Freedom maximalist. Good vibes only.
Boulder, Colorado, USA, Earth
Joined March 2008
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Announcing hashsma.sh! 𝟘 𝟙 ❒ 🔨
Strengthen cryptography with AI.
Cryptography—both current and post-quantum cryptography—depends on hashes. SHA-256? SHA-3? BLAKE3? Nobody knows if they are secure. We're going to find out!
Come help accelerate scientific research!
HashSmash is an open science-acceleration project in collaboration with @yukonresearch, @eigenlabs, @projecteleven, and @ShieldedLabs.
zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
Most incredible account on this site right now hands down
Check it out! You can actually use Optical Character Recognition or an AI to decode that funny-looking sigil in this screenshot, and recover the complete 256-bit cryptographic value. With the hex code from this screenshot, you only get 40 bits.
xitter.cf/zooko/status/211439703…
zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
always on hot mic functionality btw.
PLUS: automatic content recognition, geo positioning, network mapping, a targeted ads service, 4 distinct drm services, user profile building and so much more juicy telemetry!
just you, God, a $3000 TV and samsung + their 400 partners!
more to come, screenshot below is of a file called security-policy.xml
zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
My reading of the current situation is that a group of new community members—who have joined since late 2024, and especially in 2025—are attempting to impose their vision and position themselves as community leaders. Many of these new members are highly influential on social media, yet they lack a public track record regarding the defense of privacy and human rights—unlike the individuals they are attacking.
Zcash has become very valuable due to technical improvements and rising prices. I believe the power struggles to gain control of the narrative are only just beginning.
zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
The lack of arguments, combined with Tom’s recurring, hostile comments toward Shielded Labs, is truly very strange. Furthermore, in my opinion, Tom frequently offers incomplete or erroneous interpretations regarding Zcash and the community.
For example, Tom claims that Shielded Labs has lost the support of the community, while the NSM (a proposal from Shielded Labs) has been approved and is frequently praised as an excellent solution to the security budget problem.
I would like to know how one arrives at the conclusion that SL has lost support, when one of its proposals receives such support.
My current position on Crosslink: I have never liked the idea of PoS, but I believe that having fast finality is essential for Zcash to be adopted as a currency for payments. And this should definitely be included in the roadmap, even if Crosslink doesn't end up being the chosen solution.
Discussion is good, yet this discussion has been had ad nauseam before you showed up in Zcash.
It seems tiring to you, that is because we are tired of having the discussion over and over when it has been clearly unwanted by the community.
Shielded Labs team / Zooko has lost support from several waves of newcomers in the past and then they just wait for a new crop of newcomers to bait into supporting their broken scheme.
But ok, we will have this discussion again. This time loudly and publicly. And put it to bed finally.
zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
It's really strange that so many people are trying to shout this down immediately.
It's an open system, guys. Different upgrades are proposed and talked about publicly. There's nothing wrong with talking about it.
Do better.
zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
Proud to work at Shielded Labs. We never stop defending Zcash’s security.
I’m confused by the outrage from certain people around Crosslink. At this point, it’s an R&D effort. There’s no activation proposal or ZIPs, and it isn’t on the mainnet roadmap. It’s a prototype design that we’re testing and iterating on.
Research and experimentation are good for Zcash. Permissionless innovation means people can explore ideas without first securing everyone’s agreement, and the Zcash community should encourage that. Good-faith debate is how Zcash improves, and we welcome scrutiny of Crosslink’s design, assumptions, and tradeoffs.
We’re working on Crosslink because we think stronger protection against reorg and rollback attacks may be a necessary security upgrade for Zcash at some point. AI or other forces could eventually challenge the security assumptions behind PoW, and our thesis is that a hybrid model may offer stronger security than either pure PoW or pure PoS.
Shielded Labs’ mission is to protect the long-term security of Zcash. It’s a common theme across all our projects, including Crosslink, the Network Sustainability Mechanism (NSM), and Epoch. We also demonstrated that commitment by bringing on Taylor Hornby as a security researcher to use AI tools to identify potential vulnerabilities, which uncovered the Orchard counterfeiting bug. We want to address potential risks before they become urgent, and recent events have shown the value of being forward-looking.
