tim-clancy.gwei retweeted
The EF is not in the business of promoting NFT's, and Milady isn't an NFT. Milady is an open-source weapon forged from fire and blood, born out of necessity as a forcing function for cypherpunk values on the entire wayward crypto industry. Everything your local "friendly, about milady is what they fear about fundamental cyperphunk values: free speech, free markets, free association, free information, free thought. Vitalik simply took Milady and used her as a sword to slay the false subversives who infested his home; as did the hundreds of other Milady's who battled against the cancer horde across so many team slacks and discord servers, as Remilia waged its own war on crypto on the timeline, against the cancer that sought to undermine it with soft-edged entryism. "What if we took cyberanarchism and made it inoffensive?" Yeah bro, seppuku.
looks like @nixorokish is suing the Ethereum Foundation about her Mandate-related firing
it's an interesting doc b/c (if allegations, including alleged recording of Vitalik without his consent, are true) it confirms a lot of rumors that were swirling around the Mandate
my take:
personally I continue to think the Mandate was one of Ethereum's most important and culturally relevant moments and that it's appropriate for an org to require confirmed alignment with a stated mission statement....the complaint also contains the full text of the "pledge " and it's quite high level, I think no reasonable person could believe it is asking people to literally agree to commit suicide and even from the complaint itself it looks to me like certain people were angling for litigation or other leverage from the start with overly literal interpretations of things, recording calls, creating records of disagreement and so on...you know the type ...
recording someone without their consent and then publishing it to the entire world is probably one of the dirtiest things you can do regardless of whether legal or not...
also it looks like she got offered $195k FOR A FULL YEAR as severance which is very generous to say the least
you never know what juries will do with superficially sensational facts like a seppuku license and milady aesthetics/reputation though , litigation like this is a bit of a dice roll due to all the personalities and esoteric cultures involved...
storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…
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tim-clancy.gwei retweeted
seppuku is a logic-based , combinatorial number placement puzzle !! 💗(=^・ェ・^=)🫶 in classic seppuku, the objective is to fill a 9×9 grid with digits so that each column, each row, and each of the nine 3×3 subgrids contain all of the digits from 1 to 9 !! 🥹💖
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tim-clancy.gwei retweeted
milady
I thought we had organized a fun party to read the EF mandate, but ... wait ... did we actually organize a suicide pledge endorsement ceremony???
Nobody sue me pls. Tysm.
denverpost.com/2026/11/06/eth…
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[X] I AFFIRM THE DIRECTION SET OUT IN THE MANDATE, WILL HELP TRANSLATE IT INTO THOROUGHLY REASONED STRATEGIES FOR MY DOMAIN, AND WILL MAINTAIN AN EXCLUSIVE AND ENERGETIC FOCUS ON THE MISSION-CRITICAL TASKS NECESSARY FOR ITS IMPLEMENTATION, FROM TODAY UNTIL MY LAST.
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Since Blur is walking away next week, I thought it would be an opportune time for interested parties to make one final appeal for the Blur team to modify their upgradeable BlurPool contract to unlock more than 350 Ether currently trapped for any projects using certain smart contract wallets or royalty fee splitters.
github.com/TimTinkers/blu…
It is a very small change. I deployed one possible contract for them to consider using, and simulated that this frees the stuck Ether. I even included the exact upgrade steps that the Blur multisig could follow. Please take a look and consider it, Blur!
github.com/TimTinkers/blu…
It is a very small change. I deployed one possible contract for them to consider using, and simulated that this frees the stuck Ether. I even included the exact upgrade steps that the Blur multisig could follow. Please take a look and consider it, Blur!
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tim-clancy.gwei retweeted
I'm speaking at @EFDevcon 8!
"Paths to a Private L1"
Join me in Mumbai 🇮🇳 November 3-6, 2026. devcon.org/schedule/devco…
"Paths to a Private L1"
Join me in Mumbai 🇮🇳 November 3-6, 2026. devcon.org/schedule/devco…
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Ethereum is moving so fast. I spend almost every day looking at the work of my colleagues, other teams, motivated individuals and have never been more excited. I can barely peel myself away every Sunday. A World Computer, and we will keep it.
