Dan Quach

[Hedgeye @Hedgeye]

China's Real Estate Market has erased all gains from the last 20 years

[Dan Go @CoachDanGo]

Your 90-year-old self would give anything to be where you are right now. Lift weights, walk, eat healthy, and sleep well. You are living your golden years right now. You're younger than you think you are. Don't waste it.

[Dear Son. @DearS_o_n]

Our biggest downfall as men, is that after you finally win, we sit down to eat with women who never starved with us.

[Rose TheArtist @rosethaaartist]

The fact Airbnb is losing revenue isn’t shocking to me . Once hosts started pricing the same or more than hotels didn’t make sense . I rather stay at the hotel with daily housekeeping and room service if that’s the case .

[DKB 🐉 @DragonKoiBoi]

Said this before and I’ll say it again.

In this hobby, you’ll meet some of the greatest, coolest human beings ever.

On the flip side of that, you can also meet some of the worst human beings ever.

You gotta take the good with the bad.

Beard dad is one of the good ones.

Careful, video gets blurry at the end 😭

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Some of my perspective on where the @ethereumfndn is going.

First of all, this is only my own view. The board is not just me, and I have no extra special powers on the board that the other board members do not. @aerugoettinea is the one executing much of this transition. My input has been largely on technical questions. The board is in the process of expanding, and my own power within the org will continue to decrease, which is honestly what I want.

The 2025 era brought many important improvements to EF and its ability to execute. Many issues were resolved, and EF continues to benefit from its improved efficiency and greater focus on concrete goals to this day. And so with those problems resolved, early this year, the largest remaining hole that I perceived was something different nagging at me: I would regularly spot people saying things like "vitalik says these beautiful things about ethereum needing to be decentralized, and have privacy, and be a sanctuary technology, but why do the EF's actions not reflect that?"

Now, you may have been hearing something different. You may not have been sensing a feeling of crisis at all, and maybe were hearing people saying that finally we were taking execution and BD seriously and the main task for us is to keep going that way and be even better and faster. Then probably there is genuine difference between you and me, in what kinds of criticism I take most seriously, and what kinds of critics through their criticism are most able to make me feel pain.

As an analogy, let's briefly switch over to a different domain.

One belief you can have about Google is that it is a success story, and has brought a lot of good to humanity in organizing the world's information. Another belief you can have about Google is that they had a beautiful idealistic beginning, but at some point the corruption of mainstream corporate attitudes seeped in, and they slowly bit by bit completely abandoned the "don't be evil" slogan.

My belief on Google specifically is probably somewhere between the two. BUT, if you had taken me back in time to ~2008, and offered me a button to press to make Google one or two standard deviations more "dogmatic", eg. give Richard Stallman permanent veto power over some key policies, I would immediately press it.

Why? Because a choice for one company is not a choice for the world, or even one country. Google existed and exists in the context of a technology industry generally drifting away from early idealistic don't-be-evil roots and toward greed for financial gain, totalizing visions of accelerated superintelligence, infiltration by sociopaths, and craven capitulation to (or worse, active participation in) government pressure for ideological control, surveillance and war. And so *one company* doing something different, positioning itself to be what George Bernard Shaw calls the Unreasonable Man, resisting the trend of the times, would have been better for freedom, balance of power and stability of society as a whole, than *all* large companies bending to dominant trends. This is a part of my version of pluralism.

This line of thinking is not just mine, but I also is not too far off from what Aya and others had in mind with the Mandate.

Now how does this all get to the role of the EF?

EF is not a "center of Ethereum", rather EF is "one node, with a defined purpose, alongside other nodes". We've always said that the EF should be the latter, but many in the Ethereum ecosystem (and even within the EF) wanted us to be the former. Now, we are taking action to ensure that we will be the latter.

This is particularly important because EF is a limited organization, with limited resources and limited organizational capacity. The EF has only ~0.16% of all ETH (less than many other individual ETH holders), whereas among other blockchains it's common for "the central foundation" to have 10-50%. Fiscally, the EF was originally designed to fulfill a limited work scope defined in the token sale docs and other pre-launch materials (building the chain software; getting through Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity), which was fully completed in 2022; it was not designed to be an eternal steward.

And so today, the EF is choosing to use its remaining resources to pursue longevity over breadth (yes, this means we sell less ETH). The EF focuses *specifically* on those activities critical to the success of ethereum as a censorship/capture-resistant, open, private and secure system, that would not happen otherwise. This means making hard choices, and in some cases even activities that we highly approve of and people that we highly respect becoming outside of the EF. People of great technical talent, public respect and even alignment with the mission and CROPS being outside of the EF is in fact necessary if we want important tasks to be able to attract outside capital. This also means the EF taking opinionated stands culturally.

This is all intended in cooperation with all other parts of ethereum. We recognize that many other parts of the ethereum world highly respect CROPS and related values. But highly respecting is not the same as choosing to specialize and totally dedicate to a domain (Compare in a different domain: I think reducing animal cruelty is important, and I like vegan food, but am not full unconditional vegan myself)

EF is still in a transition period, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize over the next few months. What are the guiding principles of this new form? Again, I am only one person, but I can give my answer from a technical perspective (there are also critical non-technical aspects).

