Tech Director for BTC++, BitBlockBoom, TabConf, Unconfiscatable, and https://teapawt.net/t.co/DUqNrlZrVs events⚡[email protected] Fiat delenda est
npub1papldckxytp2m8met6hyeh37m
Joined June 2008
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EXFROG - #FREESAMOURAI #FREEROMAN - #ROSSFREE retweeted
The year is 1873. Your wife tires easily and reads too much. The doctor prescribes the rest cure: six weeks flat in bed, no books, no visitors, fed on milk, forbidden to sit up without his permission. The man who devised it is the most famous nerve specialist in America, and the women come out of it quieter, which is taken as the cure.
The year is 1915. The hospital has a new way of delivering your child. Morphine, then scopolamine, and the mother wakes two days later with a baby she cannot remember having. They call it twilight sleep. The women are strapped into padded cots so they do not hurt themselves while they scream, and the straps are the modern part. The babies arrive blue and slow to breathe.
The year is 1945. The truck comes down your street fogging DDT, and the children run behind it in the white cloud because the man on the back says it is harmless. At the beach it is sprayed over the bathers on their towels. It goes on the cattle, over the barn, and across the kitchen table.
The year is 1948. Your son has trouble with his ears. The doctor slides a rod tipped with radium up each nostril and holds it there for the best part of ten minutes, and you bring him back three more times. Hundreds of thousands of American children get the same treatment. The cancers arrive in their fifties.
The year is 1962. The health visitor tells you breastfeeding is old-fashioned and the formula is scientific. By 1972 fewer than one American baby in four is breastfed at all. The formula is skimmed milk and sugar, with the milk fat taken out and vegetable oil put in.
The year is 1971. The family planning clinic fits a small plastic crab called the Dalkon Shield. Its tail is a bundle of fibres that wicks bacteria up into the womb. 2.8 million are fitted in America before it is withdrawn, and the company goes bankrupt under the claims. It had been sold as safe and superior.
The year is 1983. The doctor says your arteries are the butter's fault. The dripping tin goes in the bin, the yolks go to the dog, the margarine goes in the fridge, and you have the heart attack anyway, on skimmed milk, having done everything right.
The year is 2001. Your 15-year-old is low, and the doctor prescribes Paxil, because the trial in the journal says it is effective and well tolerated in adolescents. The raw data, reanalysed 14 years later, shows more suicidal thinking on the drug than on the sugar pill. The company pays $3 billion to settle. Nobody rings the house.
The year is 2009. The government has spent around £500 million stockpiling Tamiflu for the pandemic, on the strength of the manufacturer's trials. When the trials are finally prised loose five years later, the drug shortens flu by about half a day and nothing shows it keeps anyone out of hospital. The stockpile goes out of date in a warehouse.
The year is 2026. The doctor has ten minutes and a screen. The number is high, so the tablet is for life. The weight is high, so the injection is for life. The meat is bad for the planet and the oil is good for the heart, and the person in the chair is as certain as everyone who ever sat in it.
Every one of those was settled, by a committee, in a journal, with a doubter somewhere being laughed at. The rest cure, the straps, the fog, the rod, the formula, the crab, the margarine, the trial, the stockpile. All of it certain, all of it printed, all of it done to somebody who had asked for help.
You were never the one who was wrong. You were the one it was done to, and the only person in the story who did as they were told every single time.
The apology comes a generation late, in a footnote, addressed to nobody.
The next one is being drafted now.
EXFROG - #FREESAMOURAI #FREEROMAN - #ROSSFREE retweeted
My groceries need financing but the chatbot believes in me.
“Hit Delete” by Kraylee 💗
EXFROG - #FREESAMOURAI #FREEROMAN - #ROSSFREE retweeted
It's Halloween season again and as a mathematician I'm obliged to post this. I don't make the rules
EXFROG - #FREESAMOURAI #FREEROMAN - #ROSSFREE retweeted
"Journalist extraordinaire" @hodlonaut has "reached out for comment" regarding his next "article."