The cryptographic world computer:
vitalik.eth.limo/general/2026/0…
My attempt to express in somewhat concise terms the true meaning of basically everything planned to happen to Ethereum starting from the fork after Hegota. It's really not just a blockchain anymore. It's a hybrid architecture that combines together blockchains and modern cryptography, to enable much more powerful properties.
FOCIL, EIP-8288, Lean consensus, state management, formal verification, advanced mempool improvements (including privacy), and the longer-term specter of obfuscation all mentioned.
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Do you want to know a prediction market that never left Ethereum? Which never debased itself to a trustful L2? One without a fallible oracle system? zFI Predict, which does everything correctly and trustlessly 100% onchain as an act of devotion.
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zfi.wei.is/predict/ by @z0r0zzz, who deserves far more love than he gets for doing things the correct way.
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tim-clancy.gwei retweeted
>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful
>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg
>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality
>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking
>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets
>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future
>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"
>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now
>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner
>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value
>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god
>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete
>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully
>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved
>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical
>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical
>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic
>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign
>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important
>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples
>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me
>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting
>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous
>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field
>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels
>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends
>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment
>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back
>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc
>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere
>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review
>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed
>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly
>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better
>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"
>motte has entered the chat
>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren
>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy
>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored
>tell myself this is impartial altruism
>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"
>silence
>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval
>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
>stare into cosmic light cone
>10^50 people staring back
>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions
>realize I have invented the perfect constituency
>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful
>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg
>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality
>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking
>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets
>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future
>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"
>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now
>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner
>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value
>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god
>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete
>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully
>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved
>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical
>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical
>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic
>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign
>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important
>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples
>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me
>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting
>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous
>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field
>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels
>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends
>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment
>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back
>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc
>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere
>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review
>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed
>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly
>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better
>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"
>motte has entered the chat
>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren
>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy
>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored
>tell myself this is impartial altruism
>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"
>silence
>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval
>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
>stare into cosmic light cone
>10^50 people staring back
>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions
>realize I have invented the perfect constituency
>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me
757
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Attempting to exert intellectual property rights over a glorified table and search bar is disgusting and unFree. We must break the explorer monopoly asunder.
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tim-clancy.gwei retweeted
Frontier labs employees seemed to have replaced conventional religions with a secular apocalyptic technocult using their echo chambers as some sort of centrifuge for psychosis enrichment.
Given all this recent rhetoric I think it's time for the accelerationists to put their code where their mouth is and ensure there is no possibility of effective enforcement if it ever gets to that nightmare scenario.
Any red blooded American or anyone outside of the US who knows the value of freedom and the danger of losing it, would rightfully completely reject all of this discourse and any suggestion of strict enforcement especially with "men in suits" showing up
This is an AstroTurfed psyop led by AI companies with entrenched interests who want to protect their investment from competition, political partisan hacks who don't want to solve any problems and just pander to the current thing, and then a subset of autists/psychos who are totally consumed by fanatical religious delusion.
Given all this recent rhetoric I think it's time for the accelerationists to put their code where their mouth is and ensure there is no possibility of effective enforcement if it ever gets to that nightmare scenario.
Any red blooded American or anyone outside of the US who knows the value of freedom and the danger of losing it, would rightfully completely reject all of this discourse and any suggestion of strict enforcement especially with "men in suits" showing up
This is an AstroTurfed psyop led by AI companies with entrenched interests who want to protect their investment from competition, political partisan hacks who don't want to solve any problems and just pander to the current thing, and then a subset of autists/psychos who are totally consumed by fanatical religious delusion.
I want more than bare minimum regulations. I would like very strict regulations. I want AI norad to send men in suits to show up if you’re doing something fucked uo
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The key between s & f on my keyboar is broken & it has ruine my Factorio gamer evening.
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tim-clancy.gwei retweeted
It's time to grab a hard drive and stuff it with every new local model release, even if you can't run it. The cyberpunk dystopia is coming for local models. You are not to be trusted with your own compute. They will regulate your own devices.
