Frank Braun

Using Zcash as a mixer doesn't work — transactions going in and out can be correlated by time and value. The only way to break this link is to use it as a store of value. If the market demands more financial privacy and understands this dynamic, value will accrue to Zcash.

Money is technology — technology evolves.

The future is private.

Get worse to get better.

The claim that you lost your coins in a boating accident is more credible if those coins cannot be traced.

Who would have thought that we weren't shitposting on Reddit 10 years ago but were training superintelligence.

You can define an encoding that maps any blob of data to a single number. To censor certain data, you'd have to censor certain numbers. But under a different encoding, those numbers would be different. So: censor all numbers.

Just finished "Zero World Problems: New Standards of Living for the Post-Materialist Economy" by Aaron Clarey, great read. Should be mandatory reading for the crypto twitter crowd that thinks trading meme coins from mom's basement is the best way to financial independence.

If it’s OK to filter transactions with “too much” OP_RETURN data, wouldn’t it be also OK by the same logic to filter CoinJoin transactions with too many inputs and outputs? After all, what useful purpose do they serve? They are not transferring value.

Seems like we have now reached the “but it just feels better” stage of privacy tech. For many communism also feels better than capitalism. How did that work out so far?

Your threat model should include sophisticated technical attackers. But don't forget to include the unsophisticated non-technical religious mob.

Having shielded transactions does not only make coins more fungible, it also makes transactions more censorship resistant. You cannot censor selectively what you cannot differentiate. Lesson in there.

Bitcoiners: The network is censorship resistant. Somehow also Bitcoiners: Let’s figure out how we can best filter “undesirable transactions”.

I think there are usually no big reasons for short term price movements. The Monero drama had a short term price impact and now that seems to be reverting. But generally it's more people are buying than selling that makes number go up and vice versa. Both Monero and Zcash are down about 20% in USD term compared to one month ago while Bitcoin is mostly flat in that time frame. And one month is still a rather short time frame. The question that interest me much more than the infighting: Why are privacy coins in general underperforming at the moment? Is it because we are still pretty early in the bull part of the cycle and privacy coins come later in the cycle? Right now ETH is picking up, but SOL is still not really pumping. So from that perspective it might still be early "alt season". Does the market simply not value privacy and we just have to accept it? Or is it a communication problem that can be solved with better education and marketing? Or is it something else entirely?

While Solana celebrated a new record of 92,628 tx/s the dominating "problem" in Bitcoin seems to be how to best filter "spam" transactions while the mempool sits mostly empty. Sad.

"The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned." — Frederick Phillips Brooks Jr, The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (1975)

The free market is a harsh mistress.

The threat model for my life is: It's complicated.

Less ego leads to more success. It allows you to learn and adapt. The real cost is not making a mistake, it's defending it.