Hackers managed to steal authentication keys for devices made by @KeystoneWallet I don't understand one thing here however. During manufacturing, as part of the factory self test in initial boot you have the device generate & save a private key on its own, and take note of the public key. If you have private keys to be stolen, it means that *somehow* a copy of the key exists outside of the secure element on the device? If the manufacturing process involves each device's private key existing outside of the device, there's something that needs urgent improvement. Have the device generate the key and include its own public key as part of its self test report, not the other way around.

Lots of people missed this, I think. Soon, @vizorwallet will have quantum-unlinkable swaps, and it doesn't need to wait for a network upgrade. Yet another way it leads the privacy frontier of Zcash right now.

SBF x Vitalik Buterin talking about Effective Altruism for an hour: I watched this live 6 years ago on the FTX YouTube channel, went searching for it 4 years ago when FTX went bankrupt, but couldn't locate it. It was scrubbed. Lost media. Thanks to LLMs, I was able to locate an archive

@mcl4m It's basically just for historians/cryptographers (or as they call them in “A Fire Upon the Deep”, Programmer Archaeologists). I can't think of a way to explain meaningfully what the Programmer Archaeologists would do with it.

Message I got from Zooko re: their efforts to recover the missing Zcash trusted setup ceremony transcript. Given there is a chance at a market moving hundreds of millions of dollars screw up, I don't want to be in possession of any insider info. So I'm making this transparent.

The Kubrick Moon Enigma: A Real Leap, a Filmic Facade, and Why We Stayed Grounded A Triumph of Two Realities On July 20, 1969, humanity crossed a threshold that had haunted dreams for millennia. Neil Armstrong’s boot pressed into the lunar soil, and in that grainy transmission, the world saw proof that Earth’s boundaries had finally been breached. Yet what most of the world saw wasn’t exactly what happened. The Apollo 11 landing was real—its telemetry, seismic readings, and rock samples still confirm it—but the televised spectacle that captivated 650 million viewers was, in part, a cinematic construction. It was not a hoax to conceal failure, but a safeguard against it: a visual insurance policy designed by one of cinema’s most exacting visionaries, Stanley Kubrick. In this version of history, NASA’s engineers achieved the impossible, while Kubrick ensured the world would believe it. Why Kubrick? The Cold War’s Perfect Director In the mid-1960s, the U.S. was in a credibility war, not just a space race. The Soviet Union had humiliated America with Sputnik (1957) and Gagarin’s orbital flight (1961). Kennedy’s moon promise—“before this decade is out”—was both prophecy and political trap. NASA’s technology sprinted ahead, but live broadcasting from a quarter-million miles away posed serious risks: weak signal strength, unstable sync, and the chance of total blackout during a global broadcast. A failed feed would gift Moscow a propaganda coup. Enter Stanley Kubrick. By 1968, 2001: A Space Odyssey had proven him the only director alive who could make outer space believable. His film’s spacecraft interiors were so convincing that NASA engineers privately joked it looked more authentic than their prototypes. Kubrick’s collaborator, NASA designer Harry Lange, had even worked on real Apollo schematics. The production’s camera innovations—the slit-scan sequences, front projection with Scotchlite screens—were quantum leaps beyond contemporary news footage. According to plausible declassified anecdotes (and echoed in memoir fragments), NASA’s public-relations branch did, in fact, explore contingencies for a broadcast failure. Kubrick’s London studio became a plausible “fail-safe set”: if the transmission went dark, a pre-filmed simulation could be patched in. The world would never know. That’s not conspiracy—it’s contingency planning in the age of nuclear brinkmanship. The Landing: Real Peril, Cinematic Polish Apollo 11’s landing sequence remains one of the most harrowing feats in human history. The onboard computer flooded Armstrong’s interface with 1202 and 1201 alarms, warning of overload. With less than 30 seconds of fuel, he manually overrode automation and guided Eagle to safety amid a field of boulders. The telemetry confirmed the near-crash—but television didn’t show that chaos. What the public saw was smoother, almost balletic—eerily reminiscent of 2001’s grace. The lighting looked “too even,” shadows subtly inconsistent. Those imperfections could easily stem from the optical chain converting slow-scan video to broadcast standard, but they also resembled Kubrick’s signature lighting—meticulous, atmospheric, dramatic. The result was more vision than documentation. As with all great cinema, it distilled truth through artifice. The illusion enhanced the moment without erasing reality. Evidence, Misread and Misused Moon-landing deniers misinterpret this hybrid narrative as proof of total fabrication. But the facts cut the other way. The Soviets—then America’s existential rival—tracked Apollo’s radio signals, verified the landing, and publicly congratulated NASA. The retroreflectors left on the surface still bounce lasers back to Earth. Lunar soil samples, unique in isotopic composition, have been independently verified by laboratories worldwide.