The burden of proof is on us. If we want Crosslink included in a future network upgrade, it’s our responsibility to demonstrate consensus. But that’s still a long way off. For now, we’re focused on improving the design, incorporating user feedback, and working toward a production-ready implementation for the community and coinholders to evaluate.
There’s still a lot of work to do before we’d propose Crosslink for mainnet, and we plan to run it on testnet for an extended period of time. If you disagree with Crosslink, challenge the design and help us understand what we’re missing. We all want Zcash to succeed. Let’s focus on strengthening and protecting Zcash as a whole by giving research and experimentation room to happen.
If you're interested in learning more about Crosslink or participating in the incentivized testnet, feel free to DM me.
zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
“Good-faith debate is how Zcash improves, and we welcome scrutiny of Crosslink’s design, assumptions, and tradeoffs.” 🤝
I’m confused by the outrage from certain people around Crosslink. At this point, it’s an R&D effort. There’s no activation proposal or ZIPs, and it isn’t on the mainnet roadmap. It’s a prototype design that we’re testing and iterating on.
Research and experimentation are good for Zcash. Permissionless innovation means people can explore ideas without first securing everyone’s agreement, and the Zcash community should encourage that. Good-faith debate is how Zcash improves, and we welcome scrutiny of Crosslink’s design, assumptions, and tradeoffs.
We’re working on Crosslink because we think stronger protection against reorg and rollback attacks may be a necessary security upgrade for Zcash at some point. AI or other forces could eventually challenge the security assumptions behind PoW, and our thesis is that a hybrid model may offer stronger security than either pure PoW or pure PoS.
Shielded Labs’ mission is to protect the long-term security of Zcash. It’s a common theme across all our projects, including Crosslink, the Network Sustainability Mechanism (NSM), and Epoch. We also demonstrated that commitment by bringing on Taylor Hornby as a security researcher to use AI tools to identify potential vulnerabilities, which uncovered the Orchard counterfeiting bug. We want to address potential risks before they become urgent, and recent events have shown the value of being forward-looking.
The burden of proof is on us. If we want Crosslink included in a future network upgrade, it’s our responsibility to demonstrate consensus. But that’s still a long way off. For now, we’re focused on improving the design, incorporating user feedback, and working toward a production-ready implementation for the community and coinholders to evaluate.
There’s still a lot of work to do before we’d propose Crosslink for mainnet, and we plan to run it on testnet for an extended period of time. If you disagree with Crosslink, challenge the design and help us understand what we’re missing. We all want Zcash to succeed. Let’s focus on strengthening and protecting Zcash as a whole by giving research and experimentation room to happen.
If you're interested in learning more about Crosslink or participating in the incentivized testnet, feel free to DM me.
zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
live-tweeting on samsung findings were fun.
i'll let my agents give it a bit more time, but this document is already the most comprehensive breakdown of some key concerns of tizen i've seen run on a live device.
it takes like a good while for me just to scroll through it (there's about 44 writeups as of right now on individual functionality).
release is probably happening in a few days.
zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
Agree.
1/ Discussion is good. The only way Zcash wins is through discussion. Crosslink could be a terrible idea but calling the very discussion of it an attack or a risk is closed minded and fragile.
FWIW I do think a random tweet about Crosslink from the Zcash handle was provocative and maybe unnecessary but I'm glad for the conversation it's prompting.
Below are why I'm particularly concerned about shutting down security conversations early.
2/ The "encrypted Bitcoin" narrative only works if Zcash can get the hashrate. After my deep dives into PoUW hashrate economics I do not think this will happen. The economics aren't there. Pearl is at least 20x as capital efficient and it's PoW. Yes Pearl is early but try to understand it. It also may be the first of many PoUW chains.
I am not the only person who thinks this BTW. It's just a blind spot for many because PoUW is so new and poorly understood.
3/ If my concerns in 2 materialize then Zcash best move is to lean into an alternative security model from PoW or to find an alternative work based algorithm with better economics for miners.
4/ Both 2 and 3 might be obsolete arguments if there's a fast move toward market share from Zcash. Sometimes the best tech doesn't win because of network effects. But I think that's harder without going directly for small quick transaction use cases with extreme haste. I don't think Zcash is on a path to replace Visa faster than Pearl or other PoUW can decisively outcompete Zcash on security.
