65% of cases involving Monero)…

⤵
Mar 31, 2023 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
Something really interesting is happening: a new crop of blockchain analytics companies selling their services to the public. The first cohort, Chainalysis et al., sell only to banks/exchanges and to governments (including, from what I hear, corrupt and autocratic regimes).

… This is going to drive demand for privacy in crypto. Until now, for most people, it was just theoretical that your crypto activity and wealth could be tracked, and could be linked to your real world identity and your other activities. It’s about to become tangible.

…
Jan 30, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Further decentralization of the Zcash support ecosystem is under way: “Shielded Labs: An Independent, Non-US Organization”—forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/shielded-lab…

In particular, this new organization is intended to support Zcash from outside the United States. There’s a lot of disinfo about Zcash (at least some of which is intentional lies and not just honest confusion) but the fact is that…
May 11, 2022 • 28 tweets • 7 min read
It’s here!!! Zcashd 5.0.0! If the Zcash users choose to run zcashd 5.0.0, then at the end of this month Zcash Network Upgrade 5 will activate on mainnet. This is an historic step forward for human society.

electriccoin.co/blog/new-relea… It is an historic step forward for two reasons: 1. It puts the soundest money in the world—Zcash—on a foundation of long-term, scalable, and extensible cryptography. 2. It marks the maturation of zero-knowledge proofs into a general purpose technology.
Mar 8, 2022 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Money is a technology.

Recent events—the protests in Canada and the war in Ukraine, and in cyberspace—have shown that our current monetary tech is an instrument for political power, and it has reminded us that politically neutral money is necessary for democratic societies. … Bitcoin cannot be politically-neutral money. This is because its information architecture gives an asymmetric advantage to the attackers—the bigger and more powerful organizations that want to leverage the monetary system against smaller users. …
Jan 29, 2022 • 38 tweets • 7 min read
“About Those Fauci Emails ...”—thebradentontimes.com/about-those-fa…
Jan 20, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
This makes me so angry. The arrogance and mendacity of Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, thinking that they can lie to the public because they are the Great and the Good who know what's best for everyone else (and incidentally to protect their power).

mattridley.co.uk/10783 I've got a tip for you. When something like this turns up, the question is: are there consequences? If not, that means their boss is complicit. As long as Fauci still has his job, you can safely attribute arrogance and mendacity to his boss.
Dec 15, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Two tweets: 1.
Dec 14, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Oof. Good work! HT @str4d It's awesome that THORChain and other open source projects that depend on this cryptographer rewarded the discoverers with $500,000 worth of bounties!

eprint.iacr.org/2021/1621.pdf Read this interesting backstory, which also mentions the BCTV14 flaw that led to CVE-2019-7167: hackmd.io/@omershlo/Sk_8…
Apr 10, 2021 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
I heard that Youtube (owned by Google/Alphabet) took down a video of Florida Gov DeSantis hosting a round-table retro on covid-19 with Scott Atlas, Jay Bhattacharya, and others. That interested me. As I've previously tweeted, I'm profoundly concerned about censorship and other forms of thought-control beginning to be exercised by the Tech Titans like Google, among others.
Apr 10, 2021 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
When trying to learn about the state of the pandemic, I try avoid paying attention to the kinds of facts and data which are vulnerable to being manipulated and misrepresented and look for "harder data": I'm convinced that the most effective tools for propaganda, panic-mongering, and thought-control are data that are *true facts* and *true data*, selected and framed to support a false narrative. True facts are more powerful tools for deception than falsehoods are.
Apr 10, 2021 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Total deaths in USA per week from all causes (the orange line is basically "how many deaths we'd have in a particularly bad year") cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr… Note that the most recent few weeks haven't yet had all of the deaths that week fully counted, so those bars will get revised up over the next few weeks, which is why I excluded the most recent two weeks from the highlighted image (left).
Dec 14, 2020 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
Privacy technology (such as Zcash) doesn't *just* protect Americans from their own government (in accordance with quintessentially American values such the Fourth Amendment). Perhaps more importantly, it protects Americans from *enemy governments*. Listen to Chairman Powell. Liberty, and limitations on central power, is the way we do things here. It's what makes us different and better.
Jun 4, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
What the fuck? Amazon is now doing "Virtual Book Burnings" to prevent people from reading dangerous ideas. This trend will further destabilize human society and make it harder to learn and harder to make peace with each other. Amazon has now joined the Hall of Shame of the Monopoly Tech Overlords who are giving into the inevitable human desire to control other people's thoughts: