patience for what? lol View quoted note →

If you think Ethereum is "stealing" Bitcoin's narratives, then yes - and that's how it's supposed to be

We choose to build trustless systems even when it is harder. We pay the cost of openness over the convenience of control. We do not outsource neutrality to anyone who can be bribed, coerced, or shut down. We measure success not by transactions per second, but by trust reduced per transaction. We refuse to build on infrastructure we cannot replace. We refuse to call a system "permissionless" when only the privileged can participate. We refuse to trade autonomy for polish, or freedom for frictionless UX. Trustlessness is not preserved by consensus alone — it is preserved by resistance. If your protocol requires faith in an intermediary, change it. If it relies on a private gateway, replace it. If it hides critical state or logic offchain, expose it. In the end, the world does not need more efficient middlemen. It needs fewer reasons to trust them. Trustlessness is the foundation. Everything else is construction on top of it. The designs will change. The principles will not. View quoted note →

“Ethereum was not created to make finance efficient or apps convenient. It was created to set people free” https://trustlessness.eth.limo

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vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) on X

“Ethereum was not created to make finance efficient or apps convenient. It was created to set people free” This was an important - and controv...

"comprehensive technical framework for secure electronic voting that uses biometric passports for identity verification, zero-knowledge proofs for anonymity, blockchain smart contracts for vote recording, and a novel relayer incentivization system to eliminate transaction fees for voters." 👀

Freedom Tool

An identification and privacy solution that revolutionizes polling, surveying and election processes

Cypherpunks direct code Cypherpunks write code is outdated

"Often housing groups of people with radically different interests and goals and values, nation states are odd by their very nature. However, they are also odd in how they operate externally. Nation states do go to war. They do it all the time. And while tribes also went to war, when a nation state engages in kinetic conflict, it is really something to behold. Because some nation states are drawn with borders that have enormous territories and numbers of people, they typically also have vast resources to wage wars – wars in which weaker nations are turned into economic vassals. When large nation states find themselves in conflict with their peers, the result (as seen in those wars of the twentieth century) is typically the deaths of tens of millions of people." - Farewell to Westphalia

Anarcho-capitalism's greatest strength, in my view, is its intellectual coherence. Built on logical foundations rather than emotional ones, it avoids the splintering into competing sub-movements that plagues many political philosophies.

Someone hacked into someone else's server, did damage and surveillance. And a "privacy activist" says that it's not actually violence relativizing it by joggling about intellectual property. Basically saying its okey. WTF?

The "paradox of tolerance" versus anarcho-capitalism is an interesting tension. When I wasn't an anarchist, it made sense to me. But now I see the problem: it inherently requires some authority to determine what counts as tolerant or intolerant. It presupposes the state, or something functionally equivalent. Beyond that, if someone builds their own website, I don't see how anyone has the right to violently intrude into it based on ideology. And since everyone believes they're fighting intolerance, this framework just legitimizes whoever currently has the technical and social power to enforce their definition. What's your view on that?

I'm deeply concerned about what I saw from CCC this year, though CCC is just one example of a broader pattern. A journalist hacked a white supremacy dating site, extracted all data, and destroyed their infrastructure live on stage. The crowd celebrated. This seems to be the direction society is choosing, and I'm not sure it's leading anywhere good. I need to say this clearly: I despise white supremacy. But I'm not writing about them. I'm writing about what's happened to hacker culture, and what this approach actually accomplishes. The hacking ethos used to be about resisting power itself, not about wielding power against the right targets. We opposed surveillance, censorship, and centralized control as structural problems, not as things that were bad only when used by the wrong people. The principle was simple: concentrate power anywhere and it will be abused, so build systems that distribute it. Somewhere along the way, that changed. "hacker culture" has become increasingly collectivist, increasingly comfortable with using force and control as long as it serves the correct ideology. The logic is seductive: we're the good guys, we're targeting bad people, therefore our use of power is justified. But that's exactly how every authoritarian movement justifies itself. Here's what nobody seems willing to ask: what did this actually accomplish? I'd never heard of this white supremacy dating site before. It was probably a handful of people in their own corner of the internet, doing nothing of consequence. Now they're martyrs. Now they have a story about persecution by the powerful tech elite. Now they have proof that "the system" is out to destroy them, which is exactly the narrative that radicalizes people further. This is basic human psychology. When you attack people's identity and destroy their spaces, you don't make them reconsider their beliefs. You confirm their worldview. You give them grievance. You push them deeper into their ideology and make them more willing to fight back. Every authoritarian regime understands this: if you want to eliminate an ideology, persecution is the worst possible approach. But it feels satisfying, and that's what matters to the crowd. What we're doing is pouring gasoline on cultural and racial tensions. We're creating cycles of retaliation where each side sees the other as an existential threat that must be destroyed. The white supremacists see this hack as proof they're under attack. They'll radicalize further, recruit more effectively, and be more willing to use violence because they have a persecution narrative that's actually true. And when they retaliate, the other side will use that as justification for more aggressive action. This is how tribal conflicts escalate into wars. Hacker culture used to understand that the tools we normalize using will eventually be used against us. When we cheer for infrastructure destruction targeting racists today, we're establishing that infrastructure destruction based on ideology is legitimate. What happens when the political winds shift? What happens when the people with power decide that anarchists, or activists, or minority communities are the "dangerous ideology" that needs to be hacked and destroyed? There is no principle left to appeal to, because we've already agreed that power is fine as long as we like the target. The shift toward collectivist thinking, toward "solidarity" as the highest value, toward celebrating power when it's used against acceptable targets, this creates exactly the tribal dynamics that lead to conflict. When your identity is bound up in your collective, and the collective has decided who the enemy is, questioning the tactics becomes betrayal. Dissent becomes treason. And anyone pointing out that you're creating the very cycles of violence you claim to oppose gets treated as an enemy themselves. Hackers used to be about building systems assuming those systems would be used against us, so we made them resilient and distributed. That required uncomfortable consistency: defending infrastructure neutrality even for people we despised, because the alternative was endless cycles of retaliation. We understood that you can't build a free society by normalizing the destruction of spaces you disagree with, because eventually someone will disagree with you. The question isn't whether white supremacists are bad. Obviously they are. The question is whether we've become so focused on winning the current battle that we can't see we're creating the conditions for endless war. And whether we've forgotten that the point of hacker culture was to build systems that made such wars unnecessary, not to become better warriors in them. View quoted note →

Bitcoin gave us digital gold - revolutionary and beautiful. But Ethereum gave us something I'm constantly amazed by: the ability for anyone to create trustless, permissionless markets for ANYTHING. No lawyers, no regulators, no permission needed. Just deploy contracts and you have global coordination infrastructure.

If you genuinely believe in freedom and permissionless systems, other people's choices don't threaten you. You shrug and say "not my thing, but you do you"

Image NFTs were web3's porn moment - the "low culture" thing that actually drove adoption and got normies using self-custody wallets for first time in their life. massive opportunity we completely wasted. View quoted note →

I'm not a fan of more and more browsers - but I'm bullish on this one. It's time to make p2p and distributed storage first-class citizen in the browser. Brave tried it maybe too early, and then got enshitified. The source code is not even released yet, it's early days, but team and roadmap sounds very promising and I really hope they make it work

Freedom

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