Inlay

There are often posts mentioning that I donated a very large amount of funds to @FLI_org years ago and connecting me to various policy actions that they take. I thought I would make clear the record both on the nature of my connection to them, and on similarities and differences between my approach to the AI risk topic and theirs. First, what happened: * In 2021, I received a large amount of SHIB and other dog coins, seemingly because the creators wanted to use "Vitalik owns half our supply" as a marketing tactic and be "the next Dogecoin" * The tokens quickly rose in value, and at the peak the "book value" of those tokens was over a billion dollars * I felt that surely this was a bubble, it would pop quickly and the price would drop massively, and so I scrambled to retrieve the funds from my cold wallet (this included things like calling my stepmother in Canada and asking her to go into my closet and read out a 78-digit number, and then adding it to a different 78-digit number transcribed from a paper in my backpack). I sold what I could for ETH and donated to relatively more "normal" things (eg. $50m to GiveWell). But then I was still left with lots of SHIB * I sent half to @CryptoRelief_ (half of _those_ funds ended up supporting Balvi, and the other half is being spent by @sandeep and team on improving medical infrastructure in India). I sent the other half to FLI * At the time, they presented me with a comprehensive roadmap that focused on improving all major existential risks (bio, nuclear, AI...) as well as general pro-peace and pro-epistemics (ie. helping us know the truth in adversarial contexts) initiatives * I thought that surely they would cash out at most $10-25M, because there's no way the SHIB market is deep enough to cash out more * Instead, they managed to cash out ... something like $500M (same with cryptorelief) * Since then, FLI had an internal pivot by which they started focusing on cultural and political action as a primary method, quite different from the original approach. * Their justification is that the situation has changed greatly since 2021, AGI is coming very soon, and their pivot is needed to affect the world fast enough, and to counteract the lobbying warchests of large AI companies. * My worry is that large-scale coordinated political action with big money pools is a thing that can easily lead to unintended outcomes, cause backlashes, and solve problems in a way that is both authoritarian and fragile, even if it was not originally intended that way. * For example, their primary approach to biosafety has been "how do we put guards into bio-synthesis devices and AI models so that they refuse to create bad stuff?". I view this as a very fragile solution: there are many ways to jailbreak, fine-tune or otherwise get around such restrictions. Ultimately, putting all your eggs into this strategy can lead to very dark places like "let's ban open-source AI" and then "let's support one good-guy AI company to establish global dominance and don't let anyone else get to the same level". Approaches like this VERY EASILY backfire: they make the rest of the world your enemy. * More generally, historical experience tells us that when regulations are made on dangerous tech, "national security" orgs (today, realistically incl Palantir) inevitably get exempted, and in fact those very same orgs are a major source of risk (see: pandemic lab leaks typically coming from government programs). This is something I worry about. * My approach on these topics has been centered around d/acc: build the tech (eg. air filtering, early detection, continuous passive PCR-quality air testing, prophylactics etc for pandemics, greatly improving software and hardware verifiability for cybersecurity...) to help us survive a much higher-capability world safely, and open-source the tech so that the entire world can freely incorporate it. * This is the sort of thing that the ~$40m I recently allocated is for. A big part of that pot is for secure hardware, which is good both for Ethereum users who do not want to lose their coins, and for humanity if we want ubiquitous computer chips to not be hackable (incl by AI) and spy on us. If I had the FLI warchest and tweet-chest, I would use it to do more of those things. * I have shared my difference in perspective with them on several occasions. * At the same time, I've also been heartened by many of @FLI_org 's recent moves. I think the "pro-human AI declaration" ( https://humanstatement.org/ ) is a very good philosophical path forward. It unites conservatives, progressives and libertarians, America, Europe and China, people worried about unemployment, surveillance, psychosis and paperclip doom, atheists and the Pope. They have also been researching ways to avoid concentration of power resulting from AI. These things are all good. I wish them best of luck on these positive initiatives, and hope that they operate with the caution and wisdom that their task deserves.

