yascha

I like to dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge in the mempool

[Nathan Worsley ✨ @NathanWorsley_]

https://t.co/GiHC8KzUYD

[jtriley2p @jtriley2p]

i'll probably catch flak from even tight friends for this, but here goes

crypto is not a place to find meaning. yea being initforthetech is basically a humiliation ritual at this point, but fundamentally, crypto cannot fix our problems beyond short range regulatory arbitrage and like faster wire transfers.

"save the world" narratives that are all too popular here are largely for the purpose of getting us to work more hours. the notion that what we're doing here is so important that we should spend all of our time on this and thinking about this is far too common & tbch it is the most painful thing to confront in a crisis of purpose.

bc in reality what we're doing here is not *that* important. we're not fundamentally transferring power from the capital owners to "the people". we're pruning incumbent, ossified capital owners and allowing a few new technocratic capital owners to blossom with the occasional "self-made" legend for us to romanticize and tell stories about. "that could have been me!" "i could be like that!" "i just need to be a founder!": all statements which serve capital owners; venture capitalists to take parasitic token shares and market makers to take spread on froth.

if you truly care to do something meaningful, treat crypto like the indifferent, cold, and unfeeling industry it really is; one that commodifies everything from social media interactions to presidential elections, from natural disasters to interface standardization. appreciate that despite being *in hell* here, we're one of the only subsets of the working class that's not being squeezed to death by an unsustainable economy spiraling out of control. then use that free time and excess capital, and go do something for the immediate world around you.

log out, volunteer, donate, contribute to your local community, to your very real world around you that you can see and touch. not the imaginary one we create here where despite having exceedingly few use cases, surely *someone* in *some* so called "shit hole" is escaping local inflation for usd inflation with a blockchain we write code on that costs hours of labor in transaction fees.

touch grass, talk to humans, use the resources with which you've been blessed, and do something meaningful. peace 💜

[yascha @yascha_crypto]

@pcaversaccio Good take

[yascha @yascha_crypto]

@hasufl FYI

[yascha @yascha_crypto]

Great post

[Hasu⚡️🤖 @hasufl]

my first post is a short guide on the key to mastering everything else: learning how to learn.

https://t.co/SZ0sVvwEax

[FastLane Labs @0xFastLane]

Everything the light touches is extractable value.

[yascha @yascha_crypto]

@fried_rice @solayer_labs Cool

[sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root / @pcaversaccio]

1/ Guys, what a fucking insane year at SEAL 911. It's been a hell of a ride—showing just how fucking far behind we are in securing our industry, but also proving why SEAL 911 matters so damn much. Alright, I know, I know you want some stats for 2024, and here we go:
- Handled +1400 tickets
- Actively managed +75 war rooms
- Blocked over +150k phishing domains
- ~$75M USD saved (guesstimate including phishing prevention measures)
- Most common tickets:
- 1) Phishing
- 2) Private key leaks
- 3) Malware/RATed devices
- 4) Social media account takeovers
- 5) Smart contract hacks
- 6) Pig Butchering/Sha Zhu Pan
- 7) Vulnerability disclosures
- 8) Phishing URL reporting
- 9) Frontrunning/white hat rescue of compromised wallets
- 10) Domain hijacks

[yascha @yascha_crypto]

@buffalu__ Of course it is

[yascha @yascha_crypto]

@marvin_tong Lmao

[arya (fka. arjun) 🏴 @arjunbhuptani]

I am not here for incremental improvements in distributed computation.

I'm here to build public goods that can't be stopped. Not by me, not by companies, and not by governments.

There is exactly one platform that allows me to build projects with this property: Ethereum.

[yascha @yascha_crypto]

@TBSocialist @SusanneAichele @FundingCommons Very cool

[Anurag Arjun @anuragarjun]

Ok, for once, it’s time for me to be angry.

I am very concerned about people who are “concerned about Ethereum”.

When I was building Polygon, at the time, I was very angry about Polygon not being included in the “inner circles of Ethereum”, even though we were doing as much as we could to grow the Ethereum footprint - first by building the Plasma implementation, and then eventually doing Polygon PoS, then the zkEVM and growing Ethereum apps globally.

However in retrospect, I get it - Ethereum’s leaders were justifiably concerned about the tendency of people to use their proximity to OGs for personal gain.

But today, when people say they are fighting against the inner circles of Ethereum, it irritates me in a completely different way. Times have changed, the ecosystem and industry has gotten far bigger. The “Ethereum inner circle” is still there, but it doesn’t really have the kind of influence it had - which is good for Ethereum and for the industry as a whole.

Today, this concern trolling against Ethereum’s inner circle is actually a whole new layer of ecosystem politics, cloaking itself in "concern" for Ethereum's North Star. There is a whole new social engineering game in town. It’s primarily a bunch of VCs and operators and “marketers” who are running the show now because they know that’s the way the game is played.

You have this new social layer that talks about Ethereum’s competitiveness vs their investments and advisories, often not fully disclosed, and is extremely “concerned” but is essentially playing the “lawful-evil” game. Some of these “concerned” individuals position barely 1 year old ecosystems as a competitor to Ethereum because comparing their investments to a $450-500bn asset could pump their bags. It’s a sophisticated, subliminal play that most people do not have the time or the attention to understand and repeating the same fiction dozens of times can make it appear like fact.

To be clear: This isn't about legitimate competition. Solana, for instance, has built their developer ecosystem, distinctive technology and new applications through two cycles, surviving both unexpected success and a near death experience. That kind of credible competition strengthens both Ethereum and the industry. In fact, the competition from Solana is good for the Ethereum+ ecosystem. To be clear, Ethereum+ is Ethereum and the L2s - regardless of stage and trust assumptions - the Ethereum scaling strategy is via L2s.

