I was recently at Real World Crypto (that's crypto as in cryptography) and the associated side events, and one thing that struck me was that it was a clarifying experience in terms of understanding *what blockchains are for*.
We blockchain people (myself included) often have a tendency to start off from the perspective that we are Ethereum, and therefore we need to go around and find use cases for Ethereum - and generate arguments for why sticking Ethereum into all kinds of places is beneficial.
But recently I have been thinking from a different perspective. For a moment, let us forget that we are "the Ethereum community". Rather, we are maintainers of the Ethereum tool, and members of the {CROPS (censorship-resistant, open-source, private, secure) tech | sanctuary tech | non-corposlop tech | d/acc | ...} community. Going in with zero attachment to Ethereum specifically, and entering a context (like RWC) where there are people with in-principle aligned values but no blockchain baggage, can we re-derive from zero in what places Ethereum adds the most value?
From attending the events, the first answer that comes up is actually not what you think. It's not smart contracts, it's not even payments. It's what cryptographers call a "public bulletin board".
See, lots of cryptographic protocols - including secure online voting, secure software and website version control, certificate revocation... - all require some publicly writable and readable place where people can post blobs of data. This does not require any computation functionality. In fact, it does not directly require money - though it does _indirectly_ require money, because if you want permissionless anti-spam it has to be economic. The only thing it _fundamentally_ requires is data availability.
And it just so happened that Ethereum recently did an upgrade (PeerDAS) to increase the amount of data availability it provides by 2.3x, with a path to going another 10-100x higher!
Next, payments. Many protocols require payments for many reasons. Some things need to be charged for to reduce spam. Other things because they are services provided by someone who expends resources and needs to be compensated. If you want a permissionless API that does not get spammed to death, you need payments. And Ethereum + ZK payment channels (eg. https://t.co/1Q2Hqg0DZg ) is one of the best payment systems for APIs you can come up with.
If you are making a private and secure application (eg. a messenger, or many other things), and you do not want to let people to spam the system by creating a million accounts and then uploading a gigabyte-sized video on each one, you need sybil resistance, and if you care about security and privacy, you really should care about permissionless participation (ie. don't have mandatory phone number dependency). ETH payment as anti-sybil tool is a natural backstop in such use cases.
Finally, smart contracts. One major use case is _security deposits_: ETH put into lockboxes that provably get destroyed if a proof is submitted that the owner violated some protocol rule. Another is actually implementing things like ZK payment channels. A third is making it easy to have pointers to "digital objects" that represent some socially defined external entity (not necessarily an RWA!), and for those pointers to interact with each other.
*Technically*, for every use case other than use cases handling ETH itself, the smart contracts are "just a convenience": you could just use the chain as a bulletin board, and use ZK-SNARKs to provide the results of any computations over it. But in practice, standardizing such things is hard, and you get the most interoperability if you just take the same mechanism that enables programs to control ETH, and let other digital objects use it too.
And from here, we start getting into a huge number of potential applications, including all of the things happening in defi.
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So yes, Ethereum has a lot of value, that you can see from first principles if you take a step back and see it purely as a technical tool: global shared memory.
I suspect that a big bottleneck to seeing more of this kind of usage is that the world has not yet updated to the fact that we are no longer in 2020-22, fees are now extremely low, and we have a much stronger scaling roadmap to make sure that they will continue to stay low, even if much higher levels of usage return. Infrastructure for not exposing fee volatility to users is much more mature (eg. one way to do this for many use cases is to just operate a blob publisher).
Ethereum blobs as a bulletin board, ETH as an asset and universal-backup means of payment, and Ethereum smart contracts as a shared programming layer, all make total sense as part of a decentralized, private and secure open source software stack. But we should continue to improve the Ethereum protocol and infrastructure so that it's actually effective in all of these situations.
@humansoul@yososocial i will choose cricket as my fav category
Will we see hat trick in this t20 world cup?
because it's unique and I didn't see any this question.
“A censorship machine and surveillance backdoor installed within all of your messaging applications.”
@TuckerCarlson reacts to a shocking new censorship law put in place in the name of protecting child exploitation.
“The people engaged in exploiting the children, and committing serial acts of terror against their own population, they’re all very concerned.”
Watch:
"The great disappointment of the last ten years for me is that crypto transactions don't seem to be as private or beyond government control as I thought it would be." - Tucker Carlson
The missing piece for crypto is privacy.
Breaking 👀☂️
Arcium ☂️ Gated RTGs is not live!!!
What Are the "Gated" Arcium RTGs?
The directory has a dedicated Gated section (all currently off chain and active).
These are exclusive opportunities reserved for the most dedicated early contributors specifically users who qualified in Wave 1 and received the "Esteemed" role in the official Arcium Discord.
Examples include high level tasks like <Encrypted> Counsel (strategic feedback and ideas from those who know the project best).
The Esteemed role also unlocks other perks and "gated mainnet alpha" access on the RTG platform. Gated RTGs are explicitly for the project's strongest, longest-aligned community members. @Arcium
How to Position for RTGs (Including Gated Ones)RTGs reward sustained, verifiable impact over time not one-off actions.
Here's the practical playbook:Check your current status immediately
Go to https://t.co/iisBiwq6iz
→ connect Discord + Solana wallet. If you see Wave 1 eligibility
→ you should have the Esteemed role
→ full access to gated RTGs.
If ineligible in Wave 1
→ Wave 2+ is still open.
For Gated RTGs (highest tier access) You generally need the Esteemed role (tied to Wave 1 eligibility).
If you missed Wave 1, focus on Wave 2 by maximizing visibility of your contributions now (see below).
The team has indicated gated opportunities will continue to open for top community members.
General positioning (open RTGs + future waves) Stay highly active in Discord ("Under the Umbrella" program, missions, adventures, calls, helping others).
Complete listed RTG tasks in the directory:
Developers → Build private perps, blind auctions, tools, or apps on Arcium (Mainnet Alpha is live ship real things).
Ecosystem/Community → Create content/translations in your language, document use cases, give feedback, run local events, etc.
On-chain actions → Connect multiple wallets (increases claim strength for eligible users) and interact with the network.
Build real value → Launch infrastructure, provide critical product feedback, create meaningful utilities, or champion the "encrypted supercomputer" vision.
Be consistent because The system uses manual reviews, AI detection, and pattern analysis to filter sybils,
Note; Multiple waves are coming ongoing high quality contributions can still qualify you for later announcements.
Claims happen at TGE (details TBA).
Read the official disclaimers on the RTG site — nothing is guaranteed.
Gmpcccccc ☂️👀
The most advanced tech in crypto isn't about:
❌ Faster transactions
❌ More storage
❌ Better memory
It's about ✅ STRATEGIC FORGETTING
Arcium isn't just encrypted computing
It's the internet learning to forget.
THE FORGETTING MACHINE
What if I told you the most revolutionary technology isn't about remembering everything...
It's about forgetting at exactly the right moment? 🧠
A thread on why @Arcium is building the internet's first "selective amnesia" 👇
THIS IS REAL WORLD MAGIC:
Healthcare: AI diagnoses you, forgets your medical history instantly
Finance: DeFi processes your trade, never knows your balance
AI: Model learns from your data, never stores it
The computation happens
The knowledge stays with YOU