I was recently at Real World Crypto (that's crypto as in cryptography) and the associated side events, and one thing that struck me was that it was a clarifying experience in terms of understanding *what blockchains are for*. We blockchain people (myself included) often have a tendency to start off from the perspective that we are Ethereum, and therefore we need to go around and find use cases for Ethereum - and generate arguments for why sticking Ethereum into all kinds of places is beneficial. But recently I have been thinking from a different perspective. For a moment, let us forget that we are "the Ethereum community". Rather, we are maintainers of the Ethereum tool, and members of the {CROPS (censorship-resistant, open-source, private, secure) tech | sanctuary tech | non-corposlop tech | d/acc | ...} community. Going in with zero attachment to Ethereum specifically, and entering a context (like RWC) where there are people with in-principle aligned values but no blockchain baggage, can we re-derive from zero in what places Ethereum adds the most value? From attending the events, the first answer that comes up is actually not what you think. It's not smart contracts, it's not even payments. It's what cryptographers call a "public bulletin board". See, lots of cryptographic protocols - including secure online voting, secure software and website version control, certificate revocation... - all require some publicly writable and readable place where people can post blobs of data. This does not require any computation functionality. In fact, it does not directly require money - though it does _indirectly_ require money, because if you want permissionless anti-spam it has to be economic. The only thing it _fundamentally_ requires is data availability. And it just so happened that Ethereum recently did an upgrade (PeerDAS) to increase the amount of data availability it provides by 2.3x, with a path to going another 10-100x higher! Next, payments. Many protocols require payments for many reasons. Some things need to be charged for to reduce spam. Other things because they are services provided by someone who expends resources and needs to be compensated. If you want a permissionless API that does not get spammed to death, you need payments. And Ethereum + ZK payment channels (eg. https://ethresear.ch/t/zk-api-usage-credits-llms-and-beyond/24104 ) is one of the best payment systems for APIs you can come up with. If you are making a private and secure application (eg. a messenger, or many other things), and you do not want to let people to spam the system by creating a million accounts and then uploading a gigabyte-sized video on each one, you need sybil resistance, and if you care about security and privacy, you really should care about permissionless participation (ie. don't have mandatory phone number dependency). ETH payment as anti-sybil tool is a natural backstop in such use cases. Finally, smart contracts. One major use case is _security deposits_: ETH put into lockboxes that provably get destroyed if a proof is submitted that the owner violated some protocol rule. Another is actually implementing things like ZK payment channels. A third is making it easy to have pointers to "digital objects" that represent some socially defined external entity (not necessarily an RWA!), and for those pointers to interact with each other. *Technically*, for every use case other than use cases handling ETH itself, the smart contracts are "just a convenience": you could just use the chain as a bulletin board, and use ZK-SNARKs to provide the results of any computations over it. But in practice, standardizing such things is hard, and you get the most interoperability if you just take the same mechanism that enables programs to control ETH, and let other digital objects use it too. And from here, we start getting into a huge number of potential applications, including all of the things happening in defi. --- So yes, Ethereum has a lot of value, that you can see from first principles if you take a step back and see it purely as a technical tool: global shared memory. I suspect that a big bottleneck to seeing more of this kind of usage is that the world has not yet updated to the fact that we are no longer in 2020-22, fees are now extremely low, and we have a much stronger scaling roadmap to make sure that they will continue to stay low, even if much higher levels of usage return. Infrastructure for not exposing fee volatility to users is much more mature (eg. one way to do this for many use cases is to just operate a blob publisher). Ethereum blobs as a bulletin board, ETH as an asset and universal-backup means of payment, and Ethereum smart contracts as a shared programming layer, all make total sense as part of a decentralized, private and secure open source software stack. But we should continue to improve the Ethereum protocol and infrastructure so that it's actually effective in all of these situations.

