Nikita Zhavoronkov

Jack of All Trades @Blockchair ⤶
Chief Troll Officer @Trollbox ⤶
Goodies: · ·

[Nikita Zhavoronkov @nikzh]

Excited to launch https://t.co/F8GSKfGDP5 — a tracker for leading privacy cryptos that ranks them by total shielded supply rather than plain market cap.

Featuring @monero 🥇, @Zcash (3 shielded pools) 🥈, @zano_project 🥉, @PirateChain, and @litecoin (MWEB). More to come! 🔒

[Nikita Zhavoronkov @nikzh]

@NomadDotBTC @Pledditor Yet for some reason almost everyone uses some custodial wallet. If "anyone" started to really use Lightning, there would not be enough on-chain space to use it in a non-custodial way.

[Nikita Zhavoronkov @nikzh]

@NomadDotBTC @Pledditor Centralized and custodial, actually.

[Nikita Zhavoronkov @nikzh]

@AMoneroHodler @Pledditor 99.99 of the Lightning Network are some custodial wallets that can freeze you on a whim. As for the rest, good luck trying to transact there with a 100 mil lol.

[Nikita Zhavoronkov @nikzh]

As I've said multiple times (https://t.co/cMTTXF7oxP, https://t.co/pBPqimza0r, https://t.co/OXb63boSmg, and so on), these "security councils" can and will unilaterally expropriate user funds. Make no mistake: L2s are centralized custodial services.

[Arbitrum @arbitrum]

The Arbitrum Security Council has taken emergency action to freeze the 30,766 ETH being held in the address on Arbitrum One that is connected to the KelpDAO exploit. The Security Council acted with input from law enforcement as to the exploiter’s identity, and, at all times, weighed its commitment to the security and integrity of the Arbitrum community without impacting any Arbitrum users or applications.

After significant technical diligence and deliberation, the Security Council identified and executed a technical approach to move funds to safety without affecting any other chain state or Arbitrum users.

As of April 20 11:26pm ET the funds have been successfully transferred to an intermediary frozen wallet. They are no longer accessible to the address that originally held the funds, and can only be moved by further action by Arbitrum governance, which will be coordinated with relevant parties.

[Nikita Zhavoronkov @nikzh]

So the budget for fooling the uninformed noobs has dried out, and now, instead of pretending to be "progressing" towards "Stage 2", these L2s are unashamedly downgrading to "Stage 0" 🤪

[Scroll @Scroll_ZKP]

Today we'd like to announce an important proposal regarding Scroll's protocol and governance operations.

We're proposing to dissolve the Security Council and transition protocol admin control to a Scroll Admin multisig. We expect the transition to take place over the next ten days.

The council's cost relative to its actual usage over the past quarters no longer justified continuation. These resources are better directed toward building products and driving growth.

We've carefully weighed the security considerations that come with this change and are confident this is the most responsible allocation of resources at this stage. Security councils play an important role in the maturity of any protocol and that's why we will be working with key stakeholders to identify a new security council structure better adapted to current market conditions.

Our infrastructure is mature, thoroughly audited, and actively maintained by the engineering team that built it.

Scroll will continue operating under the highest security standards to safeguard users.

[Nikita Zhavoronkov @nikzh]

@bellweirboy Not a coincidence. Especially considering that first they were blocking scaling, and now they're trying to make everyone to procrastinate on quantum…

[Nikita Zhavoronkov @nikzh]

Satoshi was a brilliant man, but he made two mistakes that have crippled his creation:

1. Imposed a "temporary" block size limit.

2. Mentioned Adam "Andy" Back, a copycat who allegedly went to the you-know-what island, in the whitepaper instead of the true PoW inventors: Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor.

The limit became a technical loophole that is being exploited by parties that want to ruin Bitcoin, including The New York Times which is peddling this "expert" who has built his fortune on the limit.

Not only has Bitcoin not scaled to meet the transactional demand because of that, its security is also failing because of the diminishing security budget and the downplaying of quantum risk.