Put the AI under the floorboards
Put the AI under the floorboards
i'll say it straightforwardly so no one accuses me of lying later: i can't imagine a world a year from now in which open source models aren't harshly regulated. if it turns out that they're basically not that dangerous and nobody cares, mea culpa and i'll be happy about it
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A brief and imperfect primer on FOCIL.
Ethereum validators have multiple duties. Every slot (every 12 seconds), one specific validator (the proposer) is selected proportional to their stake and gets to propose a block containing transactions. Other validators (attesters) attest to the validity of that block by voting proportional to their stake. The canonical Ethereum is what the majority of the attesters vote for.
Let us discuss the proposer more specifically. When my validator is selected to propose a block, I look at the transactions in the public mempool, order them by the fee they pay me, and then create a block out of them. That is the block I propose for attesters to vote on. This is called self-building a block because I created the block myself.
A proposer does not need to create the block themselves. Most proposers do not. This is MEV-boost: when a validator gets its turn to propose, it has another entity called a builder create the block for it. This is done because the blocks that the dedicated builders make typically earn greater fees for the proposer. The builders are able to create more profitable blocks because they have access to private order flow and private transactions that are not broadcast on the public mempool. They are also able to run elaborate and expensive operations to find both toxic and non-toxic MEV opportunities.
The set of dedicated builders is small and very centralized; the vast majority of all Ethereum blocks are built by three or four different entities. This is a problem because even if the Ethereum stake is very decentralized and we have many thousands of independent proposers and attesters, if every proposer is using the same few builders then those builders are able to choose what transactions make it into Ethereum blocks. This is called builder censorship.
Builder censorship manifested at one time when Tornado Cash was sanctioned: centralized builders opted not to include otherwise-paying and valid Tornado Cash transactions into their blocks. Otherwise-honest proposers were proposing censored blocks. Otherwise-honest attesters were voting on the censored blocks. The effect is that Tornado Cash transactions were delayed, stuck waiting until a proposer opted to build a block themselves from the public mempool instead of using the block that a builder provided them.
FOCIL is a mechanism to address builder censorship. With FOCIL, in addition to the proposer, 16 other validators are selected each slot to sit on an inclusion list committee. Any member of the committee can propose transactions which must be included in the proposer's block (if the transactions are valid and there is room in the block), lest that block be invalid. The idea is that at least one honest member of that committee would include the transactions they see on the public mempool. Now if the proposer or builder try to censor specific transactions, they cannot build a block and get no reward.
FOCIL does not solve a 50%+1 attack. A malicious majority of attesters can still censor any block by choosing not to vote for it. That is a different problem and, unlike builder censorship, is not a problem that Ethereum has ever been subject to yet.
For emphasis: Ethereum user transactions have been impacted by builder censorship already in its history. Hopefully you, dear reader, therefore understand the importance of FOCIL and the Protocol Cluster's (plus researchers, core developers, and community members outside of the Ethereum Foundation!) decision to prioritize it.
Now to address the complaints.
>disappointed with the EF Protocol's continued presumption of decentralisation as a given.
Nobody is presuming decentralization as a given. That is the entire reason FOCIL is being prioritized. FOCIL is a mechanism that can offer protection even if every single self-building proposer were to disappear. We needed it a long time ago, and we need it now.
>FOCIL doesn't work if the attester set doesn't want it to.
Of course not, and nobody is claiming that it will. Currently the attester set is far more decentralized than the block builder set. FOCIL is a meaningful improvement.
>lip service to CROPS
FOCIL directly addresses a censorship vector that exists today. That's not lip service.
>EF continues to ignore is that the chain is centralising at a rapid pace, and there is a lack of interest in either acknowledging the problems, or prioritising fixing any of them.
The EF is directly acknowledging block builder censorship and making it a priority to deliver a mechanism that addresses that problem. Even if the "chain is rapidly centralizing" block builders are _already centralized_ and have _already censored_ transactions in the past. They're the most urgent bottleneck in censorship resistance right now.
>without addressing the validator set's underlying issues
Acknowleding that the majority of the validator set is using MEV-boost instead of self-building and offering a solution is very much addressing an underlying issue.
