Anas Uddin

When I was 14, social media was my escape hatch from mediocrity. I did not relate to anyone at school. Online, I found people on the other side of the world who thought the way I did. That changed my life. It is how I ended up working with one of Silicon Valley’s most respected investors and some of the smartest engineers in the world. It is how I started a podcast and got into rooms school would never have opened for me. The UK wants to close that door for every weird, ambitious, hyper online 14-year-old. They say it is “for safety”. But there is a much greater danger in being trapped inside schools, consuming state-mandated narratives, and waiting for permission from people whose entire worldview is obedience. The internet lets kids escape the factory before the factory stamps them into shape. It lets them find mentors, employers, collaborators, friends, customers, and ideas no school would ever give them. It lets them discover that the classroom is not the world, and the adults around them are not the ceiling. A social media ban for under-16s protects the enforcement regime, not the child. Age verification is KYC with a child-safety sticker on it. First they ask if you are old enough. Then they ask who you are. Then the anonymous internet is gone. The excuse is children. The prize is obedience. Fight back, Britain.

In the long run, civilizations are built by people who create new knowledge. Zcash keeps attracting them. Over the past decade the project has quietly assembled one of the strongest cryptographic teams in the world. The people who actually move the field forward keep ending up here. A few of them: Sean Bowe (@ebfull) has been a principal cryptographic engineer of Zcash since day 1. He invented Halo, the breakthrough that eliminated trusted setups in zero-knowledge proofs and changed how the whole industry builds them. He's a high-school dropout and self taught cryptographer who fundamentally advanced the field of cryptography. Not only Zcash but also the world wouldn't be the same without his discoveries. Dev Ojha (@zkDragon) is best known as a cofounder of Osmosis, one of the most successful blockchains in the Cosmos ecosystem. He's also a world class cryptographer who studied at UC Berkeley under Alessandro Chiesa, one of the foremost zero-knowledge researchers in the world. Before Osmosis, he was part of the launch and a core contributor to both Tendermint and the Cosmos SDK. In cryptography, he coauthored Fractal, the world's first post-quantum recursive proof system, and contributed substantively to Aurora and Marlin, two foundational papers in the ZK canon. His code lives in production ZK libraries used across the industry. After helping build a multibillion dollar protocol, he turned his attention to one of the hardest open problems in the field: how to scale encrypted money to billions of users. His work goes straight at the bottlenecks that have kept private payments from reaching global scale, including private information retrieval, eliminating shielded sync, and post-quantum privacy. Tal Derei (@mariusmargulus) is one of the core engineers and cryptographers building Tachyon alongside Sean. He comes to it from Penumbra, one of the most ambitious privacy projects in all of Cosmos, while doing zero-knowledge research at Lehigh. He won a ZPrize for making client-side proving dramatically faster on the GPU, cracking one of the exact bottlenecks that decides whether billions of people can generate private proofs on a phone instead of renting a data center. That single problem sits between encrypted money and the entire planet. And Tachyon is where that firepower gets pointed. The bar is almost absurdly high: make fully encrypted money scale by orders of magnitude while making privacy stronger and validators lighter. Most teams would kill to land even one of those. Tachyon is chasing all three at once. The proposed upgrade cuts transaction costs by roughly two orders of magnitude, ends runaway state growth, enables oblivious synchronization, and charts a path toward full post-quantum privacy. These are the people who ship what everyone else calls impossible. That's before the wider ecosystem of protocol engineers, researchers, auditors, and contributors who've spent years pushing zero-knowledge cryptography forward. These names matter for one reason: they keep producing original advances that the rest of the industry later adopts. Zcash shipped the first production zk-SNARKs. Zcash researchers helped eliminate trusted setups. Right now the team is building Ironwood, a near-term upgrade that uses formal verification and independent audits to harden the protocol and let anyone verify the circulating supply for themselves. A perfect shielded pool. Ironwood also makes Zcash post-quantum recoverable, building on Dev's work: if a quantum computer ever breaks today's cryptography, your funds can still be moved to safety. Next comes Tachyon, a new architecture for private payments designed to scale while keeping privacy intact. Tachyon takes the harder step to full post-quantum privacy, so shielded transactions stay private even against a future quantum computer. Backing Zcash is a bet on something larger than encrypted money. It's a bet that some of the best cryptographic talent on Earth keeps doing what it's done for a decade: creating new knowledge. Historically, betting against the people who create new knowledge has not been a winning strategy.

.@friedberg: “A wealth tax takes away private property. If you give the government the ability to do that on even 1% of net worth for billionaires, the next step is 5% of the billionaires, or maybe 2% of millionaires, and then maybe it’s 3% on people that have a net worth of 100 grand a year. And by the way, to figure out how much you have, what your assets are, you’ve got to send me a list every year of everything you own. So now the government gets to look into your house, not just see what’s in your bank account, what stocks you own, but what cars do you own? What’s the value of those cars? How much is that art worth? What’s everything here worth? Private property rights go out the window when you institute a wealth tax. Because now the government has the right to assess all your value and to take anything they want from you based on a vote where a bunch of people raise their hand and say, we’ll increase the tax rate to this—5%, 2%, 10%, whatever it is—and here’s the threshold, and we’ll take it every year. And when you do that, it eventually leads to 51% of people voting to take everything from 49%. That’s the worst case. That’s the end state of this. It eats itself, and that’s socialism. And so I think that a wealth tax—and look, it’s not going to affect me, this California tax. So don’t think that I’m trying to speak my book or whatever the comments or bullshit are. I think this is a fundamental, principled issue. By degrading private property rights, we are setting a precedent in the United States that is the foundation of why the United States was set up in the first place, which is for all of us that came to this country to get away from tyrannical governments outside the United States that took all our shit and controlled everything and told us what to do all the time. And we came here and we get to have private property. Sure, I’ll pay my tax. Here’s my 53%. Thank you very much, government, for all the great stuff you do, for all the services you provide. But now, f*ck off and leave me alone. And that’s not the case anymore when this passes. Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna, all these national politicians, AOC, Elizabeth Warren—they’re all saying we need to have a national wealth tax now. So it’s not just in California. This is going to be the issue between 2026 and 2028. The elites are the billionaires and the tech people. They’re coming after them. And the manifestation of that is to create this wealth tax. And that gives the government the system by which private property rights are gone. And the United States has a very questionable future at that point. That’s the thing I worry about the most. And I juxtapose that with my optimism about the future and this amazing shit. I mean, think about it—this amazing shit that’s happening in the world. We’re going to have free f*cking energy. We’re going to live forever. We’re going to have all of this insane stuff that we never imagined. Abundance and resources that we could never contemplate. Happiness. Spending time with family. Working less hours. Robots that build shit for us. Everything is going to get better. Everything is getting better. Everything is getting more amazing. And then we’re like, let’s f*ck ourselves. Why not? Because we’ll just f*ck ourselves.”