Privacy is normal.

Bay area
Joined April 2024
John retweeted
not only am i not worried about the crypto community's ability to handle the upcoming ai/quantum threat, i will venture to say that in the next 2 yrs the world will realize crypto is far better prepared for it than the rest of the internet and finance. we've had a trillion dollar *irreversible* honey pot for a decade, producing a far more battletested system and adversarial security culture than pretty much anywhere else on earth.
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Zcash was built on conviction, cryptography and uncompromising discipline. Took time. No hype. Just math. Someone told me today: "If you told everyone at ZODL they wouldn't get paid for the next three months, they'd just say ok." It’s just how it is. All in. Onward.
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DC fined me $75 for littering after I put some things out for a bulk trash pickup my neighbor had arranged. The city actually collected the trash. As far as I know, I did nothing wrong. Still, I was perfectly happy to pay $75 rather than waste time fighting it. But the citation didn't even mention an online payment portal. When I asked ChatGPT how to deal with it, it found that the online filing portal appeared to be down for maintenance, but offered to submit an "admit with explanation" response by email. I said sure. It prepared the paperwork, attached the citation, and emailed the administrative hearings office. It was significantly easier than paying the fine. This is a fascinating reversal of the traditional asymmetry between citizens and government. The state has automated issuing fines, while citizens have had to manually navigate cumbersome appeals processes. AI makes responding almost frictionless. If everyone starts doing this, not as a protest but simply because it's easier, governments will face a deluge of procedurally valid responses where they previously collected revenue with little effort. Things are going to get interesting.
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The Founding Fathers would have owned Zcash. It's American values and the Bill of Rights encoded into money. 🇺🇸
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macs are for performative hipsters
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If you pick the wrong integrity crypto, your blockchain monetary system would break, but it can be rebuilt. If you pick the wrong secrecy crypto, people could actually die and you can’t bring them back
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This joker is a fraud. I hate this industry. So many zero sum. So many grifters. So many LARPers and mercenaries. So many grasping for power. So many self-seeking. Underneath the voices, there is something pure. Human agency. Best solution wins. It must. It will. Onward.
Rebrand Zcash to Ztracked.
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John retweeted
I refuse to call it a hardware wallet unless it can show me coin balances. Until then, I shall refer to them as signing devices
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The cypherpunks fought to make private communication over the internet possible. We're doing the same for money. ZODL founder Josh Swihart (@jswihart) on building a financial system without banks, live at Network State (@ns).
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For anyone who doesn’t know, Sean’s credentials as a world class cryptographer were conferred on him primarily by his work on zk-snarks in zcash, particularly by making them recursive, which is an incredible feat of both mathematics and engineering. He does not get enough credit for this, imo. If you believe in zec, thank Sean. Thank you Sean. 🫡
I think Justin Drake's latest alarmism/vagueposting is going to do a ton of damage in multiple ways. It's basically a huge self-own for their own advocacy work on quantum stuff. Threats from quantum/AI are real, and teams throughout this industry are making considered decisions about how to respond to those risks in a practical way, and to help their users navigate the uncertainty. Some of those teams have really good cryptographers with an excellent grasp on the decisions they can make, others have to take their cues from trusted experts. There are so many dimensions to optimize along! And due to the complexity involved, it's almost impossible to explain this stuff to non-cryptographers. Experts have to be cognizant of all this, and of their responsibility to be levelheaded. After the fog clears up and people learn from their cryptographer friends what is actually going on, they're going to discover this was (at best) an unintentional marketing stunt and a lot of trust will be lost. And nobody will really know what to do... This is a shame, because they are directionally correct. It actually meant something when they sounded the alarm before. They've just gradually descended into unhinged predictions without feedback to discourage it. Can anyone, I mean seriously anyone, justify this debacle? It permanently colors all the legitimate concerns/predictions about classical crypto going forward. By their own admission, there was no new information that drove this. I think Justin Drake should explain how he thought this was the right approach, even if he genuinely believed what he was saying. Baffling.
