Marco (∎, ∆)

Scaling @zksync | Executive Director at ZKsync Foundation

[Marco (∎, ∆) @Be1garat]

Why Crypto? For me:

From Paternalistic to Independent

From Entitled to Empowered

From Subject to Sovereign

From Duties to Incentives

From Passive to Active

From Rights to Powers

From Obey to Enforce

From Trust to Verify

[Sam Hogan 🇺🇸 @samhogan]

We're releasing Inference AutoTune

Distill any frontier model into a 1-30B parameter task-specific SLM with only 25 lines of code

automatically route requests to reduce cost and latency by >90%

~2 hours and <$250 to train. You own the weights

Available in private beta today

[Marco (∎, ∆) @Be1garat]

@ercwl The "Wall Effect"?

[Marco (∎, ∆) @Be1garat]

100%

I'm a foreigner and have been living in Singapore for 13 years.

There is no other country that compares. Not even close.

It's not romantic to have beggars in the street or people breaking into your car or home. It's not romantic to have to do 5 floor walkups or have massive traffic to move around or overpriced taxis. It's not romantic to not have AC nor have functioning uber or a functioning airport. It's not romantic to wait 6 months for a Tac or spending 20bn to not being able to build a railroad. It's not romantic to have strikes all the time. It's not romantic to have incompetent public administration who does not seem to understand that they are your employee and are not making you a favour. And it's not romantic to pay 50-60% tax for all these "privileges".

Singapore is the best.

You want to see the Louvre or the Uffizi? You want to go to the mediterrean? You want to go to the Lincoln Center? You can fly and experience these and then go back to Singapore where day to day stuff works.

[Felix Lee @felixleezd]

Singaporeans are romanticizing every country except their own.

And it's the dumbest trade in the world. You're trading the best functioning city on earth for a Netflix version of America that doesn't exist.

I'm Singaporean. I grew up in Singapore and now live in San Francisco for @ADPList. And my friends who moved to London, Melbourne, NYC. I love them, but here's what's actually happening over there. SF's single bedroom will cost $4k a month. Melbourne is great if you like waiting forty minutes for a tram that's late. NYC is a hundred dollars before you've even left the apartment.

Meanwhile in SG, you tap on the MRT. The next train is in two minutes. You eat a Michelin meal for $6 at a hawker. You walk home at 2am and it's safer than most cities at noon. Healthcare works. The government replies to your email.

And here's what nobody wants to say out loud.

The reason Singaporeans romanticize abroad isn't because abroad is better. It's because Singapore works so well that we forgot to be impressed by it. We confused "boring" with "functioning." We thought sterile meant soulless. But every country I've been to would kill to have what Singapore made normal.

You don't need to move to SF/NYC to feel alive. Go to Geylang at midnight. Take the bumboat to Pulau Ubin. Eat at a kopitiam down your HDB.

You're romanticizing the wrong country. It's the one you're in.

[Vivek Sen @Vivek4real_]

PALANTIR CTO:

“FOR $10 BILLION, ELON MUSK PUT 300 ROCKETS IN ORBIT.”

“FOR $11 BILLION, THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA HAS BUILT 1,600 FEET OF ELEVATED RAIL...

WITH NO RAIL.”

[Michael Pettis @michaelxpettis]

4/5
The problem is that businesses are unwilling to invest. A recent ECB study suggests that the main reason by far for their unwillingness to invest is lack of demand, followed by low profitability, other regulatory and administrative burdens, and labour costs.
https://t.co/OpErTsvaPq

[Michael Pettis @michaelxpettis]

4/4
But I disagree that the problem has to do with "financialization", except to the extent that it leads to declining competitiveness (and it usually does). The real problem is the declining competitiveness that results from mercantilist policies abroad.
https://t.co/qer7BAuIxE

[Lefteris Karapetsas @LefterisJP]

🙍Europeans: We need to become competitive. We need to be able to have our own local tech sector, our own AI industry and encourage enterpreneurship.

🇪🇺EU: I hear you ... but how about we just scan all your private messages, images and media without needing a warrant instead?

[Aurea @AureaLibe]

Je lance l’initiative Exit Chat Control.

https://t.co/GCt0vLw7YF

Ce site est un guide complet qui vise à répertorier tous les outils nécessaires pour contourner tout système de surveillance de vos messageries privées.

Le site est open source et sera amélioré en continu.

[Marco (∎, ∆) @Be1garat]

@LionTV_crypto This is my thesis

As long as:
- there will be competing groups
- they will want to trade with each other
- they will not want to cede sovereignty to a new intermediary
- they will not want to fully standardize

Then I cannot see any other solution

[Marco (∎, ∆) @Be1garat]

https://t.co/0lZQNXYiWt

[ZKsync @zksync]

America has 4,000+ community banks financing homes, small businesses and local infrastructure.