One tool that seems to me would lead to large wins for safety at very low cost to civil liberties, is that everyone should have easy and deniable on-hand ways of calling the police. Think: you pre-select a few secret words, and when your watch or phone or local device in your house hears these words, it silently auto calls 911, and temporarily streams to the police your real-time location. This could work very well for eg. crypto holders who are worried about getting kidnapped / robbed. If we create an environment where if you rob someone (whether at home or outside), there is at least a 20% chance that the police will be on their way immediately, so you won't have time to take anything from them and you don't even realize whether or not the alarm got triggered, then that type of crime flips to being very non-viable. And because this requires deliberate action from the victim in order to function, the risk that this can be used by the government against people seems relatively quite low.

This is the new EF Mandate. For many of you, the contents should be no surprise, and a clarification along the lines that we have been going and thinking for the past few months. But the clarification is nevertheless worth making. Ethereum is a unique object and has a unique role in the world. Its role is to be a sanctuary technology, to preserve technological self-sovereignty, to enable cooperation without coercion, domination or rugpulling, and to provide an escape hatch, to ensure that no single person, organization or ideology's victory in cyberspace can be total. The Ethereum Foundation is a steward of Ethereum - the original steward, and today, the steward specifically dedicated to preserving and expanding the above aspects of Ethereum. This means a heavy emphasis on CROPS (censorship and capture resistance, open source, privacy, security), both at the protocol layer, and at the access layer, user-facing applications and tools that we create or contribute to. There are things that we do in Ethereum because we believe that they are valuable for the underlying goals that we have for Ethereum. There are things that we do not do because from the perspective of our values we find them uninteresting (or worse, harmful). But there are also things that we do not do because while they are useful, they are not our role. At the Ethereum protocol layer, we focus on decentralization, verifiability, inclusion guarantees, protocol liveness, security and privacy first and foremost. We also value capabilities (eg. L1 scale, account abstraction, perhaps some forms of in-protocol aggregation), particularly because improvements in these capabilities better enable users to properly benefit from Ethereum's CROPS properties and displace the need for higher-layer intermediaries that might weaken the extent to which Ethereum's properties carry over into the full stack. We also believe that the Ethereum protocol must strive to pass the walkaway test. "We do X to specialize to serve the use cases of today, if more use cases appear later, we will continue to keep adding more EIPs for them later" is logic fit for many other blockchains whose names you hear often on this forum, but we do not believe it is logic fit for a decentralization-first blockchain like Ethereum. At the application layer, we focus on making "the zero option" - user experience that goes hard on ensuring security and privacy, avoiding dependence on intermediaries, and respecting the user's agency - as high quality as possible. We see this as complementary to work in the Ethereum ecosystem that "goes broad", starting from the world that it exists, and brings it onchain and improves its properties over time. Such work has its natural home outside the EF. We intend to be supportive of such efforts. We believe that the two are complementary: tools that are developed within the EF can be adopted by anyone, including partially, and even partial adoption that improves people's security, privacy and agency is a good thing. But the form of user experience that is more heavily insistent on CROPS properties is where we want the EF to develop its center of expertise. This does not mean shrinking from the hard questions. We believe in a vision of self-sovereignty that protects users, and does not leave users in the cold to face environments where they lose their life savings if they make a mistake, and click "yes" on a confirmation screen by accident two seconds after. But such protection must be designed based on a philosophical baseline of empowering the user, not empowering centralized organizations that claim to act in the user's name. This quadrant of design space - caring about users' (including non-experts') well-being and safety, and yet insistent on doing this in a way compatible with their agency and freedom, is underserved (not just in crypto, but in the world). We wish to use Ethereum as a platform to build out and showcase this quadrant, and ideally work with others to expand its reach over time. This is also a new chapter in how we see our position in the world. We must see ourselves not just as the Ethereum community, but also as maintainers of the Ethereum tool within what you might call the CROPS community or the sanctuary tech community, or a dozen of other words that have for a long time been used by people with similar values to us but far outside Ethereum. This means open-mindedness to new conceptions of what things in the world are our natural allies. Ethereum is not the world. Ethereum is a specific object in the world that is here to have specific properties. The Ethereum Foundation is a specific organization within Ethereum - one steward, not the sole one. I encourage all to read the mandate in detail; it includes concrete examples of how we intend to deal with the challenges and nuances of these ideas. We are doubling down on Ethereum and are excited about its next chapter.