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I wasn’t going to comment since this is a really bad take IMO, but since it’s taken off I feel the need to. To my understanding, there is no evidence whatsoever pointing to a break of decades old hardness assumptions like elliptic curve cryptography. 1/n
Today I call upon the blockchain industry to calmly begin planning for "bunker mode". My personal recommendation is to set in motion a controlled mass migration of assets to fresh addresses, i.e. addresses whose pubkeys remain hidden behind a hash. Holders, starting with large and sophisticated ones, should consider moving the bulk of their funds to addresses that have never signed a transaction. And when they do sign one, they should also move remaining funds to a new address (possibly generated from the same seed phrase). Don't rush. While I believe there is cause for action a rushed migration would do more harm than good. Don't panic either. Moving assets to protected addresses is a simple, preventative step which does not require new cryptography or new wallets. IMO it is now reasonable to brace for the possibility that ECDSA breaks before qday, in the worst case in months not years. By "break" I mean fast private key recovery (e.g. in one week) on available hardware (e.g. a large GPU cluster). Recent days have been humbling for human mathematical intuition. Long-held, unquestioned hypotheses have fallen. This includes the n log(n) bound for integer multiplication and the 3SUM conjecture. In hindsight, May's unexpected disproof of the Erdős unit distance conjecture was our warning shot. Yesterday's OpenAI drop made it clear that mathematical superintelligence is upon us. They say there are weeks where decades happen. We are about to live through weeks where centuries of mathematical progress happen. Could our magic 64-byte ECDSA signatures be too good to be true? Was it just security through obscurity all this time? Elliptic curves feel especially vulnerable to superintelligence. Curves carry rich structure, with room for fancy tricks like Schoof, Frobenius, pairings. (By contrast, hashes are designed to minimise algebraic structure.) Separately, as Ewin Tang can attest, an efficient quantum algorithm sometimes foreshadows an efficient classical one. We should be open to the possibility of a classical counterpart to Shor that breaks elliptic curves and RSA at once. Also noteworthy is the striking under-representation of cryptographic breakthroughs among the 722 mathematical results OpenAI published. I've witnessed first-hand the US government censoring academic quantum cryptanalysis results. Backroom interventionism is my base case. I urge large, sophisticated actors to lead by example. Project11's "risq list" (bitcoin-risq-list.projecteleven[.]com) is a great tracker of exposed BTC pubkeys. Binance, Bitbank, Robinhood, Bitfinex, and Tether have an opportunity to harden their cold storage. Next month I'll address institutions in London in a live Q&A (forum.ethereuminstitutional[.]org/london-2026). Again, please do not rush. Wallets holding under 50 BTC enjoy partial cover from "Satoshi's shield", i.e. his 20K exposed addresses that hold 50 BTC each. Load-bearing signers like oracles and L2 security councils should consider rotating ECDSA pubkeys with every signed message and/or multi-signing with a hash-based schemes like SPHINCS. Exiting bunker mode safely will require post-AI cryptography. My inclination is to go all-in on hash-based cryptography and avoid structured mathematical assumptions entirely, whether from curves, lattices, or isogenies. A single battle-tested hash (e.g. from the SHA or BLAKE families) yields plausible post-AI security. The Ethereum roadmap on strawmap[.]org fully embraces hash-based cryptography with end-to-end formal verification as a response to the quantum threat. Those timelines must now be revisited and accelerated in light of mathematical superintelligence. I'll be pushing for maximum defensive acceleration.
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It's been a hard month for privacy and your right to use crypto. There's a bright spot. Two rules at Treasury that Coin Center has vehemently opposed over the last several years have been officially withdrawn. The "unhosted wallet rule" that would have made Coinbase and others collect information on people who are holding their own crypto is dead. The special measure for mixers rule that would have classified effectively every step you should take to secure your privacy when using crypto (like not reusing addresses) as a "primary money laundering risk" subject to enhanced surveillance at financial institutions is dead. This is good news and I'm happy that our work for several years to characterize these rules as bad policy and probably unconstistitutional has born fruit. That said, the underlying statutory authority to create new, similar bad rules remains. Our work is not done and won't be until we truly protect self-custody and legitimate privacy tools in law via Congress or the Courts. Thank you to all of those who have supported Coin Center's work, and thank you to those in Treasury who have come to understand why these rules were bad policy and should be abandoned. coincenter.org/treasury-just…
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Zodl has surpassed $1 billion in lifetime swap volume. Onward.
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The best way to add privacy to Bitcoin is to fork it and use zero knowledge proofs at the base layer That was launched 10 years ago It’s called Zcash
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🌲 Milestone Ironwood just crossed 4.00M ZEC. 89.4% of Orchard migrated. cipherscan.app/ironwood
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The "Shielded Bitcoin" paper is a great step forward. More privacy on Bitcoin is good for everyone. Fun fact: Zerocoin, the paper behind Zcash, was first proposed for Bitcoin in 2013. The Bitcoin community passed on it, as zero-knowledge proofs were still immature. But the solution the paper presents is not competition for Zcash: - It uses a trusted setup - There's no consensus enforcement - No trustless light clients - Its bridge, usually the most hacked part of these designs, isn't specified yet - Bitcoin L1 transaction fees - It doesn't have a >$7B shielded pool with millions of transactions to hide in - It's a paper. Zcash has ~10 years in production, pioneered ZK proofs in production, and has the wallets, audits, and hardware support. More broadly: privacy works best when built into the base layer. Not requiring Bitcoin changing is this design's biggest selling point, and also its biggest drawback. We're rooting for more privacy on Bitcoin. Financial privacy isn't zero-sum.
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John retweeted
Watch this. Let it sink in. And then watch it again.
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I'm back.
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This is the way. Assume all code has exploitable vulnerabilities, and it’s not possible to patch them before an adversary notices. What now? Systems designed around this assumption are the most secure, and it’s relevant now more than ever.
Replying to @logangraham
Start with assuming an invariant that all software an organization uses has exploitable vulnerabilities that their adversaries can exploit and that the organization cannot fix. Create security strategies and approaches around this as an axiom. Still also find, fix, patch anyway.
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