I am the Director of Seat Merchandising at United, and I sell you a window seat that does not have a window. You know the upgrade. You are in basic economy, the map opens, and there is the good seat, the one against the wall, the one that costs more than $50 because you want the light and the armrest and the small dignity of choosing where your body goes for four hours. You paid it. Most of you paid it. I am counting on the fact that you paid it, because the seat you bought, on certain rows of certain 737s and A321s, is a solid blank wall where the glass should be. A woman named Brenman took us to federal court in San Francisco over exactly this. Our lawyers stood up and said the thing I would never let myself say out loud. They said a window seat only means a position. It tells you where you sit relative to the aisle. It promises you nothing about the glass. The judge, a man named Donato, did not buy it. He let the case go forward. More than 1 million of you are in the class. I read the ruling the way I read a fuel-hedge report, which is to say I noted the number and I priced it. The wall is not a defect. It is air-conditioning duct, or an electrical run, or the plug where a door used to be, and it has been there since the plane was built. We did not remove your window. We simply never installed one, and then we labeled the seat in front of it a window seat, and then we charged you the window premium, and then we declined the refund, because the refund is a leak and my entire job is to seal the leaks. We have a name for those seats. Internally they are wall-adjacent inventory, and they are the most profitable window seats in the fleet, because they cost United nothing and they sell for the same premium as the ones that see the sky. I did not hide them. I did something better. I let the seat map do the hiding. The map is the product. The window was always just the fine print. Here is the part I am proudest of, and it is the part that survived the lawsuit intact. I do not sell you the window. I sell you the belief that there is a window. The belief is cheaper to manufacture than glass, it fits in every airframe, and it does not fog at altitude. You buy it at checkout, one green button, and you do not learn what you actually purchased until you are at 30,000 feet, buckled in, facing a wall the color of a hospital hallway, with nowhere else to go. You will lean toward it anyway. Out of habit, because you paid for a window and your body still believes the map, you will lean toward where the window should be. That lean is the purest thing I sell. That lean is worth more than $50. I fly up front, and I do not choose my seat from the map, because I know which rows are walls and that list is not something we surface. There is always a real window somewhere on the plane. I just did not put it where you would look for it. Do not switch to Delta, either. Delta is in the same building down the hall, sued on the same theory, defending the same sentence. Every carrier flying a 737 or an A321 has a wall pretending to be a window, and every one of us charges you for the pretend. The standard is industry-wide. I helped write it. That is what merchandising is. So keep buying the window. The suit will settle for a number smaller than what the wall earned while the case was open, the seat map will not change, and next quarter I will find a new feature to charge you for the absence of. A window seat is a location. I never said you would get the view. I said you would get the seat. You are in it. Enjoy the wall.

Elon Musk built a second internet above the first one. Nobody asked him to. Thousands of satellites orbit at 550 kilometers. Moving at 25 times the speed of sound. Talking to each other through lasers in the vacuum of space. Musk: “Thousands of satellites providing low latency, high-speed internet throughout the world.” Before Starlink, satellite internet lived at 36,000 kilometers. Geostationary orbit. Signals traveling a tenth of the way to the moon before bouncing back. The lag made it barely functional. Musk dropped the altitude by 98%. One decision rewrote the physics of an entire industry. But the altitude wasn’t the real play. Musk: “There are laser links between the satellites. It forms a laser mesh. The satellites can communicate between each other and provide connectivity even if the cables are cut.” Every internet connection you’ve ever used runs through cables. Fiber optic lines buried in soil. Dragged across ocean floors. Threaded through chokepoints that every military maps before anything else. A single anchor drop can black out a country. An earthquake can sever a continent. The entire digital world hangs from threads in the mud. Musk built a network that doesn’t touch the ground. No cables. No trenches. No ocean floor. No single point of failure. A constellation of machines whispering to each other through light at the edge of the atmosphere. The men who tried before him weren’t fools. Gates backed Teledesic at the height of Microsoft’s power. Motorola built Iridium with the best engineers alive. Both paid someone else to reach orbit. Both went to zero. Musk owned the rocket. SpaceX made launch reusable. Built the satellites in-house. Flew them on its own rockets. Owned every inch of the chain from factory floor to orbit. That isn’t a cost advantage. It’s a moat no one can cross without first building a rocket company from scratch. Starlink passed 10 million subscribers as a side project. Every telecom executive on Earth watched it happen. Not one of them can explain the architecture underneath. They think he built a better satellite company. He built the only network that survives when the ground gives out. And the ground always gives out.

