joe xu

entrepreneur - building at - father of 3 (so far) - mbet @uwaterloo

[joe xu @JoeXuY]

@Molson_Hart For me the max pain is selling at bottom and watching it 10x later 😭

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Two weeks ago, Ethereum researchers met in Berlin to continue charting the protocol's long-term trajectory, following along discussions with client teams in Svalbard in April.

The updated strawmap is at https://t.co/9e2AQ6rhz6, and I attached a picture of it to this post.

My own high-level takeaways:

* "Lean Ethereum" is not a single one-shot upgrade, it is a collection of improvements that will come online to the Ethereum network over the course of three or four years. But make no mistake, this IS the third major iteration of Ethereum in the same way that the Merge was the second. Almost every major piece of the protocol will be replaced:

- Verification through recursive STARKs, rather than direct re-execution. Recursive STARKs become an enshrined first-class core component of the protocol
- Replacing everything quantum-vulnerable with quantum-safe alternatives
- Consensus: decoupled available chain and finality, one or two-round finality. Theoretically optimal security properties, simpler than today, and faster than today
- Multidimensional gas
- State: not just tree structure, but what *types* of state are available
- Changes to client architecture
...

At the same time, simplification, cleanup and future-proofing. And this will all be done in a way that minimizes disruption to existing application. We've done this before (the Merge), we can do it again.

* H-star (aka Hegota) is probably Ethereum's last thematically "pre-Lean" fork. Starting from I-star, most of everything we do will have a very strong "Lean" feel to it in one way or another.

* Privacy is no longer an afterthought, it is a first class goal. When designing Frames, the mempool, additions to the state tree, we explicitly ask the question "okay, how do quantum-safe, intermediary-free privacy protocol transactions go through this, and what is the overhead?"

* Formal verification of everything for security.

* FV also makes us much more comfortable with canonicalization (having pieces of the protocol that are directly defined as a piece of bytecode expressed in some language). evm-asm is being written in part to become a canonical proof system for the EVM.

* Quantum safety has shifted up a LOT in priority. This adds a lot of work (eg. finalizing a quantum-safe blobs design has become urgent; this work has already been ongoing for months)

* Probably the single most disruptive part of the plan is the changes to state. There is growing consensus around leaving present-day-style "dynamic state" mostly unchanged, but scaling it only a medium amount, and adding new types of state that are more scalability-friendly (eg. no need for builders to sync/store all of it) but more restrictive, and that will scale a large amount.

eg. possible Ethereum in 2030: 2 TB of present-day-style (dynamic) state, and 100 TB of new-style (scalable but restrictive) state

This "new-style" state would work very well for ERC20s, NFTs, many defi use cases, but not eg. highly "central" objects like Uniswap contracts, or onchain order books, or other complex things (which are crucial for Ethereum but which only take up a small percentage of state)

Hence, it will not be *necessary* to rewrite any apps, but it will be *very cost-effective* to eg. rewrite an ERC20 token into a newer design that uses a new type of UTXO storage that is currently being explored, so that it will have >10x lower txfees.

Design of these new state types (current ideas: keyed nonces, ring buffers, UTXOs, statically accessible state, temp state) is an area where we will need a lot of feedback from application developers (incl. privacy-friendly application developers) and probably several rounds of rethinking and iteration.

* In the context of a much larger total state size, we need to figure out the incentive issues around who stores this state and what motivates them to. Even saying "each node stores 1%" is not good enough - why do they store that 1% and why are they willing to serve it? This is being elevated as a first-class research area.

* Ethereum will need to have a "VM" other than EVM in one form or another - at the very least, we need something like leanISA for recursive STARKs - and the gains are large in exposing it to users so that we support programmable privacy and better scalability. Right now, the most likely contenders are leanISA and RISC-V.

My own ideal is that in this world, we adjust the protocol so that the EVM becomes a high-level-language compiler-level feature, and the protocol only "sees" RISC-V / leanISA directly. But this is still far away.

