600–900 continuous rotations. Dizziness vanishes. Visions of gods appear. Sufi Whirling (Sema): Complete Practical Guide, Methodology, and Critical Safety Precautions Note: I am not a member of the Mevlevi Order. This is my own synthesis based on information gathered online out of pure curiosity, combined with insights from friends connected to the tradition. However, I believe I can clearly explain the fundamental principles of perceptual transformation. Why does intense rotation lead to visions? Why must it be counterclockwise? I’ll break it down from the physics of clothing to the nano-structure of the inner ear — from anatomical and neuroscientific perspectives. ↓ Continued in thread

Your mind’s eye exists somewhere on a sprawling continuum. Some people have visions so vivid that they are indiscernible from reality — and others cannot form mental images at all.

WATCH: Jeweler Nadine Ghosn discusses how customers want ‘more truth and less BS.’ By focusing on authenticity, Ghosn says that there is room for younger brands to showcase their visions

🚨NEWS: Mamdani just committed $122 million to hire 1,000 new teachers in NYC public schools. Melania Trump wants to replace teachers with an AI chatbot called “Plato.” One mayor is investing in the humans who teach your children. One First Lady wants to replace them with a machine. Different visions. Different values.

GUYS THIS IS SO ADORABLE!!! Getting to see Yuna, Rikku & Paine in new art style in our year of 2024?! A blessing!!! 💖💖💖 War of the Visions Final Fantasy Brave Exvius x FFX-2 COLLAB 💫

a trend i'm seeing across web3 is projects becoming more specialized. instead of trying to do everything, many teams are focusing on solving specific problems and building products around clear use cases. @XOOBNetwork is an example of this approach. rather than focusing only on visibility or short-term hype, it is working on growth infrastructure that can help communities, creators, and brands scale in a more organized and sustainable way. the idea is to create systems where engagement and growth can continue over time instead of relying on temporary attention. @sleepagotchi is taking a different path by focusing on wellness. what started as a gamified sleep experience is evolving into a broader platform that uses ai powered tools and health insights to help users build better daily habits and improve their overall well being. different markets, different goals, but both projects show how web3 is maturing. instead of chasing trends, they're continuing to build products with clear purposes and long term visions. Also keeping an eye on @quipnetwork & @3look

It’s not “equality”. Based on Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy Lamont makes in his article the case that capitalism rewards practical doers who create value for consumers, while undervaluing abstract verbal brilliance, breeding resentment. Socialism elevates them to central planners & directors with status & protection from markets. TLDR: Capitalism rewards those who do. Socialism elevates those who direct. Note: this view is echoed by thinkers like Nozick and Sowell. Nozick argued intellectuals (“wordsmiths”) develop entitlement in school where verbal brilliance earns top status, then resent capitalism for rewarding practical value-creation for consumers over abstract intellect. Sowell described them as “the anointed” who overestimate their knowledge for grand social engineering, blame capitalism for society’s ills while ignoring trade-offs and dispersed practical wisdom, and promote visions that elevate their role as planners and critics.

The context for this analysis is provided by the following two articles: "To All Practitioners, Investors, and Observers Concerned About the Future of Web3" "Clarifications and Reflections on Labs" Analysis of Yi He’s Response from a PR and Communication Perspective Yi He’s response demonstrates a high level of professionalism in crisis management but falls short in addressing key controversies. Below is a breakdown of its strengths and weaknesses: I. Effective Strategies Reframing Responsibility: Emphasizing IndependenceBy distancing Binance Labs (rebranded as Yzi Labs) from Binance’s main operations, the response attempts to downplay allegations of systemic corruption, protecting Binance’s brand. Highlighting "layered firewalls" in listing processes implies that any misconduct is isolated rather than systemic. Emotional Resonance: Personal NarrativeYi He recounts personal experiences with rumors (e.g., the "underwear incident"), positioning herself as a victim of baseless attacks. This reinforces the narrative of a "female leader battling bias," garnering sympathy while framing anonymous allegations as potential smear campaigns. Values-Driven Messaging: Anchoring Industry IdealsRepeated references to "user-first," "value creation," and "resisting short-term greed" align Binance with long-term industry visions. This shifts focus away from specific accusations and elevates Binance’s ethical stance. II. Weaknesses and Avoidance Failure to Address Key AllegationsThe response avoids engaging with specific examples (e.g., Hooked, Sleepless AI) or operational details (e.g., advisor token allocations, listing deposits) raised in the anonymous letter. Instead, it relies on generic calls for "evidence," lacking substantive rebuttals. No explanation is given for why implicated employees (e.g., Dana, Nicola) remain in key roles, nor is there transparency about internal investigations. Logical Contradictions: Independence vs. Resource ExchangeWhile asserting Labs’ independence, the response admits that "airdrops to Binance users influence listing decisions," indirectly validating suspicions of quid pro quo arrangements. This undermines claims of robust firewalls. Oversimplified Industry DiagnosisBlaming market chaos on "founders’ profit-seeking" and "regulatory constraints" sidesteps Binance’s role as a gatekeeper in project selection and resource allocation, appearing evasive. III. Risks and Potential Backlash Credibility Erosion from Unaddressed EvidenceThe vague "welcome evidence" stance risks being seen as dismissive if unaccompanied by concrete actions (e.g., independent audits, public investigations), fueling perceptions of collusion. Gender Narrative PitfallsWhile the anonymous letter’s focus on female actors hints at gender bias, Yi He’s comparison of her struggles to "women excluded from dinner tables" risks overshadowing corruption discussions with gendered debates. Values vs. Business RealitiesCalls for "value creation" clash with Binance’s reliance on listing fees and transaction revenue—a contradiction critics may frame as hypocrisy. IV. Conclusion: A Safe but Superficial Crisis Playbook Yi He’s response follows a conventional crisis PR playbook: avoiding admissions, deflecting blame, and reframing issues around ideals. While this may temporarily reassure core supporters (e.g., BNB holders), evading substantive accountability risks deepening distrust in centralized exchanges, especially in a Web3 era that prizes transparency and decentralization. To genuinely restore trust, Binance must take concrete steps: third-party audits, public reviews of contested projects, and community oversight mechanisms. Without such actions, the anonymous letter’s warning of a "race to the bottom" in Web3 may persist, fueled by unchecked power imbalances.

