blockhunter

جوینده بلاک

[Henry Knight 2nd @ml_writer_guy2]

ترجمه: «مردم بیاین آواربرداری کنید اونایی که قرار بود تیر خلاص بهتون بزنن موندن زیر خاک.»

[joseph.eth @josephdelong]

My wife is Persian, my kids are Persian. My father in law was sentenced to death for political organizing by the Islamic Republic.

I don't care what you think tankie. 🇮🇷

[Henry Knight 2nd @ml_writer_guy2]

طرف رفته گفته ۱۱ تا بمب اتم میسازیم، تابلوی روزشمار نابودی اسراییل زده، حماس و حزب‌الله و حوثی و حشد‌الشعبی و طالبان رو ساپورت کرده و موشک پرونده، از آرژانتین تا استرالیا عملیات تروریستی کرده، ترامپ رو خواسته ترور کنه…
حالا که جنگ شده:
«دیاسپورای جنگ طلب ایرانی…»

[Pooya 🇮🇷🇺🇸🇺🇦 @i_am_pooya]

فراموش نکنیم: در شرایطی که رژیم حاضر است به مغز دهها (و در آینده شاید صدها) هزار ایرانی شلیک کند تا در قدرت بماند، مخالفت با حمله نظامی عملا معادل حمایت از بقای رژیم است

نگذاریم عده‌ای اصلاح‌طلبِ خجالتی زیر نقاب مخالفت با حمله نظامی مجددا در لحظه نیاز رژیم به بقای او کمک کنند

[Henry Knight 2nd @ml_writer_guy2]

همین دو هفته پیش خامنه‌ای گفت اون ۵۰ هزار نفر «به درک واصل شدن»…
الان لاشه شده داره میگنده…

[Henry Knight 2nd @ml_writer_guy2]

بی‌پدرهای بی‌بی‌سی فارسی بی پدر شدن…

[blockhunter @decryptoh]

یه روز خوب اومد ✌️

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

This is a good post on the impact of surveillance in Iran:

https://t.co/1kT3SrsCyO

It's worth reading.

IMO one mistake that freedom advocates often make is that we talk about privacy violation and surveillance as "dystopian", using the word as a semantic stop sign: we know it means "bad", we nod along, and don't really go further to clarify why it's bad. I worry that this approach is long-run unhealthy: when we criticize various companies and countries for being "dystopian" and stop there, then to someone who's not already in the same memeplex, it sounds like we're basically criticizing companies and countries for not complying with our culture's aesthetic preferences. Which is ... duh, companies and countries are *supposed* to not comply with each other's aesthetic preferences, that's the whole point of the "pluralism" thing.

What the above article makes clear so well is that "dystopian" surveillance is not bad because it's "dystopian", it's bad because it makes a concrete property of the world worse: the power balance between individual and state. Surveillance enables an outcome where basically everyone other than police and security forces has no opportunity whatsoever to challenge the political status quo without being punished. This means an outcome where a political regime can remain in power forever, without satisfying more than a very small coalition of people who have the eyes and the guns (now drones).

The Dictator's Handbook talks about "large coalition" and "small coalition" governments; large coalition governments are the ones that are more pro-human, because they, well, have to keep a large coalition happy. Small coalition ones are the really nasty ones. Here is the near-term dark outcome of dictatorship + automated warfare + surveillance: a regime can literally survive with a coalition of size 1, because an army of all-seeing eyes and robots can defeat the entire populace in battle if needed. In Iran, we see what *just* dictatorship with surveillance can do, once you add automated police, you get to the unholy trifecta.

I don't know of a good solution to this. Privacy technology, as well as more work on censorship-resistant internet (I think we should strive for at least basic-quality internet, eg. 1 Mbps, being a global human right outside the domain of nation-state sovereignty), can help somewhat to reduce the possibility of total government control. But what else?

---

BTW one implicit frame in the article I take some issue with is framing Iran + Russia + China as the unique antagonists (both in surveillance they do internally, and in the technology they export to other countries). They do a lot of dystopian shit of both types. However, Israeli and US tech companies, and undoubtedly tech companies from other Western nations, also do a lot of dystopian shit.

Perhaps one key difference between the surveillance described above, and the Western type, is:

* The surveillance in the above article is about exercising *great control over a medium area*: you can see everything, but it requires active participation of the government of the territory being surveilled.
* The Israeli / US / Western flavor is about exercising *medium control over a great area*: there are more limits to how much they can do, but their surveillance is global: they know what people are doing even in countries and territories they have no presence in.

The distinction is not absolute: Israeli surveillance backstops a lot of its human rights abuse in Palestine, US surveillance reinforces ICE abuses (see the recent article about Homeland Security demanding social media firms reveal names of anti-ICE protesters), etc, and "transnational repression" is done by anti-Western countries. But *on average*, the above seems to be the pattern.