[The New York Times @nytimes]

Bitcoin’s founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, has remained hidden for 17 years. A trail of clues — and a year of digging by our reporter, John Carreyrou — led us to a 55-year-old computer scientist in El Salvador named Adam Back. https://t.co/s6Jy00IDdk

[Nikita Zhavoronkov @nikzh]

@bramk It's obviously about ideas, not copying some texts directly.

[Nikita Zhavoronkov @nikzh]

@Pran10000 @genzforreadonly That's why SPV exists and it's mentioned in the very same letter. D'oh! Ordinary users are not supposed to be running nodes.

[Nikita Zhavoronkov @nikzh]

@ninshim Yes, it's better to have more transactions paying 1 satoshi per byte than fewer. The "fee market" is a fairy tale.

[Nikita Zhavoronkov @nikzh]

Fake news.

Just as with all other BitVM-like gibberish, it has produced a nice headline, but in practice, it's totally unusable: 10 kB non-standard transactions that cost $100 and take hours just to calculate?

And this will be used as an excuse not to make actual progress… 🤷‍♂️

[Avihu Levy ✨🐺 @avihu28]

Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Transactions Without Softforks

https://t.co/1lx5waX9VV

[Nikita Zhavoronkov @nikzh]

@nytimes Stop with this nonsense, he hasn't even invented PoW: https://t.co/ttj1z5T84e

[Nikita Zhavoronkov @nikzh]

Satoshi was a brilliant man, but he made two mistakes that have crippled his creation:

1. Imposed a "temporary" block size limit.

2. Mentioned Adam "Andy" Back, a copycat who allegedly went to the you-know-what island, in the whitepaper instead of the true PoW inventors: Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor.

The limit became a technical loophole that is being exploited by parties that want to ruin Bitcoin, including The New York Times which is peddling this "expert" who has built his fortune on the limit.

Not only has Bitcoin not scaled to meet the transactional demand because of that, its security is also failing because of the diminishing security budget and the downplaying of quantum risk.

[Nikita Zhavoronkov @nikzh]

@SteveSimple @OrangeSurfBTC Every single upgrade to Bitcoin since 2015 (CLTV and the following) has been a mistake. Especially SegWit.

[Nikita Zhavoronkov @nikzh]

@phmay_sg @ParvizMalakouti @patienceisalpha @stkittsnevisciu @imidaily The problem here is not with St. Kitts in particular. It's just another bill that separates citizens into classes: economic and naturalized citizens are becoming more and more second-class citizens compared to citizens by birth.

[Nikita Zhavoronkov @nikzh]

@TheDesertLynx But did @cakewallet really have any "sunk costs" wrt Lightning? 🤷‍♂️

[Nikita Zhavoronkov @nikzh]

It's incredibly sad to see smart and genuine people still wasting so much of their time on a technology that is fundamentally broken.

I'd have even understood building something for Lightning in 2016, but in 2026… No matter how hard you try, it turns out to be custodial.

[Seth For Privacy @sethforprivacy]

With the launch of Lightning in @cakewallet, it felt like the perfect time for me to go back in time through my journey with Lightning and see how I ended up here.

If you had asked me 5y ago if I'd be shipping Lightning to 1M+ people, I'd have thought you were insane.

[Nikita Zhavoronkov @nikzh]

As someone who runs explorers for a living, I can only say that when you spam your own chain to impress investors with "Monthly Active Users", it's a headache for everyone else. Most of these "super popular" chains (especially L2s) are ghost towns.

[Lefteris Karapetsas @LefterisJP]

Why is @base hard to index and why are indexers and explorers dropping its support?

Oh ... I don't ... know maybe the sheer size of the spam in it?

[Nikita Zhavoronkov @nikzh]

@notgrubles And you've obviously failed because the current "fee market" is what? 0.1 sat per byte? 🤷‍♂️

Perhaps we need to go to 100 kB instead of 1 MB! 🤔