Some of my perspective on where the @ethereumfndn is going. First of all, this is only my own view. The board is not just me, and I have no extra special powers on the board that the other board members do not. @aerugoettinea is the one executing much of this transition. My input has been largely on technical questions. The board is in the process of expanding, and my own power within the org will continue to decrease, which is honestly what I want. The 2025 era brought many important improvements to EF and its ability to execute. Many issues were resolved, and EF continues to benefit from its improved efficiency and greater focus on concrete goals to this day. And so with those problems resolved, early this year, the largest remaining hole that I perceived was something different nagging at me: I would regularly spot people saying things like "vitalik says these beautiful things about ethereum needing to be decentralized, and have privacy, and be a sanctuary technology, but why do the EF's actions not reflect that?" Now, you may have been hearing something different. You may not have been sensing a feeling of crisis at all, and maybe were hearing people saying that finally we were taking execution and BD seriously and the main task for us is to keep going that way and be even better and faster. Then probably there is genuine difference between you and me, in what kinds of criticism I take most seriously, and what kinds of critics through their criticism are most able to make me feel pain. As an analogy, let's briefly switch over to a different domain. One belief you can have about Google is that it is a success story, and has brought a lot of good to humanity in organizing the world's information. Another belief you can have about Google is that they had a beautiful idealistic beginning, but at some point the corruption of mainstream corporate attitudes seeped in, and they slowly bit by bit completely abandoned the "don't be evil" slogan. My belief on Google specifically is probably somewhere between the two. BUT, if you had taken me back in time to ~2008, and offered me a button to press to make Google one or two standard deviations more "dogmatic", eg. give Richard Stallman permanent veto power over some key policies, I would immediately press it. Why? Because a choice for one company is not a choice for the world, or even one country. Google existed and exists in the context of a technology industry generally drifting away from early idealistic don't-be-evil roots and toward greed for financial gain, totalizing visions of accelerated superintelligence, infiltration by sociopaths, and craven capitulation to (or worse, active participation in) government pressure for ideological control, surveillance and war. And so *one company* doing something different, positioning itself to be what George Bernard Shaw calls the Unreasonable Man, resisting the trend of the times, would have been better for freedom, balance of power and stability of society as a whole, than *all* large companies bending to dominant trends. This is a part of my version of pluralism. This line of thinking is not just mine, but I also is not too far off from what Aya and others had in mind with the Mandate. Now how does this all get to the role of the EF? EF is not a "center of Ethereum", rather EF is "one node, with a defined purpose, alongside other nodes". We've always said that the EF should be the latter, but many in the Ethereum ecosystem (and even within the EF) wanted us to be the former. Now, we are taking action to ensure that we will be the latter. This is particularly important because EF is a limited organization, with limited resources and limited organizational capacity. The EF has only ~0.16% of all ETH (less than many other individual ETH holders), whereas among other blockchains it's common for "the central foundation" to have 10-50%. Fiscally, the EF was originally designed to fulfill a limited work scope defined in the token sale docs and other pre-launch materials (building the chain software; getting through Frontier, Homestead, Metropolis, Serenity), which was fully completed in 2022; it was not designed to be an eternal steward. And so today, the EF is choosing to use its remaining resources to pursue longevity over breadth (yes, this means we sell less ETH). The EF focuses *specifically* on those activities critical to the success of ethereum as a censorship/capture-resistant, open, private and secure system, that would not happen otherwise. This means making hard choices, and in some cases even activities that we highly approve of and people that we highly respect becoming outside of the EF. People of great technical talent, public respect and even alignment with the mission and CROPS being outside of the EF is in fact necessary if we want important tasks to be able to attract outside capital. This also means the EF taking opinionated stands culturally. This is all intended in cooperation with all