The two are differently scary. The former for the reasons I described above. The latter because it allows global projection of power: a politician or civil servant in one country now has to worry about being blackmailed, droned or otherwise attacked from other countries. The USA has shown willingness to go after individual EU officials, ICC officials (see recent articles on both), and others. Ultimately, I suspect that even democratic governments will want more privacy to protect themselves, and we will have to have deep conversations about what "democratic accountability" means: how can a civil servant be accountable to the people, but not accountable to foreign spooks?

My high-level frame is: privacy generally helps whoever is weaker. "Weaker" does not mean "moral": sometimes the weaker side is criminal. But in the 21st century, we are at serious risk of stronger factions using modern technologies to establish unbreakable lock-in to power. And so on average, reducing the gradient of power, giving the weak a fighting chance, is something that the world desperately needs.

[Lex Fridman @lexfridman]

I stand with the people of Iran 👊❤️

I have a lot of Iranian friends, including my childhood best friend. Amazing people.

It's one of the great cultures and peoples in the history of the world.

Stay strong ❤️

[PachaPapa @pachapapaya]

چند نفر رو دیدم که کیف‌پولشون خالی شده. حتما اگر از اکستنشن کیف‌پول Trust Wallet استفاده میکنید سریع اونو آپدیت کنید و اطلاعیه‌های رسمی اکانتشونو بخونید. مراقبت کنید. ❤️

[blockhunter @decryptoh]

@pachapapaya عالی

[blockhunter @decryptoh]

@ml_writer_guy2 تلخ بود ولی دمت گرم هواشونو داشتی👍

[blockhunter @decryptoh]

@pachapapaya به به چه سفر خفنی. امیدوارم سرما زودی خوب شه و کلی عکس قشنگ باهامون به اشتراک بزاری😄

[blockhunter @decryptoh]

@metaproph3t No, it’s a mistake

[Nick Szabo @NickSzabo4]

Anarcho-capitalism is a wonderfully abstract ideal that can inspire innovation. It helped inspire me to help invent cryptocurrency.

But real-world cryptocurrencies are not trustless -- they are trust-minimized. Each cryptocurrency has a legal attack surface, representing the kinds of ways governments and/or private entities can practically use law to disrupt their operations. The layer 1 of a good trust-minimized cryptocurrency like Bitcoin can withstand much more interference than centralized technologies could or can, but the technology still has its limits.

The kinds of attacks that come from financial law have largely proven to be manageable, due to a combination of the trust-minimized (not trustless) technology, which requires diligent attention from developers motivated to keep it a trust-minimized form of money, and a large army of cryptocurrency industry lawyers who specialize in financial law.

The legal attack surface from arbitrary data is far larger and far less predictable. The crypto industry does not have the legal expertise to deal with it.

Thinking that Bitcoin, or any other cryptocurrency or blockchain protocol, is a magical anarcho-capitalist Swiss army knife that can withstand any kind of governmental attack in any legal area is insanity.

[blockhunter @decryptoh]

@benhoneill Is there a space to grow or saturated already?

[blockhunter @decryptoh]

This is low. Delete it !

[asanso @asanso]

Unsolicited advice to zero-knowledge system learners.

I’m a cryptographer, not a ZK specialist, who spent years lost in the Cambrian explosion of ZK systems. Every time I sat down to learn the new cool kid, say Plonk, an even cooler kid arrived, Halo or the next thing. Neighbor’s boat syndrome, theirs always looked bigger, faster, shinier. I hovered in a limbo, unsure where to invest serious time.

As an elliptic-curve lover, I bet on curve-based SNARKs. I even flirted with class groups, DARK, gorgeous math that never truly lifted off. With hindsight, that bet was misaligned with where the ecosystem’s pragmatics were headed.

What changed my mind was a mix of the post-quantum narrative hardening, you can debate timelines, not the direction, spectacular prover and performance gains on the STARK side driven by hash-centric designs and simple, scalable building blocks, and a maturing ecosystem around FRI and its descendants with cleaner recursion stories and increasingly friendly hardware paths.

Net result: STARKs, with FRI and its offspring (STIR, WHIR), have effectively ossified into the pragmatic default for many real-world pipelines today. Not the only game in town, but the clearest hill to climb first.

If I were starting now, and this is what I’m doing, I’d focus on the STARK stack first. Learn AIRs and how to turn computations into execution traces and constraints. Understand FRI and DEEP style low-degree testing and why it scales. Study recursion and composition patterns and why they feel cleaner with hash-based commitments. Get comfortable with hash-friendly arithmetic and lookup patterns. Invest in prover engineering such as memory layout, parallelization, field choices, commitment schemes, and profiling. And do not forget to (always) have fun

[blockhunter @decryptoh]

@anthonyyim @artemis @Kalshi Thank you 👍