I'm a cardiologist. I've had my hand on the human heart for more than twenty years. I've felt it race with fear and go still with grief. And somewhere along the way I stopped believing the thing they taught me in medical school — that the heart is only a pump. The heart is a witness. It keeps a record of everything we were too afraid to feel. Let me tell you about a patient. I've changed her details, but the truth of her is exact. She came into the ER gripping her chest, certain she was dying. Her EKG was alarming. Her cardiac enzymes were up. We rushed her to the cath lab expecting a blocked artery. We found nothing. Her coronaries were pristine. Beautiful, even. What she had was Takotsubo cardiomyopathy. We call it broken heart syndrome. Under a surge of overwhelming stress, the heart muscle balloons and fails — mimicking a heart attack down to the last detail, with no blockage at all. The artery is innocent. The grief is not. When she was stable, I pulled a chair to her bed and asked her a quiet question. Not about cholesterol. About her life. And it came pouring out of her. She was the one everyone leaned on. The daughter who never said no to her aging parents. The mother who never said no to her grown children. The wife who never said no, period. She had spent fifty years being everyone's reliable vessel — and had not, in her own words, "taken a full breath in decades." Her arteries were flawless. Her heart had simply had enough of holding what she would not put down. I have thought about her for years. Because she is not the exception. She is most of us. And here is the part I need you to understand — because it is not poetry, it is physiology. Swallow yourself for forty years and your body keeps the score. Your sympathetic nervous system stays quietly switched on. Cortisol runs high. Blood pressure climbs. Inflammation smolders in the vessel walls. Heart rate variability — one of the truest signatures of a resilient heart — narrows and stiffens. Her ballooned heart was not a metaphor. It was her body doing the math on a lifetime of unspoken no. We think we are burying our feelings. We are not. We are storing them — in our arteries, in our sleep, in the tension we carry so long we forget it isn't part of us. Two hundred years ago the Kotzker Rebbe said a thing I can now confirm on an echocardiogram: there is nothing so whole as a broken heart. He didn't mean it as consolation. He meant the heart that has been broken open is the only one large enough to hold the truth. Rumi, from the other side of the world, said the same thing: the wound is the place where the light enters you. Your broken heart is not your malfunction. It is your assignment. The break is where the light gets in — and where your light finally gets out. So here is the one question I now ask before I write a prescription. It is so simple it embarrasses me that I did not learn it in medical school: Where in your life are you not saying no? Almost everyone knows the answer before I finish the sentence. There is a no you are swallowing right now — to keep the peace, to please someone, to stay the strong one, the reliable one, the one who never needs anything. And every swallowed no is a small dose of stress hormone. A quiet tax on the heart. Paid daily. For years. Until the bill comes due in a cath lab, or a sleepless 3 a.m., or a body that suddenly won't cooperate and no one can tell you why. If that question just landed somewhere in your chest — don't rush past it. That feeling is not nothing. That is your own heart, finally getting a word in. My patient went home. She started saying no. Small ones first. Then real ones. She let people carry themselves for a change. The last time I saw her, her blood pressure was down. Her sleep was back. And she laughed — a real, unguarded, surprised-by-itself laugh — right there in my exam room. Her arteries were still perfect. But now, so was her breathing. You do not have to wait for a broken heart to learn what it came to teach you. Call the friend you've been meaning to call for a year — call, don't text. Say the no you've been swallowing. Feel the thing you've been outrunning. And let yourself be happy anyway, even with the world on fire, because your joy was never a betrayal of anyone's pain. The wound is where the light enters. Your heart already knows the way home. It's just waiting for you to stop holding your breath. I wrote and essay — the five regrets of the dying, why nobody was ever born a coward, and how the heart keeps its record — on my Substack:

This year, the EF is decreasing its budget by roughly 40%, which entails some difficult decisions. The goal of the decreases was set out in the Treasury Management Policy last year: the EF is transitioning into being a long-term-oriented endowment-based organization, shifting from its pre-2026 average of spending ~15% of its remaining funds each year, toward a post-2030 target of ~5% per year. Often, when an organization goes through something like this, people try to pretend that nothing of great value was lost, that it is an efficiency increase, that the only people cut are unproductive dead weight, and everyone else stopped partying, studied the blade, entered cracked S-tier beast mode, and this was sufficient to make up for the downside. I will not try to pretend this. I respect my EF colleagues far too much to pretend that there was not much that is lost. They are brilliant people. They are dedicated engineers of whom some have worked on the Ethereum protocol for nearly a decade. They have brought a bright light to the Ethereum ecosystem with their code, their words, their warmth as human beings and their actions. My dearest hope is that they find a path that brings them fulfillment and happiness whether inside Ethereum or outside. Hopefully many will be able to bring their excellent talents and mindset to the wider Ethereum ecosystem, or the even wider CROPS world. Instead, I will try to explain what *are* some of the grand sacrifices being made. The Ethereum Strawmap is no small thing. It is an extremely ambitious undertaking seeking to replace and augment almost every part of the protocol - consensus, proofs, privacy, account model, state, and more. This is the third iteration of Ethereum, in the same way that the Merge was the second, even if the shipping style is less Big Bang and more one-piece-at-a-time. On top of this, the EF is increasing its role in the Access Layer. We are not compromising on Ethereum being a Deeply Impressive protocol, something worthy of its place in a world with quantum computing, rockets to Mars and powerful biotech and AI, and capable of meeting the challenges that this era will bring. Some of the deficit will be recovered through more work happening outside the EF. But not all. So what are the grand sacrifices that will enable a leaner effort to accomplish all of this? I will give a few examples (though far from an exhaustive list): * The multi-client model will shift in the direction of multiple clients existing less for _redundancy_, and more for _specialization_. Up to this point, redundancy has been the main security strategy: if one client has a bug, if it has less than 33%, the chain keeps going and does not even stop finalizing. We are increasingly exploring moving more pieces of the protocol to a different security strategy: AI-assisted formal verification. Some smaller pieces of Ethereum (eg. BLS libraries) have worked this way already for a long time. But soon many more parts of Ethereum will likely function on this model. This may greatly reduce resource requirements of shipping a large number of EIPs. The resources saved by client teams can ideally instead be used to better serve different specialized user needs, including EF Access Layer goals. * PSE (Privacy and Scaling Explorations) is winding down as a unit. The number of people working on ZKPs for privacy and scaling is probably as high as ever, but they are working less on "exploration" and more on *implementing* ZKP-based privacy and scaling into the Protocol and Access Layer * Devcon will likely over time become smaller-scale, somewhat more spartan, much lower-deficit than previous years, in addition to other changes in vision in line with the Mandate. * Fewer beyond-Ethereum megaprojects coming from EF. As I announced earlier this year, I am taking on some of the responsibility of doing projects in this category that I consider valuable with my personal funds. * EF institutional work is reducing in scope, specializing more specifically on creating replicable test cases of highly CROPS-friendly deployments, even if at smaller scale. These do not explain all departures; in some cases they do not explain departures at all and rather explain _reduced need for new spending_. But they are a large part of the strategy at play. In the longer term, I personally favor a "soft lean-and-done" approach to Ethereum: once the Strawmap is completed, generally stick to security fixes and small high-value changes, and have a much higher bar for considering new feature additions to the protocol. This allows Ethereum to remain capture-resistant without demanding very large budgets. Learn less from multimillion-line-of-code behemoth projects, more from bitcoin. The past years have been a challenging era for Ethereum. However, the ecosystem is adapting, both inside the EF and outside, and I am confident that Ethereum is very well-positioned to succeed and thrive.

I love how light my heart feels after spending time with the right friends. There’s something almost cosmic about platonic love the way it quietly nurtures you, fills you up, and reminds you that being deeply cared for isn’t reserved for romance.

Time to light up! The Liangshan Torch Festival is here — the most solemn and grand celebration of the Yi people and other ethnic communities. Across China, ethnic traditions are treasured, preserved, and celebrated. May every torch illuminate the way forward, and bring hope, happiness, and joy!

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.