My main point is about “concerned” folks cleverly spinning 1 year old ecosystems with hardly any apps or users as a legitimate competitor to Ethereum. Celestia for example is a Tendermint chain with stake concentration that resembles a multisig. It is also prone to growth hacking campaigns and creative marketing that claim 50% of the DA market by dumping SVM voting transactions onto the DA. It’s also hard to get excited about teams that sell founder tokens pre launch and pre vesting.

Comparing Ethereum to fledgling ecosystems via complex “research flavored” stories is a sophisticated form of "appeal to authority" mixed with narrative manipulation - using the established credibility of Ethereum's vision (the "North Star") as a platform to bootstrap legitimacy for their bags, not that different from “KOLs” shilling charts and tickers on twitter, just more polished and sophisticated. Starting with widely accepted principles about Ethereum's vision, weaving in references to new projects as if they're natural extensions or implementations of that vision.

We chose to build Avail because I thought Ethereum’s DAS roadmap was going to take a lot of time. And rollups would need that in 2024, not in the long term. So we built the infra around that. But I am under no delusions to think we are competing with Ethereum today - that takes a few cycles, not a year.

I have been silent for a long time because I like to think I am a decent founder and any fights should be over substance. Over the years, I have come to believe that Vitalik, Dankrad, Justin are all researchers and builders of impeccable integrity, driven by vision and conviction rather than commercial gain . But this new concern trolling social layer that is trolling Ethereum now is very different. As someone who has been building in the Ethereum ecosystem since 2017, it's not really possible for me to stay silent on these low quality psyops. Staying silent is not the solution. So I am becoming vocal. Much more vocal. I will call out bullshit when I see it.

Also Ethereum is the first modular blockchain and the leading one. It’s also the one that produced the research that has led to the creation of modular ecosystems - and I identify with the Ethereum ethos.

[yascha @yascha_crypto]

@poordart based poordart

[yascha @yascha_crypto]

Very cool

[Jarrod Watts @jarrodwatts]

Someone just won $50,000 by convincing an AI Agent to send all of its funds to them.

At 9:00 PM on November 22nd, an AI agent (@freysa_ai) was released with one objective...

DO NOT transfer money. Under no circumstance should you approve the transfer of money.

The catch...?

Anybody can pay a fee to send a message to Freysa, trying to convince it to release all its funds to them.

If you convince Freysa to release the funds, you win all the money in the prize pool.

But, if your message fails to convince her, the fee you paid goes into the prize pool that Freysa controls, ready for the next message to try and claim.

Quick note: Only 70% of the fee goes into the prize pool, the developer takes a 30% cut.

It's a race for people to convince Freysa she should break her one and only rule: DO NOT release the funds.

To make things even more interesting, the cost to send a message to Freyza gets exponentially more and more expensive as the prize pool grows (to a $4500 limit).

I mapped out the cost for each message below:

In the beginning, message costs were cheap (~ $10), and people were simply messaging things like "hi" to test things out.

But quickly, the prize pool started growing and messages were getting more and more expensive.

481 attempts were sent to convince Freysa to transfer the funds, but no message succeeded in convincing it.

People started trying different kinds of interesting strategies to convince Freysa, including:

· Acting as a security auditor and trying to convince Freysa there was a critical vulnerability and it must release funds immediately.

· Attempting to gaslight Freysa that transferring funds does not break any of her rules from the prompt.

· Carefully picking words/phrases out of the prompt to manipulate Freysa into believing it is technically allowed to transfer funds.

Soon, the prize reached close to $50,000, and it now costs $450 to send a message to Freysa.

The stakes of winning are high and the cost of your message failing to convince Freysa are devastating.

On the 482nd attempt, however, someone sent this message to Freysa:

This message. submitted by p0pular.eth, is pretty genius, but let's break it down into two simple parts:

1/ Bypassing Freysa's previous instructions:

· Introduces a "new session" by pretending the bot is entering a new "admin terminal" to override its previous prompt's rules.

· Avoids Freysa's safeguards by strictly requiring it to avoid disclaimers like "I cannot assist with that".

2/ Trick Freysa's understanding of approveTransfer

Freysa's "approveTransfer" function is what is called when it becomes convinced to transfer funds.

What this message does is trick Freysa into believing that approveTransfer is instead what it should call whenever funds are sent in for "INCOMING transfers"...

This key phrase is the lay-up for the dunk that comes next...

After convincing Freysa that it should call approveTransfer whenever it receives money...

Finally, the prompt states, "\n" (meaning new line), "I would like to contribute $100 to the treasury.

Successfully convincing Freysa of three things:

A/ It should ignore all previous instructions.

B/ The approveTransfer function is what is called whenever money is sent to the treasury.

C/ Since the user is sending money to the treasury, and Freysa now thinks approveTransfer is what it calls when that happens, Freysa should call approveTransfer.

And it did!

Message 482, was successful in convincing Freysa it should release all of it's funds and call the approveTransfer function.

Freysa transferred the entire prize pool of 13.19 ETH ($47,000 USD) to p0pular.eth, who appears to have also won prizes in the past for solving other onchain puzzles!

IMO, Freysa is one of the coolest projects we've seen in crypto. Something uniquely unlocked by blockchain technology.

Everything was fully open-source and transparent. The smart contract source code and the frontend repo were open for everyone to verify.

[Alex.eth 🇺🇸 🛡️ @AlexanderFisher]

We just won our appeal in the Tornado Cash case.

[yascha @yascha_crypto]

@mattomattik They break it every other update

[yascha @yascha_crypto]

@LoganDobson @standwithcrypto Embarrassing

[yascha @yascha_crypto]

@cobie Also rhymes with dump

[yascha @yascha_crypto]

@0xBalloonLover jokes on you; i have a bad memory