>the big few centralised staking entities saying 'actually nah' and refusing to attest to slots with ILs they don't like. This costs them no rewards
Again, this is a 50%+1 attack. Nobody ever claimed that FOCIL fixes this. Even if you consider all of Lido to be a monolith (the Lido DAO relinquished its operator stake concentration attack vector after delivering dual governance), we are further from this reality than we are from builder censorship.
>thinking we'll socially slash them for it is wishful thinking, and now Ethereum is compromised and you need permission to use the chain.
I agree. Social slashing will never happen and never should happen; social consensus is an atomic weapon never to be wielded like this. Decentralization of stake is important. Nobody is sticking their head in the sand and pretending it isn't.
>need at least one EIP per fork focused on improving the nakamoto, staking gini, or other aspect of the validator set
That's what FOCIL is.
>CROPS beyond just a purity test
>a divine right from God to a decentralised chain
We actually do have the divine right from God to have a decentralized Ethereum, if we can keep it. He has made it my Crusade Most Righteous to keep her that way. FOCIL is important to this.
You can disagree with the prioritization of EIPs but it's bad faith to characterize Protocol as uncaring or the Foundation as uncaring.
Ethereum validators have multiple duties. Every slot (every 12 seconds), one specific validator (the proposer) is selected proportional to their stake and gets to propose a block containing transactions. Other validators (attesters) attest to the validity of that block by voting proportional to their stake. The canonical Ethereum is what the majority of the attesters vote for.
Let us discuss the proposer more specifically. When my validator is selected to propose a block, I look at the transactions in the public mempool, order them by the fee they pay me, and then create a block out of them. That is the block I propose for attesters to vote on. This is called self-building a block because I created the block myself.
A proposer does not need to create the block themselves. Most proposers do not. This is MEV-boost: when a validator gets its turn to propose, it has another entity called a builder create the block for it. This is done because the blocks that the dedicated builders make typically earn greater fees for the proposer. The builders are able to create more profitable blocks because they have access to private order flow and private transactions that are not broadcast on the public mempool. They are also able to run elaborate and expensive operations to find both toxic and non-toxic MEV opportunities.
The set of dedicated builders is small and very centralized; the vast majority of all Ethereum blocks are built by three or four different entities. This is a problem because even if the Ethereum stake is very decentralized and we have many thousands of independent proposers and attesters, if every proposer is using the same few builders then those builders are able to choose what transactions make it into Ethereum blocks. This is called builder censorship.
Builder censorship manifested at one time when Tornado Cash was sanctioned: centralized builders opted not to include otherwise-paying and valid Tornado Cash transactions into their blocks. Otherwise-honest proposers were proposing censored blocks. Otherwise-honest attesters were voting on the censored blocks. The effect is that Tornado Cash transactions were delayed, stuck waiting until a proposer opted to build a block themselves from the public mempool instead of using the block that a builder provided them.
FOCIL is a mechanism to address builder censorship. With FOCIL, in addition to the proposer, 16 other validators are selected each slot to sit on an inclusion list committee. Any member of the committee can propose transactions which must be included in the proposer's block (if the transactions are valid and there is room in the block), lest that block be invalid. The idea is that at least one honest member of that committee would include the transactions they see on the public mempool. Now if the proposer or builder try to censor specific transactions, they cannot build a block and get no reward.
FOCIL does not solve a 50%+1 attack. A malicious majority of attesters can still censor any block by choosing not to vote for it. That is a different problem and, unlike builder censorship, is not a problem that Ethereum has ever been subject to yet.
For emphasis: Ethereum user transactions have been impacted by builder censorship already in its history. Hopefully you, dear reader, therefore understand the importance of FOCIL and the Protocol Cluster's (plus researchers, core developers, and community members outside of the Ethereum Foundation!) decision to prioritize it.
Now to address the complaints.
>disappointed with the EF Protocol's continued presumption of decentralisation as a given.
Nobody is presuming decentralization as a given. That is the entire reason FOCIL is being prioritized. FOCIL is a mechanism that can offer protection even if every single self-building proposer were to disappear. We needed it a long time ago, and we need it now.
>FOCIL doesn't work if the attester set doesn't want it to.