At the core, *Ethereum must be impressive*. We are living in an age of highly intelligent AI and all kinds of other technological acceleration. "Status quo EVM, with a hard fork or two a year to optimize for short-term needs of users" is not interesting.

To some, "impressive" means: 250ms latency and 1M TPS. I think Ethereum trying to go that route is a mistake. Being as fast and as scalable as possible, and only a small epsilon more decentralized than the others, is a route to mediocrity, and if we try it we will lose.

I think Ethereum should scale. But I think Ethereum should strive the hardest to be deeply impressive in a different dimension: the CROPS dimension. This means things like:

* Provably bug-free Ethereum. This is a goal that all cybersecurity researchers would have thought is absurd and impossible, up until roughly 6 months ago. Now, it's on the cusp of being possible, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification. So we should be frontrunners in doing this.

* Available chain consensus. Ethereum is, and with lean consensus will cotninue to be, the ONLY chain that has both (i) traditional-BFT style properties that it's safe under asynchrony up to a high level of fault tolerance, and (ii) the bitcoin PoW-style property that under synchrony it's safe up to 49% attackers. As far as I can tell, literally no other chain has this or is planning for it; bitcoin goes for (ii) only and most other chains go for (i) only. Some will remember I fought hard for this, Unreasonably insisting that it is not OK for ethereum to rely on social consensus and hard forks to rescue ethereum from 34% of nodes going offline. It's OK for chains like hyperledger, bnb, solana, tempo, etc. It's not OK for bitcoin or ethereum or eg. zcash.

* Intermediary minimization. The fact that smart contract wallets, protocols like railgun, etc have to send transactions through intermediaries to get included onchain is honestly embarrassing, and it's a constant point of fragility. Hence the work on FOCIL and EIP-8141 (and 7701 and years of work before) to make transaction sending intermediary-minimized with public mempool and strong inclusion properties, in a truly general-purpose way, that covers not just eg. secp256r1, but also privacy protocols and much more. Kohaku is pushing intermediary minimization at the user layer, pulling Ethereum away from the dystopian status quo world where our wallets don't even verify the chain, send our private data out to a dozen third-party servers, and toward a brighter CROPS future.

Some of these goals are Unreasonable - maybe Ethereum would be "fine" getting only 50% of the way - what if we depend on intermediaries, but make it easy to switch? But going 50% of the way would not make Ethereum Deeply Impressive in the CROPS way. So we push for 100%.

Fortunately all these goals are compatible with high TPS, this is a major focus of research (esp. on scaling the state). Well-designed L2s can also help, especially L2s optimized for specific applications (eg. high-volume trading, privacy...). These goals are even compatible with significantly lower slot times, thanks to Raul's work on erasure-coded P2P, and many other optimizations.

The most high-value "product" of the ethereum blockchain, financially speaking, is ETH the asset. Ethereum secures $250 billion of ETH. The types of properties of Ethereum that I mentioned above are very good for ETH the asset. Nearly 90% of my net worth is in ETH, and most of the remainder is ~$40m of onchain fiat of which every dollar has already been allocated for some open-source biotech or software or hardware initiative. That said, there are aspects of supporting ETH the asset - *necessary* aspects even - that are outside the scope of the EF. This is where we need other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than the EF does) to step in and help. EF has been recently thinking more about how it will relate to other such organizations, and give them needed initial support.

EF will be a smaller ship than in previous years, a more opinionated one - in some cases more opinionated in ways that might be difficult to comprehend - but a longer-lasting one, and one suited to making sure that ethereum brings something meaningful to the world. We are grateful to all those inside and outside the EF who are helping to make this happen.

[SightBringer @_The_Prophet__]

⚡️Gen Z is living inside a broken time horizon.

That is the real issue.

A $28 lunch is obviously dumb if repeated daily. At the personal level, Kevin O’Leary is right. Small leaks become real holes. People who cannot control recurring expenses usually cannot build capital. Discipline still matters. The math still matters. Nobody gets exempt from compounding because the system is unfair.

But the reason the lecture feels hollow is because the old system used to reward discipline with visible progress. Pack lunch, save money, buy a house, start a family, invest, build a career, retire. Sacrifice was tied to a future that felt reachable.

Now the future feels priced out.

That changes behavior at the root. When housing feels unreachable, careers feel unstable, healthcare feels predatory, dating feels broken, children feel unaffordable, and AI threatens the entry-level ladder, thrift loses its sacred function. It stops feeling like a bridge to ownership and starts feeling like self-denial inside a game already lost.

That is how financial nihilism forms.

People do not say it directly. They say, “I deserve a little treat.” They say, “Everything is expensive anyway.” They say, “What’s the point?” They say, “I’ll never own a house.” They say, “At least lunch makes the day tolerable.”

The $28 lunch becomes a tiny rebellion against a future they do not believe will arrive.

That is why older personal-finance commentary keeps missing the emotional layer. The old advice assumes the listener still believes in delayed gratification. But delayed gratification only works when the delay has a credible endpoint. If the endpoint disappears, delayed gratification starts to feel like humiliation.