other parts of ethereum. We recognize that many other parts of the ethereum world highly respect CROPS and related values. But highly respecting is not the same as choosing to specialize and totally dedicate to a domain (Compare in a different domain: I think reducing animal cruelty is important, and I like vegan food, but am not full unconditional vegan myself) EF is still in a transition period, and we expect its new long-term form to stabilize over the next few months. What are the guiding principles of this new form? Again, I am only one person, but I can give my answer from a technical perspective (there are also critical non-technical aspects). At the core, *Ethereum must be impressive*. We are living in an age of highly intelligent AI and all kinds of other technological acceleration. "Status quo EVM, with a hard fork or two a year to optimize for short-term needs of users" is not interesting. To some, "impressive" means: 250ms latency and 1M TPS. I think Ethereum trying to go that route is a mistake. Being as fast and as scalable as possible, and only a small epsilon more decentralized than the others, is a route to mediocrity, and if we try it we will lose. I think Ethereum should scale. But I think Ethereum should strive the hardest to be deeply impressive in a different dimension: the CROPS dimension. This means things like: * Provably bug-free Ethereum. This is a goal that all cybersecurity researchers would have thought is absurd and impossible, up until roughly 6 months ago. Now, it's on the cusp of being possible, thanks to AI-assisted formal verification. So we should be frontrunners in doing this. * Available chain consensus. Ethereum is, and with lean consensus will cotninue to be, the ONLY chain that has both (i) traditional-BFT style properties that it's safe under asynchrony up to a high level of fault tolerance, and (ii) the bitcoin PoW-style property that under synchrony it's safe up to 49% attackers. As far as I can tell, literally no other chain has this or is planning for it; bitcoin goes for (ii) only and most other chains go for (i) only. Some will remember I fought hard for this, Unreasonably insisting that it is not OK for ethereum to rely on social consensus and hard forks to rescue ethereum from 34% of nodes going offline. It's OK for chains like hyperledger, bnb, solana, tempo, etc. It's not OK for bitcoin or ethereum or eg. zcash. * Intermediary minimization. The fact that smart contract wallets, protocols like railgun, etc have to send transactions through intermediaries to get included onchain is honestly embarrassing, and it's a constant point of fragility. Hence the work on FOCIL and EIP-8141 (and 7701 and years of work before) to make transaction sending intermediary-minimized with public mempool and strong inclusion properties, in a truly general-purpose way, that covers not just eg. secp256r1, but also privacy protocols and much more. Kohaku is pushing intermediary minimization at the user layer, pulling Ethereum away from the dystopian status quo world where our wallets don't even verify the chain, send our private data out to a dozen third-party servers, and toward a brighter CROPS future. Some of these goals are Unreasonable - maybe Ethereum would be "fine" getting only 50% of the way - what if we depend on intermediaries, but make it easy to switch? But going 50% of the way would not make Ethereum Deeply Impressive in the CROPS way. So we push for 100%. Fortunately all these goals are compatible with high TPS, this is a major focus of research (esp. on scaling the state). Well-designed L2s can also help, especially L2s optimized for specific applications (eg. high-volume trading, privacy...). These goals are even compatible with significantly lower slot times, thanks to Raul's work on erasure-coded P2P, and many other optimizations. The most high-value "product" of the ethereum blockchain, financially speaking, is ETH the asset. Ethereum secures $250 billion of ETH. The types of properties of Ethereum that I mentioned above are very good for ETH the asset. Nearly 90% of my net worth is in ETH, and most of the remainder is ~$40m of onchain fiat of which every dollar has already been allocated for some open-source biotech or software or hardware initiative. That said, there are aspects of supporting ETH the asset - *necessary* aspects even - that are outside the scope of the EF. This is where we need other heroes (some of whom hold more ETH than the EF does) to step in and help. EF has been recently thinking more about how it will relate to other such organizations, and give them needed initial support. EF will be a smaller ship than in previous years, a more opinionated one - in some cases more opinionated in ways that might be difficult to comprehend - but a longer-lasting one, and one suited to making sure that ethereum brings something meaningful to the world. We are grateful to all those inside and outside the EF who are helping to make this happen.