We're publishing his questions and our response right now here.
EXFROG - #FREESAMOURAI #FREEROMAN - #ROSSFREE retweeted
> be Portland
> propose sane Bitcoin improvement
> get ignored
> Dash, Crash and Fork copy it
> bolt on a dozen insane extras
> accidentally turn it into a self-weeding garden
> only nincompoops opt in
> they fork themselves off
> Bitcoin improves
EXFROG - #FREESAMOURAI #FREEROMAN - #ROSSFREE retweeted
>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful
>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg
>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality
>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking
>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets
>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future
>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"
>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now
>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner
>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value
>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god
>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete
>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully
>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved
>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical
>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical
>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic
>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign
>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important
>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples
>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me
>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting
>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous
>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field
>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels
>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends
>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment
>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back
>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc
>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere
>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review
>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed
>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly
>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better
>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"
>motte has entered the chat
>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren
>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy
>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored
>tell myself this is impartial altruism
>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"
>silence
>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval
>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
>stare into cosmic light cone
>10^50 people staring back
>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions
>realize I have invented the perfect constituency
>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me
EXFROG - #FREESAMOURAI #FREEROMAN - #ROSSFREE retweeted
Mining keynote from @khalliburton at 10,000 Nodes Bitcoin Conference
10knodes.com
EXFROG - #FREESAMOURAI #FREEROMAN - #ROSSFREE retweeted
If the options are letting Anthropic/OpenAI control AI or 10% chance of the death of humanity, I hit the death of humanity button without thinking twice.
A fascistic oligopoly of AI is worse than the scary world of open models. Death is preferable.
I won’t let freedom yield to fear.
EXFROG - #FREESAMOURAI #FREEROMAN - #ROSSFREE retweeted
Seriously means a lot to everyone involved in TABConf this year!
The grant program for @tabconf is officially closed. Great applicants this year!
We've approved 22 grantees. Anyone else who needs funding will need to seek assistance elsewhere. h/t to @HRF being a no strings attached sponsor. We have used their sponsorship to lead our grant program this year to help folks in need come out!
We're still in the position to provide free tickets to those who genuinely can't afford one and are either students or working on a bitcoin/bitcoin-adjacent project, but that's all were able to offer at this point.
Really pumped about TABConf this year!
Still on the todo list:
- CTB puzzle
- Solidifying Schedule on github, day of activities
- Tons of admin work
- Procure wristbands, collectable poker chips, posters
- Finalize Swag apparel
- Sponsor Signage
- After party location announcement - hoping to get a sponsor soon for this.
30 Days and counting!
See y'all Oct 12-15!
If you made it this far and you're registered for TABConf you're probably getting email that are being filtered under promo/advertisements. Search for them.
If you haven't registered yet, please do.
EXFROG - #FREESAMOURAI #FREEROMAN - #ROSSFREE retweeted
the influence that aella still has on frontier labs is just insane
EXFROG - #FREESAMOURAI #FREEROMAN - #ROSSFREE retweeted
Come vibe with us! A conference for plebs, by plebs.
Grab your tickets: conf.bayareabitcoiners.com
EXFROG - #FREESAMOURAI #FREEROMAN - #ROSSFREE retweeted
Successful nerd snipe. Open source MIT SSP built on top of ldk-server. Deployed on mutinynet today!
github.com/benthecarman/open…
Day 5 of me respectfully asking @lightspark to explain how to write integration tests.
Day 5 of Spark ignoring my requests.
Let's ask Spark users @blinkbtc and @walletofsatoshi and @coinbase: how do you test your integrations?
... you do test your integrations, right?
EXFROG - #FREESAMOURAI #FREEROMAN - #ROSSFREE retweeted
How much entropy should I have on my passphrase?
My passphrase:
EXFROG - #FREESAMOURAI #FREEROMAN - #ROSSFREE retweeted
NEW: @tetherwallet launches mobile deposit, allowing users to deposit physical cash by taking a photo with their smartphone.