So young people consume the present because the future has stopped making a persuasive offer.

There is also a status layer. A lot of modern consumption is not about the object. It is about maintaining self-respect in a system where people feel economically powerless. Coffee, lunch, delivery, clothes, trips, subscriptions, gadgets, nightlife, little comforts. These become micro-status and micro-control. They let people feel briefly like participants in abundance even while their actual ownership path deteriorates.

That is the trap. The spending is both understandable and destructive.

The system damages the future, then sells little present-tense anesthetics to the people who lost faith in it.

Delivery apps, fast casual, lifestyle brands, streaming, subscriptions, social media, gambling, crypto speculation, “self-care,” buy-now-pay-later. All of it feeds on broken time preference. The more unreachable the future feels, the more valuable immediate relief becomes.

That is the real sickness.

A healthy civilization teaches young people: sacrifice now and something real becomes yours later.

A decaying civilization teaches young people: sacrifice now and maybe you still lose, so consume enough to keep functioning.

The $28 lunch is not why Gen Z is financially cooked.

It is what a cooked generation buys on its lunch break.

[BuccoCapital Bloke @buccocapital]

I can’t stop thinking about this post. If you do one thing today, I encourage you to give it a thoughtful, thorough read…

And then commit to never living your life this way. Life has wasted success on the people described in this post.

It really is completely pathetic. They say that comparison is the thief of joy - look no further than this post for validation it is indeed true.

On their deathbed they will realize they have lived their life completely wrong. Don’t let it be you.

[Hedgeye @Hedgeye]

🚨 China's Real Estate Market has erased all gains from the last 20 years

[Dalton (Analyze & Optimize) @Outdoctrination]

Ranking based on how much human evidence supports them:

Exercise: A+
Fiber: A
Vitamin D: A
Red light: A-
Magnesium: A-
Omega-3: A-
Probiotic: A-
NAC: B+
Vitamin C: B+
Creatine: B+
Melatonin: B+
CoQ10: B
NAD+ precursors: B
Glycine: B
Taurine: B-
Vitamin B1: C+
DHEA: C
Collagen: C-
Vinegar: C-
Desiccated thyroid: D
F: Greens powder
F: Alkaline water

Note: this is NOT a list of what you should or shouldn't do. This is simply a list on what has been researched to have benefits the most in humans.

[Max @minordissent]

This is literally the cause of like 80% of depression.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Agency > Intelligence

I had this intuitively wrong for decades, I think due to a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence, various entertainment/media, obsession with IQ etc. Agency is significantly more powerful and significantly more scarce. Are you hiring for agency? Are we educating for agency? Are you acting as if you had 10X agency?

Grok explanation is ~close:

“Agency, as a personality trait, refers to an individual's capacity to take initiative, make decisions, and exert control over their actions and environment. It’s about being proactive rather than reactive—someone with high agency doesn’t just let life happen to them; they shape it. Think of it as a blend of self-efficacy, determination, and a sense of ownership over one’s path.

People with strong agency tend to set goals and pursue them with confidence, even in the face of obstacles. They’re the type to say, “I’ll figure it out,” and then actually do it. On the flip side, someone low in agency might feel more like a passenger in their own life, waiting for external forces—like luck, other people, or circumstances—to dictate what happens next.

It’s not quite the same as assertiveness or ambition, though it can overlap. Agency is quieter, more internal—it’s the belief that you *can* act, paired with the will to follow through. Psychologists often tie it to concepts like locus of control: high-agency folks lean toward an internal locus, feeling they steer their fate, while low-agency folks might lean external, seeing life as something that happens *to* them.”

[George Mack @george__mack]

Rule of thumb: Fix hardware (sleep, exercise, diet) or power adapter (environment) before software (psychology). 95% of my software issues get fixed when I do this. And the remaining 5% is easier to debug.

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Naval Ravikant: “Networking is overrated… Do something great and your network will instantly emerge"

Naval offers the following advice to startup founders:

“Don’t spend your time doing meetings unless you really, really have to. I really think networking is overrated. There’s all these articles about how you’ve got to network more, and it makes me want to vomit.”

Instead he suggests:

“Go do something great and your network will instantly emerge. If you build a great product or if you get a good customer base, I guarantee you will get funded.”

Recruiting (customers and employees) and learning from really smart people are two exceptions. But don’t worry about building relationships with VCs or going to conferences early on. Just focus on your product, your team, and your users.

[Swingtrader @Swingtrader]

Brilliant article by @profplum99 - I don’t think this could have been articulated anyway possibly better.

https://t.co/UpG6MwvmiM

[Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent @SecScottBessent]

17 years after the white paper, the Bitcoin network is still operational and more resilient than ever. Bitcoin never shuts down.

@SenateDems could learn something from that.

[jack @jack]

yes

[Daily Stoic @dailystoic]

How to overcome anxiety:

[Daily Stoic @dailystoic]

One of the most powerful passages in Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations":

[Robert ₿reedlove @Breedlove22]

😂😂😂