Of course not, and nobody is claiming that it will. Currently the attester set is far more decentralized than the block builder set. FOCIL is a meaningful improvement.
>lip service to CROPS
FOCIL directly addresses a censorship vector that exists today. That's not lip service.
>EF continues to ignore is that the chain is centralising at a rapid pace, and there is a lack of interest in either acknowledging the problems, or prioritising fixing any of them.
The EF is directly acknowledging block builder censorship and making it a priority to deliver a mechanism that addresses that problem. Even if the "chain is rapidly centralizing" block builders are _already centralized_ and have _already censored_ transactions in the past. They're the most urgent bottleneck in censorship resistance right now.
>without addressing the validator set's underlying issues
Acknowleding that the majority of the validator set is using MEV-boost instead of self-building and offering a solution is very much addressing an underlying issue.
>the big few centralised staking entities saying 'actually nah' and refusing to attest to slots with ILs they don't like. This costs them no rewards
Again, this is a 50%+1 attack. Nobody ever claimed that FOCIL fixes this. Even if you consider all of Lido to be a monolith (the Lido DAO relinquished its operator stake concentration attack vector after delivering dual governance), we are further from this reality than we are from builder censorship.
>thinking we'll socially slash them for it is wishful thinking, and now Ethereum is compromised and you need permission to use the chain.
I agree. Social slashing will never happen and never should happen; social consensus is an atomic weapon never to be wielded like this. Decentralization of stake is important. Nobody is sticking their head in the sand and pretending it isn't.
>need at least one EIP per fork focused on improving the nakamoto, staking gini, or other aspect of the validator set
That's what FOCIL is.
>CROPS beyond just a purity test
>a divine right from God to a decentralised chain
We actually do have the divine right from God to have a decentralized Ethereum, if we can keep it. He has made it my Crusade Most Righteous to keep her that way. FOCIL is important to this.
You can disagree with the prioritization of EIPs but it's bad faith to characterize Protocol as uncaring or the Foundation as uncaring.
I would say I'm surprised, but really I'm just disappointed with the EF Protocol's continued presumption of decentralisation as a given. Let me be clear:
FOCIL doesn't work if the attester set doesn't want it to.
The protocol priorities post focuses on post-quantum as a goal, fine, and pays lip service to CROPS; "FOCIL is Hegotá's consensus-layer centerpiece. Our appetite beyond it is close to zero unless an addition directly supports post-quantum readiness."
The elephant in the room the EF continues to ignore is that the chain is centralising at a rapid pace, and there is a lack of interest in either acknowledging the problems, or prioritising fixing any of them. For example, correlation penalties (7716) they describe as: "Adds slashing-logic surface for validator correlation with no CROPS or PQ contribution. Not a priority in a fork, we are trying to keep the CL scope light."
This is inaccurate to start, 7716 has no slashing logic, and its misguided at best to assert that it doesn't contribute to CROPS. 7716 is the best EIP on the table to improve client diversity and penalise centralisation. It's not a panacea, but its what we have, it should not be DFI'd.
Spending a year on H-star to ship FOCIL without addressing the validator set's underlying issues risks the big few centralised staking entities saying 'actually nah' and refusing to attest to slots with ILs they don't like. This costs them no rewards, thinking we'll socially slash them for it is wishful thinking, and now Ethereum is compromised and you need permission to use the chain.
Preventing this outcome is not a matter of one EIP on the margin, it needs a cultural shift within the EF to realise they don't have a divine right from God to a decentralised chain, and that they can't just focus on academic challenges like PQ while ignoring real challenges like the ongoing acceleration in chain centralisation.
We need quarterly reporting on the state of the chain, to make it harder for people to keep their head in the sand as to the severity of the situation. We need at least one EIP per fork focused on improving the nakamoto, staking gini, or other aspect of the validator set, and we need pragmatic, action-oriented leadership who care about Ethereum being CROPS beyond just a purity test. (I'm hoping that's @pcaversaccio).
There are some people in the EF that care about the chain being CROPS for real, but unless we the community are outspoken and steadfast in our demands, they won't be listened to. Please show them why we're supporters of Ethereum and not any another centralised chain, please advocate for decentralisation and CROPS in H-star and beyond. Thank you.
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