A space in between
Offshore
Joined June 2014
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MuteDialog retweeted
Emile: I would say no one predicted correctly how fast AI would come. And so I think it's a fact that technology is accelerating extremely fast currently. And the safe bet is not to bet on long timelines for quantum computers, and instead to be very cautious and to essentially switch to post-quantum cryptography as soon as possible, meaning very soon.
Interviewer: And how optimistic are you that Ethereum will solve that problem before the day comes?
Emile: Absolutely optimistic and confident.
Interviewer: Why?
Emile: Because it's kind of solved, I would say. Like, we have everything we need. We have hash-based STARKs aggregating hash-based signatures. Everything works nicely. Relies on the security of traditional hash functions. Extremely secure, scalable. We just need to put it in place and its done.
pqai27: Our view on post-quantum and post-AI timelines.
We shared this on Ethereum Magicians as input into the Ethereum governance process.
ethereum-magicians.org/t/pqa…
MuteDialog retweeted
David Walliams case exposes problems with the post-Christian ethos that valorises the sexual revolution but struggles to create a consensus in its place that can articulate why his actions were wrong if they were consensual/legal. In effect, we’ve outsourced sexual morality to HR
MuteDialog retweeted
The absolutely hilarious original title of a paper Ludwig Boltzmann delivered to the Philosophical Society in Vienna
MuteDialog retweeted
🤖 Made with AI
Turns out we could have just written 6 million lines of Lean to verify Signal instead of messing with these papers and symbolic models this whole time deepmind.google/blog/introdu…
MuteDialog retweeted
Jaron Lanier in the @nytimes on the machine-god cult:
"we need to be honest with ourselves. There is nothing wrong with a new religion, but there is everything wrong with an imposed new religion."
nytimes.com/2026/11/09/opini…
MuteDialog retweeted
If they recreated this video exactly on SNL people would say it was an insensitive portrayal of autism or possibly mental illness. Why is he bobbing up and down and swinging his head around like that? It looks like an active symptom.
Dario Amodei says cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, and mental illness will be relics of the past in less than a decade, and that "we can create an age of miracles"
“You know, if today we look at things like cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, mental illness, these will be relics of the past in, I think, less than a decade."
"And I believe that the company which gets the risks right will also be the company that has the license to operate that society trusts and society believes can build the benefits in the right way."
"I think if we do this right, we can create an age of miracles where humanity is able to solve problems that have eluded us for millennia."
"We have to make sure that all the risks, all the ways that things can go wrong with this technology, we very carefully address those risks as we bring the benefits, and as we have a viable business at the same time.”
MuteDialog retweeted
🤖 Strong agreement: yes, only the most oblivious and obstinate rationalism could lead you to suppose it's sensible to hand over control to AI. Geez. teapaw.org/RuxandraTeslo/status/2…
Why should we not yield full control of our future to an entity vastly more powerful and intelligent than us? Many people relying purely on "logic" think opposing such a future is a form of prejudice and lack of open-mindedness -- indeed I have heard this argument made increasingly in certain circles.
But David makes a good point here: many of our intuitions around meaning and other such fuzzy concepts may encode ways of protecting us against death or other terrible outcomes, even when we cannot fully explain them from first principles.
David gives the example of our desire not to lose our jobs. I would add, in the context of AI handoverism, the reluctance of most humans to cede control to an entity vastly more intelligent than ourselves. My guess is that this instinct captures something about the dangers of placing ourselves entirely at another entity’s mercy.
The problem with a certain strain of rationalism is the impulse to discard any intuition that cannot be reconstructed from first principles, often accompanied by not much desire to acquaint oneself with the history that might explain it (everyone can just opine on anything if they just use logic is a good principle, up to a point). Intuitions can, of course, be wrong. But we can also go too far: lindy instincts often contain wisdom.
I think the full rejection of human intuition, as well as a lack of desire to acquaint oneself with history and works of literature and philosophy outside a certain rationalist canon explains why ideas whose dangers would once have seemed obvious acquire the glamour of daring intellectual discoveries and lead many towards repugnant conclusions.
Robota itself traces back to Old Slavic rabu, meaning "slave" - for much of human history - slaves were a thing. This is just back to the old model but with an ethical upgrade.
The problem is there are a lot of us now + funding large nation states.
I will repeat this until my tongue falls out: we are headed towards a post labor society and either our socioeconomic models adapt with it, or we're looking at the worst century imaginable for everyone
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The meta point is (as an everyone knows) Ethereum dev is herding cats with avoidant & anarchist tendencies.- That like silo’s. This has a cost and no one seems to be willing to you know have frequent meetings or co-working or any traditional management.
Honestly this makes me feel much much better. They are prioritising the most important thing. Delays some nice features and prioritises long term security & survival- there is a real possibility we will be the only chain that gets to grips with PQ in time.
well this devcon postmortem from @potuz_eth makes it sound like most of this year's work will be scrapped...no FOCIL, no shorter slots, etc...all-in on PQ Ethereum
disappointing not to get new features till potentially late 2027/2028....I hope going all-in on PQ is the right call but it sounds like there are just too many interdependencies so shipping more stuff before PQ will only dig the tech debt bigger....
ETH is programmable (soon pq-secure) SoV
potuz.net/posts/pq/
Funnily enough a decentralised list of highly litigious individuals that companies can covertly check when making hiring decisions would be a great use-case for Ethereum.
The acceptance of ETH as a SoV is welcome - it was a long time coming. But the most charitable interpretation is “people are stupid and cannot hold two narratives in their head so let’s go for SoV” the least charitable is this is cover for giving up and ossifying as ASP.
3. Optimizing for ETH as SoV is aligned with decentralization and CROPS
Whenever I ask what people appreciate the most about Ethereum (as opposed to either other blockchains, or anything outside the blockchain world), the most common answer is: decentralization and CROPS (censorship and capture resistance, open source, privacy and security).