* Gas limit increases, blob increases and slot time decreases will happen many times over the next ~5 years. We expect a large gas limit increase with Glasterdam. Each step of increased scale or decreased slot time is a matter of getting to the point where it is safe to do it, which comes from a combination of client optimization and protocol changes.

Ethereum is CROPS.

Ethereum is scaling.

Ethereum is reinventing itself.

Onward.

[François Chollet @fchollet]

One way to live 400 years is to do (and experience) 5x more things per day

[Zara Zhang @zarazhangrui]

People are getting less willing to buy tools. If it's just a tool, they figure they can build it themselves with coding agents

What they'll pay for is the feeling of hiring expertise they don't have

[Tai Lopez @tailopez]

Alexander the Great was right. I did not conquer the world by listening to men who conquered nothing.

[Gary Vaynerchuk @garyvee]

You didn't waste your time. It was just part of your story.

[Ben South @bnj]

In 20 years there will be 5 jobs left:

Prostitute
Athlete
Politician
Priest
Entrepreneur

[Matt Paulson @MediaKing]

I remember when I was at $1M per year and thought I was a huge deal. 🤷‍♂️

And then I realized that my business could 25X and I’d still be considered a small business by the government.

Now I’m at $60-70 million and realize I’m not a big deal at all.

[Ben Cera @Bencera]

China will crash the US stock market this year.

They're dumping SOTA open-source models on the US, nearly as good as the frontier labs, basically free.

Nobody can refuse cutting a $100M AI bill down to $5M.

Once that deal is on the table for everyone, Anthropic and OpenAI can't justify their prices, or their valuations.

The bubble isn't AI. It's the price of AI. And it's about to pop.

[Yuchen Jin @Yuchenj_UW]

GLM-5.2 is the open-source Claude moment.

The demand we’re seeing at Databricks is astonishing. The world is going to see massive adoption of oss LLMs.

Also, more companies will shift toward post-training their own models on top of oss models and owning the weights.

[joe xu @JoeXuY]

@kevinxu Word

[Kevin Xu @kevinxu]

One way to measure success is the % of life experiences you've done that the human condition has to offer.

That requires a perfect balance of earning as much money as possible early in life and then spending it until the end.

I ballpark the perfect amount is $50M by 35.

[Sam Parr @thesamparr]

On MFM I asked Scott Galloway how much money it actually takes to feel economically secure. He gave me the formula and then his own number.

- Take what you need to be happy each year. Times it by 25. Assume a 4% post-tax return. That's your number.
- His own burn: $300k to $400k a month.
- $5m a year times 25 means he needs $125m to be economically secure.

He said in his 20s he thought if he ever saved $1m he was done, he'd start writing scripts for Tom Cruise movies. Then he found out how expensive kids, New York, and your own greed glands get.

[joe xu @JoeXuY]

@Molson_Hart @Seanfrank He did say buying homes (for mistresses duh)

[molson 🧠⚙️ @Molson_Hart]

@Seanfrank some big things that may be missing:

- mistresses
- in-house employees from assistants to security
- gambling
- protection money (lawsuits, hush money, political donations)
- kids private school

I'm sure there are other things

[joe xu @JoeXuY]

I really need $100m

[joe xu @JoeXuY]

@SparkingFIRENC What’s this
Net worth for ants?

[Manly Mentor @manly_mentor]

Major cheat code in life: ask for big unreasonable things. The universe will meet you at the level of your audacity.

[andrew engler @aerockrose]

Jeff Bezos explains the Wandering Rule behind real invention:

"When I sit down to work on a problem, I know I don't know where I'm going."

"To go in a straight line, to be efficient, efficiency and invention are sort of at odds."

"Real invention, not incremental improvement... real lateral thinking... requires wandering."

"You have to give yourself permission to wander."

"A lot of people feel like wandering is inefficient."

"I don't know how long the meeting is going to take if we're trying to solve a problem."

The useful distinction:

Use efficiency when the path is known.
Use wandering when the problem is still being discovered.

Most teams kill invention by demanding a straight line too early.

[scar @imfat]

every rich person i know shares 4 traits:

obsessed, disciplined, relentless, delusional