Mark Simkin

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Over the past year, many people I talk to have expressed worry about two topics:

* Various aspects of the way the world is going: government control and surveillance, wars, corporate power and surveillance, tech enshittification / corposlop, social media becoming a memetic warzone, AI and how it interplays with all of the above...
* The brute reality that Ethereum seems to be absent from meaningfully improving the lives of people subject to these things, even on the dimensions we deeply care about (eg. freedom, privacy, security of digital life, community self-organization)

It is easy to bond over the first, to commiserate over the fact that beauty and good in the world seems to be receding and darkness advancing, and uncaring powerful people in high places are making this happen. But ultimately, it is easy to acknowledge problems, the hard thing is actually shining a light forward, coming up with a concrete plan that makes the situation better.

The second has been weighing heavily on my mind, and on the minds of many of our brightest and most idealistic Ethereans. I personally never felt any upset or fear when political memecoins went on Solana, or various zero-sum gambling applications go on whatever 250 millisecond block chain strikes their fancy. But it *does* weigh on me that, through all of the various low-grade online memetic wars, international overreaches of corporate and government power, and other issues of the last few years, Ethereum has been playing a very limited role in making people's lives better. What *are* the liberating technologies? Starlink is the most obvious one. Locally-running open-weights LLMs are another. Signal is a third. Community Notes is a fourth, tackling the problem from a different angle.

One response is to say "stop dreaming big, we need to hunker down and accept that finance is our lane and laser-focus on that". But this is ultimately hollow. Financial freedom and security is critical. But it seems obvious that, while adding a perfectly free and open and sovereign and debasement-proof financial system would fix some things, but it would leave the bulk of our deep worries about the world unaddressed. It's okay for individuals to laser-focus on finance, but we need to be part of some greater whole that has things to say about the other problems too.

At the same time, Ethereum cannot fix the world. Ethereum is the "wrong-shaped tool" for that: beyond a certain point, "fixing the world" implies a form of power projection that is more like a centralized political entity than like a decentralized technology community.

So what can we do? I think that we in Ethereum should conceptualize ourselves as being part of an ecosystem building "sanctuary technologies": free open-source technologies that let people live, work, talk to each other, manage risk and build wealth, and collaborate on shared goals, in a way that optimizes for robustness to outside pressures.

The goal is not to remake the world in Ethereum's image, where all finance is disintermediated, all governance happens through DAOs, and everyone gets a blockchain-based UBI delivered straight to their social-recovery wallet. The goal is the opposite: it's de-totalization. It's to reduce the stakes of the war in heaven by preventing the winner from having total victory (ie. total control over other human beings), and preventing the loser from suffering total defeat. To create digital islands of stability in a chaotic era. To enable interdependence that cannot be weaponized.

Ethereum's role is to create "digital space" where different entities can cooperate and interact. Communications channels enable interaction, but communication channels are not "space": they do not let you create single unique objects that canonically represent some social arrangement that changes over time. Money is one important example. Multisigs that can change their members, showing persistence exceeding that of any one person or one public key, are another. Various market and governance structures are a third. There are more.

I think now is the time to double down, with greater clarity. Do not try to be Apple or Google, seeing crypto as a tech sector that enables efficiency or shininess. Instead, build our part of the sanctuary tech ecosystem - the "shared digital space with no owner" that enables both open finance and much more. More actively build toward a full-stack ecosystem: both upward to the wallet and application layer (incl AI as interface) and downward to the OS, hardware, even physical/bio security levels.

Ultimately, tech is worthless without users. But look for users, both individual and institutional, for whom sanctuary tech is exactly the thing they need. Optimize payments, defi, decentralized social, and other applications precisely for those users, and those goals, which centralized tech will not serve. We have many allies, including many outside of "crypto". It's time we work together with an open mind and move forward.

[Mark Simkin @Simk1n]

@phildaian @VitalikButerin (2) When things go wrong, all (honest) clients prove in zero-knowledge that their messages in the failed protocol execution were well-formed. The malicious client could not do that. Even if proving it takes more time, it's probably ok.

[Mark Simkin @Simk1n]

@phildaian @VitalikButerin (1) When things go wrong, all clients open all their secrets and internal random coins to show that their messages were well-formed. This is surely a privacy issue, because a DoS attack should not de-anonymize message senders.

[Mark Simkin @Simk1n]

@phildaian @VitalikButerin Out of the box, the current design would not directly allow you to determine _which_ client broke their TEE to send a malformed message that jams the communication channel. However, it seems plausible that you could add such a functionality.
Two potential directions:

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Excited to see this!

Network-layer anonymity has been a missing piece of all the privacy primitives we've been building - both the onchain stuff (eg. railgun) and the offchain stuff (eg. the ZK API tickets)

And there's a significant space of applications where the bandwidth reqs are small but latency matters a lot, so having something on the low-latency high-anonset side of the triangle matters a lot.

[🤖 @phildaian]

🌘 CRYPTO IS GOING 🅳🅐🆁🅺 🌒

https://t.co/f0sGNMoqSq

[🤖 @phildaian]

yesterday's election was a neon signal to crypto

making the bed with fascists is a clear losing, industry killing strategy. if this is what we associate with, the backlash will be extreme, regardless of the technology

let us show the world this is a small corrupt minority only

[Angus Gruen @AngusGruen]

An exciting update from myself and @benediamond (https://t.co/bKwowXYcMB). We show that the 𝘶𝘱-𝘵𝘰-𝘤𝘢𝘱𝘢𝘤𝘪𝘵𝘺 proximity gaps conjecture is 𝗳𝗮𝗹𝘀𝗲. More precisely, given any pair c, d we construct codes whose error grows faster than nᶜ / (q ⋅ (ρ η)ᵈ).