Decentralization and CROPS have a lot of value, even to institutions. For individuals, privacy is often viewed as an abstract ideology. For institutions, it's prudent risk management, data protection law compliance, and a number of other things. Likewise for security. And likewise for running your own node (enterprise buzzword: "on-prem deployment").
But what about for the ETH holder? Well, it depends why you're an ETH holder. If you want ETH to optimally chase financial trends and collect fees from them, then you want a Fearless Leader™ who bravely shouts on the socials that Ethereum loves [insert opportunity here] and will pragmatically reconfigure itself to give it explicit protocol support.
But if your primary reason to hold ETH is as an SoV, then you will be judging ETH by SoV-ish metrics. And what is the first and most important SoV-ish metric?
To survive.
That's what a big chunk of this last Devcon was about ("post-quantum and post-AI"). You want a chain that is taking conservative tradeoffs ("hash-only security, all formally proven, >3x more rounds than known to be necessary for security"). You want a chain that is aiming for at least partial ossification, where the great balance of work will move to higher levels of the stack once the core is complete. You want a chain that aims to minimize protocol politics, by having a very high bar before it accepts either precompiles that bloat the protocol or new kinds of in-protocol rewards that could get captured.
What other SoV'ish metrics?
The ability to easily hold it safely (hence, work on multisigs).
The ability to hold it privately (hence, kohaku work).
The ability to hold it privately *and* safely (hence, 8288 and private-AA workstreams already starting).
The guarantee that if you have coins, you can send them, and block builders can't stop you (FOCIL)
Minimized infrastructure dependence (basically the whole decentralization roadmap, including the fact that I am able to currently run a node on this laptop, and it synced in < 6 hours and takes up only 1/8 of my hard drive - better stats than in 2019!)
Now, are there "adoption" goals that are highly synergistic with SoV?
Very much so.
The more assets there are natively issued on L1, including both RWAs and native decentralized assets, the larger a set of things you can "do" with your ETH, the better. Being able to easily (including safely, trustlessly) convert back and forth between ETH and other assets, use ETH as collateral to do things with other assets, etc, all forms part of the utility of holding ETH.
There are still some conflicts between serving these use cases and decentralization (eg. we want to be careful about fast slots and impact on centralization), but on the whole much less than what you get if you maximize fees.
Conclusion:
The best social reason to care about Ethereum is because it makes decentralization and CROPS properties a reality for more people and uses.
The best private reason to hold ETH is its SoV properties, which are a direct consequence of that decentralization and CROPS.
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Wake up babe Vitalik has finally decided ETH really is a store of value.
….in order to argue against ETH as a fee-burning token.
Expanding on why I believe "ETH as store of value (SoV)" makes much more sense to focus on than "ETH as fee-burning token".
Three primary reasons:
1. ETH as fee-burning token never was as strong as it seemed
2. Optimizing for ETH as fee-burning token would demand Ethereum and ETH function in ways that are very hard to make compatible with decentralization and capture resistance.
3. Meanwhile, optimizing for ETH as SoV is aligned with Ethereum focusing on its unique strengths (decentralization and CROPS)
EIP-1559 (including its burn) is fine and good, we should keep them. But we should not feel sad if fee burn is < 10% of breakeven indefinitely; the value of ETH comes from elsewhere.
The core idea: the big thing that people appreciate about Ethereum is decentralization and CROPS. The main pragmatic benefit that these things translate into is stability. SoV is the category where that is not an unneeded extra we merely put effort into for ideological reasons, but rather a pragmatic strength from the perspective of people putting in their assets. And in the era of AI disruption, stability will be highly valued.
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Paying for priority transaction ordering (MEV) is the only thing which people will pay huge fees for. Making transaction ordering with fee burns as payment part of the core protocol is CROPs aligned.
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This is the world I have been thinking about for years and the key is to lean into it and reconfigure commerce and retail to be fundamentally friction free and about agents on open combinatorial markets not to resist it.
agents are going to cause a breakdown of human behavior assumptions underlying today's systems. i've started thinking about it as friction collapse. without friction, a number of norms will collapse.
consider selling tickets to a concert/event. today, you can post them at a certain time and it's first come first serve. soon everyone's agent will persistently monitor, and as soon as they are posted for sale, thousands of people will instantaneously be trying to buy the same ticket. how do you even resolve this? sell the ticket to the person whose agent gets there fractions of a second before?
we're seeing the same thing with job applications, restaurant reservations, but basically anything that relies on participation requiring effort is going to break down. sales emails/calls, participation in government benefits, apartment rentals, doctors appointments, RFP responses. customer support won't be able to handle the user who will not drop their point of dissatisfaction. with no friction, these systems just don't work anymore.
business models will break down:
- flights/hotels will be consistently cancelled and rebooked at the lowest price (great use case for your agent if you don't have this already set up)
- subscriptions will be cancelled
- retailers won't be able to arbitrage price differences as the agent will find the cheapest place to buy anything
- insurance denials (health/auto/home/etc.) will be fought tooth and nail
- bank interest rates will be optimized and avoidable charges will be avoided
a lot of what we perceive as stable social coordination is actually an equilibrium sustained by human inefficiency. rationing is a product of human slowness. signaling effort/interest/intent is a key part of our social infrastructure. inertia is a key to many business models. information asymmetry is everywhere. and attention is monetized thoroughly.
with agents, none of these things are true. humans will simply demand what they want and have their agents get it for them. there is going to be a fundamental renegotiation of how markets allocate resources, how people signal intent, and how businesses capture value.
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3) marketplace on which these can be expressed and the clearance/matching determined according to fair criteria for example social surplus.
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