A few weeks ago we published The Little Banking Agenda.

The real question isn't Banks vs. Crypto. It's whether every American bank gets to compete in the digital economy.

[ZKsync @zksync]

📣ICYMI: Private Atomic DvP on Prividiums is here.

We broke the full flow into seven steps, from agreement to settlement, including the expiry safety net if a side never locks.

[ZKsync @zksync]

"Cari immediately stood out as a project because it connected multiple banks and had a vision for an ever expanding network."

@gluk64 on @carinetwork vision to bring together banks of all sizes on a shared tokenized deposits network powered by Prividium.

[_gabrielShapir0 @lex_node]

to the surprise of no one except those who shilled them (maybe not even them) it turns out special magic smart contract languages developed by Facebook or a stablecoin chain do not guarantee security . . .

[Marco (∎, ∆) @Be1garat]

@VivekVentures @zksync @ethereum

[Marco (∎, ∆) @Be1garat]

This is a big deal for bank adoption of crypto.

Prob the largest enterprise network which is using crypto for real at the moment.

And real adoption is choosing @zksync

[ZKsync @zksync]

📌 JUST IN: Cari Joins @ABABankers Premier Partner Network & Grows to +30 Institutions

Congratulations to our partner @carinetwork for expanding participation representing a total network and pipeline of Institutions with more than $10 trillion in combined assets.

[Marco (∎, ∆) @Be1garat]

@ViktorBunin It's the litterally meaning of proletariat too so they should like it

[Marco (∎, ∆) @Be1garat]

With blockchain we actually have a tool to do this at global scale

[Handre @Handre]

New England 1818 to 1858.

The Suffolk Bank of Boston did what the Federal Reserve claims only a government monopoly can do. It cleared notes. It disciplined reckless issuers. It kept paper trading at par across six states. No congressional charter for the system, no lender of last resort, no taxpayer backstop.

Here is how it ran. Country banks flooded Boston with their notes, and those notes traded at a discount because nobody trusted redemption. Suffolk fixed that by demanding a permanent deposit, then clearing your notes at face value. Refuse to join, and Suffolk collected your paper and marched to your counter demanding gold. That threat kept your reserves honest.

By 1825 Suffolk cleared notes for hundreds of New England banks. Redemptions ran into the hundreds of millions annually by the 1850s. Discounts on country money vanished. A private firm enforced sound money through the simple mechanism of demanding specie on demand.

Then the villain showed up. Rival banks and legislators hated the discipline. After the National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864, the federal government taxed state bank notes out of existence and centralized clearing under its own thumb.

They killed a working system to build a monopoly.

Private clearing outperforms the Fed. New England already proved it. But you were taught something else.

[Marco (∎, ∆) @Be1garat]

Yes but this is not the same as deflating the bubble (let alone avoiding the damages of having had a bubble in the first place).

Why?

Because the empty buildings remain, the ghost cities remain. The damages to the Chinese economy remain, maybe further damages have been mitigated but the system is keeping all the issues created so far.

Let's hope this treated the disease and not only the symptoms but in any case the scars will remain for a long time.

[Pubity @pubity]

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

Housing prices are expected to fall even further, in line with the Chinese policy that "houses are for living, not for speculation".

[Marco (∎, ∆) @Be1garat]

"You cannot subsidize your way to wealth. You cannot redistribute what you never let people produce."

[Handre @Handre]

Two countries split from the same colonial body in 1965. One picked economic freedom. The other picked handouts and racial spoils. You already know how this ended.

Singapore had no oil, no farmland, no hinterland. Just a swamp and a port. Lee Kuan Yew looked at that and trusted trade, low taxes, and hard money. Central planners hate what he did.

Malaysia went the other way. In 1971 Kuala Lumpur launched the New Economic Policy, a state program handing quotas, contracts, and university seats to ethnic Malays. Politicians decided who got what. A commissar fantasy dressed in liberal language.

Now let's look at the numbers. In 1965 both places sat around $500 per capita. Today Singapore clears $84,000. Malaysia sits near $13,000. Same climate, same starting line, one sixth the result.

The Singapore dollar holds its value because the Monetary Authority of Singapore manages it against a currency basket and refuses to print its way out of trouble. The ringgit has lost roughly two thirds of its value against the Singapore dollar since 1981.

You cannot subsidize your way to wealth. You cannot redistribute what you never let people produce. Every ringgit funneled through a quota is a ringgit some bureaucrat spent on his own vision instead of a customer's.

Malaysia bet on planners deciding outcomes. Singapore bet on people deciding for themselves. The gap between $84,000 and $13,000 is your answer.