EXFROG - #FREESAMOURAI #FREEROMAN - #ROSSFREE retweeted
It's bad ass that these little ducks use Nostr to discover one another.
We sold over $2,500,000 worth of Microducks in the first 24 hours. Is this one of the most successful robot launches in history?
Insane achievement by @antoinepirrone and the team!
EXFROG - #FREESAMOURAI #FREEROMAN - #ROSSFREE retweeted
One thing before I start: everything in this post is public information from my own docket. None of it is new, and I'm not revealing anything you can't already find in the court filings yourself.
The retrial just got pushed to April 26, 2027. The order came down today (Dkt. 300). My acquittal motion is still sitting there, undecided. I honestly don't know when this ends.
Prosecutors are supposed to protect American interests and go after people who broke the law. A jury deadlocked on the two most serious counts against me. And still SDNY won't stop, because this case was never just about me. It's about setting an example.
Don't take my word for it. Tara La Morte, the chief of SDNY's Illicit Finance and Money Laundering Unit, said it herself at a New York City Bar Association event (Law360, Feb. 23, 2024; filed on my docket as Doc. 25-2):
"We want the industry to take notice."
"What we're trying to do is sort of bring the industry into compliance, and I think Tornado Cash is an example of that."
An example. Out of a developer who wrote code.
At that same event, her deputy praised the government's blockchain-tracing partner, Chainalysis.
Here is what they didn't tell the audience. All of it is from the public docket in my case.
According to the trial transcripts, Chainalysis was running its OWN Tornado Cash relayer, and earning fees on the transactions flowing through it.
- Chainalysis's own lawyers admitted to "a relayer node that Chainalysis operated"; my subpoena sought documents on Tornado Cash relayer(s) "used from March to August 2022." (Dkt. 211)
- In open court, the prosecutor said it plainly: "I think the parties agree as to that part of the testimony, that the Chainalysis relayer earned fees." Same hearing: "there's zero evidence that the defendant was in any way aware that Chainalysis was running a relayer." (Dkt. 259, July 25, 2025)
So the company that helped trace my "criminal" transactions was itself profiting from Tornado Cash transactions, while I was prosecuted over software I helped create.
And when my lawyers subpoenaed them to testify?
- Chainalysis moved to quash. (Dkt. 211)
- The government backed them: "Your Honor, we agree with the position outlined in the motion." (Dkt. 255)
- The night before, prosecutors called Chainalysis's counsel. The judge asked point-blank: "Did you let them know that they were potentially subject to investigation or prosecution?" The answer: "We have discussed at a high level some of the issues surrounding the relayer with Chainalysis." (Dkt. 259)
- The Chainalysis witness took the Fifth. My lawyers learned about that call only afterward, from Chainalysis's own lawyer. (Dkt. 263)
The jury never heard any of it.
This spring, at the Bitcoin 2026 conference in Las Vegas, something happened that I still can't quite believe. The Acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche, and the FBI Director, Kash Patel, sat on a panel called "Code is Free Speech."
Think about that. The two top law enforcement officials in the country. Blanche told thousands of developers: if you're a coder and you're not the one committing the crime, "you are not going to be investigated and not going to be charged." He said the last administration's crypto cases were "outrageous attacks on the industry." Patel praised "the Chainalysises of the world" as FBI partners.
And when the moderator pointed at the elephant in the room, my case, Tornado Cash, Roman Storm, the Acting Attorney General called it a "lingering case" they are "continuing to deal with."
So here is my hypothetical question. If code is free speech, why am I still being prosecuted for writing it? And if the Chainalysises of the world are the partners, the same Chainalysis that ran its own Tornado Cash relayer and earned fees from Tornado Cash users, while I never did, why is it off the hook?
They made an example out of a developer for writing code. Their own vendor ran the same infrastructure, pocketed the fees, and got a phone call instead of a prosecution.
Sources 👇👇👇