Happy 10th anniversary, Zcash! I put together this short documentary to tell the story of the Sprout ceremony from October 2016, which gave birth to the first zero knowledge proof privacy coin! Featuring @peterktodd @zooko @ebfull @EliBenSasson @rel_zeta_tech @Snowden

The 5% Rule: Floors Versus Ceilings in Corporate Crypto Treasuries Between late 2025 and late 2026, an unmistakable benchmark took hold across the digital asset treasury (DAT) landscape: 5% of an asset’s total circulating or capped supply. Yet behind that shared metric lies an ideological divide. While one camp treats 5% as an aggressive acquisition floor—a launchpad for strategic capture—another views it as an existential ceiling, beyond which corporate concentration threatens the decentralization of the very network it seeks to monetize. Chronology: The Divergent Interpretations of 5% November 12, 2025: Cypherpunk Technologies ( $CYPH ) — Zcash * Stance: Minimum Floor * Target: 1,050,000 $ZEC 5% of the 21M hard cap * Rationale: Backed by the Winklevoss twins, Cypherpunk framed 5% not as an exit ramp, but as an aggressive stake to establish sovereign network influence and anchor a substantial corner of shielded liquidity. Five percent represents a baseline hurdle rate to reach and exceed. April 6, 2026: Brian Cohen (@inthepixels) — Strategy ( $MSTR ) Proposal * Stance: Proposed Voluntary Ceiling 4.76% * Target: 1,000,000 $BTC ~4.76% of the 21M hard cap * Rationale: In “Declare Victory at One Million: Why MicroStrategy Must Stop Buying Bitcoin and Start Building,” Cohen argued that perpetual open-market cannibalization risks systemic centralization backlash and asset calcification. The proposal called for an orderly end to spot accumulation at the 1M BTC mark, shifting corporate treasury cash flow toward developer grants, Layer-2 infrastructure, and strategic ecosystem acquisitions. October 2026: Tom Lee / BitMine Immersion Technologies ( $BMNR ) — Ethereum * Stance: Operational Ceiling 5% * Target: 5% of circulating ETH supply * Rationale: Speaking at TOKEN2049 Singapore, BitMine Chairman Tom Lee introduced the “Alchemy of 5%,” reportedly framing it as an explicit stop-loss on corporate dominance developed in alignment with warnings from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. For BitMine, 5% functions as a hard regulatory and social-consensus governor to preserve validator neutrality. The Ideological Fault Line: Extraction vs. Stewardship The debate over the 5% threshold marks the maturation of corporate digital asset strategies: * The Maximalist Float-Trap (Floor): Treats digital assets strictly through the lens of zero-sum capital accumulation. Cypherpunk’s floor logic assumes maximum corporate value is achieved by locking up an ever-expanding share of scarce tokens, reducing liquid market float, and demanding a structural scarcity premium. * The Antifragile Ecosystem (Ceiling): Acknowledges that public blockchains derive value from decentralized credible neutrality. By voluntarily capping holdings around 5%, Cohen’s blueprint for Strategy and Lee’s framework for BitMine argue that excessive corporate gravity transforms an institutional sponsor into a single point of failure. Capping spot intake frees balance sheet resources to fund network development, preserving the health of the underlying asset rather than slowly centralizing it. The question facing corporate boards is no longer just how much balance-sheet runway they can convert into base-layer coins, but whether an uncapped treasury strategy eventually destroys the decentralized premium of the network it holds.

In 2003, for my birthday, my parents asked me if I wanted a gold necklace... I asked for an MP3 player you could wear around your neck instead... Samsung Yepp YP-55 series... When flippening? All the physical MP3 players I've bought EasyBuy2000 "MPTrip" [blew my mind] SlimX iMP-350 CD/MP3 Player with Ultraslim Design Philco PCD2000 Personal CD Player MP3 Disc FM Radio SanDisk Sansa m240 1 GB MP3 Player (Silver) SanDisk SDMX22-004G-A57K Sansa Clip Zip 4 GB, Black SanDisk 8GB Clip Jam MP3 Player, Green - microSD card slot and FM Radio - SDMX26-008G-G46G iPod 80 GB AGPTEK A02S 16GB MP3 Player, 70 Hours Playback Lossless Sound Music Player, Supports up to 128GB (bought a few different versions for someone else...would never trust this to touch any of my devices)

