The relationship between "institutions" and "cypherpunk" is complex and needs to be understood properly. In truth, institutions (both governments and corporations) are neither guaranteed friend nor foe. Exhibit A: https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/11/eu_open_source_consultation/ European Union seeking to aggressively support open source Exhibit B: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/ European Union bureaucrats want Chat Control (mandatory encryption backdoors) Exhibit C: the Patriot Act (which, we must note, _neither party_ now expresses much interest in repealing) Exhibit D: the US government is now famously a user of Signal Basically, the game-theoretic optimum for an institution is to have control over what it can control, but also to resist intrusion by others. In fact, institutions are often staffed by highly sophisticated people, who have a much deeper understanding of these issues than regular people and a much deeper will to do something about them. An important driver of many people's refusal to use data-slurping corposlop software is company policy. Some people have the misperception that my words yesterday about the importance of using tools that maximize your data self-sovereignty are something that will appeal to individual enthusiast communities, but will be rejected as unrealistic by efficiency-minded "serious people". But this is false: "serious people" are often _more_ robustness-minded than retail and many already have policies even stricter than what I advocate. I predict that in this next era, this trend will accelerate: institutions (again, both corporations and governments) will want to more aggressively minimize their external trust dependencies, and have more guarantees over their operations. Again, this does not mean that they want to minimize *your dependency on them* - that's the thing that we as the Ethereum community must insist on, and build tools to help people achieve. But that's precisely the complexity of the situation. In the stablecoin world, this means: * Asset issuers in the EU will want a chain whose governance center of gravity is not overly US-based, and vice versa (same for other pairs of countries) * Governments will push for more KYC, but at the same time privacy tools will improve, because cypherpunks are working hard to make them improve. The more realistic equilibrium is that non-KYC'd assets will exist, and ability to use them with strong privacy will grow, but also over the next decade we'll see more attempts at "ZK proof of source of funds". We will see ideological disputes over how to respond to this * Institutions will want to control their own wallets, and even their own staking if they stake ETH. This is actually good for ethereum staking decentralization. Of course, they will not proactively work to give you the user a self-sovereign wallet. Doing _that_ in a way that is secure for regular users is the task of Ethereum cypherpunks (see: smart contract wallets, social recovery). Ethereum is the censorship-resistant world computer: we do not have to approve of every activity that happens on the world computer. I did not approve much of three million dollar digital monkeys, I will not approve much of privacy with centralized (including multisig/threshold) decryption backdoors. But the existence of those things is not up to me to decide. What *is* up to us is to build the world that we want to see on top of Ethereum, and make that world strong, so that it can prosper in the competition, both on the Ethereum chain itself, and against the centralized world. At best, we can interoperate with the non-cypherpunk world to better bootstrap the cypherpunk world. For example, spreads on decentralized stablecoins can decrease if it's easy for people to run arbitrage strategies where they hold positive quantities of a centralized stablecoin and negative quantities of the decentralized one. If we want prediction markets to avoid sliding into sports betting corposlop, we should explore improving their liquidity by helping traditional financial entities use them to hedge against their existing risks. What is a bet from one side is often a purchase of insurance from the other side, and if we want prediction markets to evolve in a healthy way, it may be overall better for the counterparties of the sophisticated traders earning big APYs to be buyers of insurance than to be naive bettors who constantly lose money. Synergies like this should be explored across all domains. This is why I do not believe that cypherpunk requires total hostility to institutions. Instead, I support a policy that institutions are already used to using against each other: openness to win-win cooperation, but aggressively standing up for our own interests. And in this case, our interest is building a financial, social and identity layer that protects people's self-sovereignty and freedom. https://firefly.social/post/x/2014595111322353962
- 23 replies
- 41 recasts
- 172 reactions