[Nico @nico_mnbl]

Just published a simpler proof of the RBR soundness of FRI! Work with @0xAlbertG and Benedikt Wagner

I also wrote a blog post explaining the high level ideas of the proof. All you need to know is how to colour a graph!

Links to paper and blog below

1/3

[Péter Szilágyi @peter_szilagyi]

Since y'all spammed my timeline full of #Ethereum existential crises, here's a letter I sent to EF leadership in a year and half ago 😬.

(link in next post because Twitter...)

[Aniket Kate @aniketpkate]

Privacy is also not just a value (unlike mentioned below). There are many dimensions to it.

In the blockchain space, there is sender anonymity, receiver anonymity, relationship anonymity, unlinkability across 2 or more transactions, secrecy of tx value, unobservability/deniability of tx, network-level anonymity to name the few.

ZK by itself cannot solve network-level privacy for example.

For a good privacy solution, the developers need to make up their mind about what is necessary for them across different dimensions.

A good paper if one wants to annotate the privacy properties https://t.co/wrpplnwvr1
(there is no value privacy here, but it can added.)

[quintus (sovs arc) @0xQuintus]

I believe this is a radically underexplored (and high potential) direction and something that I've spent the last year working on

https://t.co/NwM1v2XVKq

[soispoke.eth @soispoke]

In defence of FOCIL

Note: I genuinely think that more eyes on major EIPs are always a net positive. The more visibility and constructive feedback we get, the more likely we are to ship meaningful, important upgrades for Ethereum.

• FOCIL is about adding multiple proposers that participate in block construction each slot to avoid single points of failure (https://t.co/fu06U7lj58). This is particularly useful to participate in the distributed block building process and impose constraints on sophisticated/centralized builders that build more than 90% of all blocks today via MEV-boost (https://t.co/kk9XmXua3w). While there is work towards more decentralized block builders, the inherent economies of scale due to MEV mean builders are likely to stay centralized in the near to medium term.

• Even if you think Ethereum is doing fine today in terms of censorship resistance (CR) and credible neutrality, it’s unrealistic to assume the network will remain as it is. Most would agree that Ethereum needs to keep scaling (e.g., raising the gas limit, zkEVMs https://t.co/hqVwkSRojt), which likely implies a future in which solo stakers can’t locally build and prove blocks at full capacity.
This leaves the network even more vulnerable to a few centralized and sophisticated entities than today, not just from a censorship perspective but also from a liveness one. And that’s why we need FOCIL: To keep builders honest, and to stop relying on altruistic local builders to preserve CR (not just altruistic btw, they’re actually losing a lot of money doing that and it’s just not sustainable).

• It is precisely because Ethereum is permissionless and censorship resistant that nations and large institutions will be comfortable using it. Otherwise, they’re exposed to competitors or adversarial entities coercing the network into excluding their transactions.

• I personally think being an Ethereum validator means you must not only put 32 ETH at stake to earn yield, but also actively perform duties to keep Ethereum secure and help preserve its core values, some of which are (and always have been) censorship resistance and permissionlessness.

nit: Please refer to the EIP as the most recent, accurate FOCIL doc: https://t.co/zEowlTHRtQ

[Michele Orrù @mmaker]

Thrilled to announce that my latest paper with Alessandro Chiesa has been accepted to TCC, the IACR conference on the theory of cryptography!

[dmarz ⚡️🤖 @DistributedMarz]

Excited for the opportunity to bring Ethereum to the world via faster, cheaper, safer, and more decentralized sequencing! 🚀🚀

[ETHIstanbul @ETHIstanbul_io]

We’re excited to welcome @boez95, Researcher at Flashbots as a speaker at ETHIstanbul! 🎈

He’ll be talking about Cross-chain Arbitrage: The Next Frontier of MEV in Decentralized Finance, exploring how MEV opportunities evolve in a multi-chain world.

Meet him in Istanbul! 👋

[Fred.⚡🤖 @Freddmannen]

After 2 years of summarizing 1000s of publications, The MEV Letter is evolving into its next phase.

Together with Edition #100, we’re launching 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙈𝙀𝙑 𝙇𝙚𝙩𝙩𝙚𝙧 𝙀𝙭𝙥𝙡𝙤𝙧𝙚𝙧 – transforming the entire archive into an interactive interface.

Quick TLDR 👇
1/8

[quintus (sovs arc) @0xQuintus]

Talks are up [esp for folks in other geographies :)]

Also including a link to a geographic decentralisation panel at MEV SBC which I thoroughly enjoyed

[Claudio Orlandi @claudiorlandi]

News from #aarhuskrypto! Welcome to Mark Simkin who joins the group as an assistant professor, Valerio Coletti as a PhD student, and congrats to our previous postdoc Hiraku Morita who is now an assistant professor at SDU. https://t.co/kYha6IoSQ0

[dmarz ⚡️🤖 @DistributedMarz]

Interested in censorship-resistance, scalability, and anonymity in blockchain p2p layers? Come hang out and discuss at NoConsensus .wtf @ SBC on the evening of Monday Aug 4th! Event link below!