Microsoft Central Bank Zero Knowledge Proof ZKP Currency Central Bank Digital Currencies face a brutal trilemma: how do you guarantee user privacy, verify the entire banking system isn’t faking balances, and eliminate single points of failure for cyberattacks? A Microsoft patent from Srinath Setty et al. proposes a solution: zkCBDC. Today, CBDCs are stuck between two extremes: * Centralized databases: Good for privacy from the public, but create massive central targets for hackers and lack independent verification. * Public blockchains: Decentralized and transparent, but expose transaction histories to anyone watching. Enter Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs). In Microsoft’s design, commercial banks act as Provers. When you make a transaction, your bank processes it internally off-chain. The bank then: * Hashes the transaction amounts (or batches them together). * Generates a succinct zero-knowledge proof confirming: "We followed the rules, money wasn't created out of thin air, and balances check out." The Blockchain acts as the Verifier. The smart contract on-chain holds only a cryptographic commitment (a root hash) of each bank's state—not customer identities, account balances, or purchase details. When the bank submits the ZK proof + transaction hash, the smart contract verifies it mathematically in milliseconds. Who runs the network? The nodes verifying these proofs are the Central Bank and financial regulators. They can mathematically guarantee system-wide solvency, prevent double-spending, and audit the entire economy in real time—without ever seeing who bought what at a retail level. What about moving money between different banks? The patent uses a Two-Phase Commit Protocol: * Phase 1: The sending bank processes the debit, submits its ZKP, and locks the state on-chain. * Phase 2: Once committed, the receiving bank submits its own ZKP to claim and credit the funds. Zero reconciliation lag, zero counterparty exposure. It even tackles cross-border FX and bond settlements through atomic Swaps: * Banks route funds into temporary on-chain escrow/swap accounts. * Both sides post ZK proofs of the locked assets. * Once verified, the contract enforces a simultaneous burn-and-mint across both currencies. If either side fails, the whole trade rolls back. The takeaway: Instead of forcing governments to choose between complete financial surveillance or total black-box banking, ZK roll-up architectures offer a third way. Math proves the system is honest, while cryptography keeps private financial lives private.

Sean Bowe and the Impossible Money Problem Sean Bowe @ebfull dropped out of high school, discovered Bitcoin as a teenager, and eventually helped eliminate one of the fundamental compromises in modern zero-knowledge cryptography. In 2012, he regrettably sold $30,000 worth of Bitcoin to an anonymous man who arrived with a duffel bag of cash—a decision he would later describe as perhaps the dumbest financial mistake of his life. Today, at 32, Bowe is a Zcash cofounder working on a considerably larger problem: how to make encrypted money work for billions of people. Outside cryptography and Zcash circles, almost nobody knows who he is. That may not last. Bowe—@ebfull on X—was Zcash's first engineer. He implemented zk-SNARKs for the original network, wrote Bellman, helped create Powers of Tau, helped make shielded transactions practical on phones with Sapling, and then co-invented Halo, the recursive-proof construction that showed zero-knowledge systems no longer had to depend on trusted-setup ceremonies. Now he is working on Tachyon and Zakura: an attempt to solve the next set of obstacles standing between private cryptocurrency and global payment infrastructure. His X account provides an unusually direct record of that work. It does not read like an influencer feed. It reads like a laboratory notebook interrupted occasionally by sermons about encrypted money. There are no routine price calls. Instead there are folding schemes, private-information-retrieval parameters, formal verification, wallet architecture, quantum threats, all-nighters spent on recursive proofs—and occasional declarations that Zcash is humanity's first mathematically fungible asset. Roughly 10,000 people follow him. He follows only a few hundred. That feels about right. Bowe generally writes for people who already know—or are at least willing to learn—what a pairing-friendly curve is. But the individual inventions are not really the story. There is a pattern running through Bowe's career. Sean Bowe has spent essentially his entire adult life removing reasons that private cryptocurrency supposedly cannot work. The objections have changed. Trusted setups are unavoidable. Shielded transactions are too computationally expensive. Private wallets cannot synchronize without leaking what their owners are looking for. Privacy cannot scale to payment-network throughput. Nobody can be certain a hidden pool hasn't secretly created money. Quantum computers will eventually break today's cryptography. Again and again, Bowe's response has been less an argument than an engineering project. The Unlikely Origin Story Bowe did not arrive through the conventional academic pipeline. He has described himself as a high-school dropout who was extraordinarily fortunate to find himself contributing something meaningful to cryptography. He encountered Bitcoin young, during the period when cryptocurrency was still small enough that participating in it could mean entering a genuinely strange experimental economy. More than a decade later, his attitude toward ZEC is strikingly different. Bowe has said he has difficulty imagining selling ZEC simply to "take profits." The leverage he wants from the asset isn't primarily financial leverage. It is the ability to continue building the system. He agreed to join what became Zcash around October 2015, shortly before his 22nd birthday. Part of the attraction was Zooko Wilcox. Wilcox belonged to an older lineage of cypherpunks and digital-cash experimenters. He had been known to Satoshi Nakamoto and had spent years trying to make private digital money practical. For a young programmer who had discovered Bitcoin early, joining him meant entering a project attempting something Bitcoin had deliberately not solved. Within a remarkably short period, the high-school dropout who had once exchanged Bitcoin for a bag of cash was helping build some of the most sophisticated cryptography ever deployed in a monetary system.