2026 is the year we take back lost ground in computing self-sovereignty. But this applies far beyond the blockchain world. In 2025, I made two major changes to the software I use: * Switched almost fully to https://fileverse.io/ (open source encrypted decentralized docs) * Switched decisively to Signal as primary messenger (away from Telegram). Also installed Simplex and Session. This year changes I've made are: * Google Maps -> OpenStreetMap https://www.openstreetmap.org/, OrganicMaps https://organicmaps.app/ is the best mobile app I've seen for it. Not just open source but also privacy-preserving because local, which is important because it's good to reduce the number of apps/places/people who know anything about your physical location * Gmail -> Protonmail (though ultimately, the best thing is to use proper encrypted messengers outright) * Prioritizing decentralized social media (see my previous post) Also continuing to explore local LLM setups. This is one area that still needs a lot of work in "the last mile": lots of amazing local models, including CPU and even phone-friendly ones, exist, but they're not well-integrated, eg. there isn't a good "google translate equivalent" UI that plugs into local LLMs, transcription / audio input, search over personal docs, comfyui is great but we need photoshop-style UX (I'm sure for each of those items people will link me to various github repos in the replies, but *the whole problem* is that it's "various github repos" and not one-stop-shop). Also I don't want to keep ollama always running because that makes my laptop consume 35 W. So still a way to go, but it's made huge progress - a year ago even most of the local models did not yet exist! Ideally we push as far as we can with local LLMs, using specialized fine-tuned models to make up for small param count where possible, and then for the heavy-usage stuff we can stack (i) per-query zkp payment, (ii) TEEs, (iii) local query filtering (eg. have a small model automatically remove sensitive details from docs before you push them up to big models), basically combine all the imperfect things to do a best-effort, though ultimately ideally we figure out ultra-efficient FHE. Sending all your data to third party centralized services is unnecessary. We have the tools to do much less of that. We should continue to build and improve, and much more actively use them. (btw I really think @SimpleXChat should lowercase the X in their name. An N-dimensional triangle is a much cooler thing to be named after than "simple twitter")
- 49 replies
- 57 recasts
- 299 reactions
In 2026, I plan to be fully back to decentralized social. If we want a better society, we need better mass communication tools. We need mass communication tools that surface the best information and arguments and help people find points of agreement. We need mass communication tools that serve the user's long-term interest, not maximize short-term engagement. There is no simple trick that solves these problems. But there is one important place to start: more competition. Decentralization is the way to enable that: a shared data layer, with anyone being able to build their own client on top. In fact, since the start of the year I've been back to decentralized social already. Every post I've made this year, or read this year, I made or read with https://firefly.social/, a multi-client that covers reading and posting to X, Lens, Farcaster and Bluesky (though bluesky has a 300 char limit, so they don't get to see my beautiful long rants). But crypto social projects has often gone the wrong way. Too often, we in crypto think that if you insert a speculative coin into something, that counts as "innovating", and moves the world forward. Mixing money and social is not inherently wrong: Substack shows that it's possible to create an economy that supports very high-quality content. But Substack is about _subscribing to creators_, not _creating price bubbles around them_. Over the past decade, we have seen many many attempts at incentivizing creators by creating price bubbles around them, and all fail by (i) rewarding not content quality, but pre-existing social capital, and (ii) the tokens all going to zero after one or two years anyway. Too many people make galaxy-brained arguments that creating new markets and new assets is automatically good because it "elicits information", when the rest of their product development actions clearly betray that they're not actually interested in maximizing people's ability to benefit from that information. That is not Hayekian info-utopia, that is corposlop. Hence, decentralized social should be run by people who deeply believe in the "social" part, and are motivated first and foremost by solving the problems of social. The Aave team has done a great job stewarding Lens up to this point. I'm excited about what will happen to Lens over the next year, because I think the new team coming in are people who actually are interested in the "social": even back when the decentralized social space barely existed, they were trying to figure out how to do encrypted tweets. I plan to post more there this year. I encourage everyone to spend more time in Lens, Farcaster and the broader decentralized social world this year. We need to move beyond everyone constantly tweeting inside a single global info warzone, and into a reopened frontier, where new and better forms of interaction become possible. https://firefly.social/post/x/2013614839705612290
- 146 replies
- 101 recasts
- 679 reactions