Finally, I'm sorry but I'm not here to engage in a deep conversation about this today. The conversations I've seen so far are tiring and impolite.
I'll talk to people about it at Zcon and can answer questions later. Most of the information is already public on my profile.
I'm obviously a fan of Zcash, but let's be honest, speed and security are some of the biggest weak spots.
For years I've enjoyed the Dash experience of "in 1 second it's permanently irreversible." It's a major competitive advantage.
With Zcash, waiting ~25 seconds (after the new faster blocks are approved) to get some kind of security, then many minutes (at least) to be reasonably (but never fully) sure the transaction is finalized, isn't optimal.
And, having to worry about mining pool centralization (which was a big problem just recently) isn't optimal either. Both of those are what mainly keep me using Dash right now.
Crosslink looks to be a good step towards closing this gap.
If not Crosslink, another solution to get finality in Zcash much, much faster than we have right now should be proposed. "Nah it's fine now" isn't an option IMHO.
zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
I'm obviously a fan of Zcash, but let's be honest, speed and security are some of the biggest weak spots.
For years I've enjoyed the Dash experience of "in 1 second it's permanently irreversible." It's a major competitive advantage.
With Zcash, waiting ~25 seconds (after the new faster blocks are approved) to get some kind of security, then many minutes (at least) to be reasonably (but never fully) sure the transaction is finalized, isn't optimal.
And, having to worry about mining pool centralization (which was a big problem just recently) isn't optimal either. Both of those are what mainly keep me using Dash right now.
Crosslink looks to be a good step towards closing this gap.
If not Crosslink, another solution to get finality in Zcash much, much faster than we have right now should be proposed. "Nah it's fine now" isn't an option IMHO.
This is fucking crazy.
I knew all the Smart TVs were spying—that’s why I have a commercial panel with minimal compute and no radio, plugged in to an AppleTV. But this is crazy!
zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
turns out it classifies what audio it hears, before reporting back to samsung.
sensor preferences, dog-barking and baby-crying event counters, and camera streaming duration are built into telemetry paths.
zooko🛡🦓🦓🦓 ⓩ retweeted
this post here is causing unnecessary drama
people are somewhat mad because the @Zcash account is educating the community on ongoing R&D by @ShieldedLabs (an independent zcash contributor) -- in a harmless post that clearly categorizes it as "proposed"
some more context ⬇️
crosslink is a proposed hybrid pow/pos upgrade for zcash. nothing is decided. both research, development and community discussions are still ongoing.
it keeps mining for block production and adds a parallel finality gadget so confirmed blocks become irreversible in practice.
shielded labs is the independent swiss organization building it. founded in late 2022 by @aquietinvestor as a donation-funded group outside the development fund and block rewards. @zooko is CPO there. the team has former ECC and equilibrium people plus other protocol engineers. their whole point is to add independent capacity so Zcash is less dependent on any single US-based entity.
that's great for decentralization!
they published the crosslink roadmap in march 2025 and have been shipping prototype milestones since then (placeholders, disconnected BFT, PoW respecting finality, staking semantics). by early 2026 the prototype phase was done and they moved into incentivized feature nets and productionization. so roughly a year and a half of public implementation work on top of earlier design discussion.
it matters because pure pow tends to centralize over time. bitcoin started with many miners of similar size and now two mining pools produce more than half the blocks. that's an inevitable outcome for the game theories behind BTC pow. i've written extensively about that (and others have too).
larger operators get more rewards, buy more specialized hardware, and smaller ones get priced out by difficulty and energy costs. capital is tied to equipment that can be pointed at other chains or sold, so the network stake is weak.
in a hybrid setup the pos side puts value at stake that is cumulative and locked to the network itself. an attacker has to compromise both layers. staking stays inside the shielded pool with batching and other privacy measures so individual positions are harder to fingerprint.
finality also makes deposits, bridges, and everyday payments more predictable without waiting on probabilistic confirmations. transactions become faster and more aligned to real-world payment expectations.
it does not replace PoW. it adds a complementary security model and better long-term sustainability as issuance declines, while expanding who can participate beyond a few large miners. that addresses the empirical centralization path pure proof-of-work has shown, without throwing away the base layer $ZEC already has.
i support the direction. independent teams building in public and having their year-and-a-half work being recognized by a simple and harmless post that is now being weaponized by governance adversaries.