#NotyoKeys Nacho Cheese #HEX #BTC #PLS #ETH
Joined October 2020
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⛓️Ethereum users. Look into Pulsechain. Go to Pulsechain.com
🍴It is a full-state forked copy of ETH.
🆓 In other words, if you had ETH or ERC tokens in a self-custody wallet on May 10th of 2023, you have free coins waiting for you on Pulsechain (chain ID 369).
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Seriously
Anti crypto politicians already have a playbook for fighting emerging technologies and the entrepreneurs building them. We’ve seen it firsthand in the war on crypto, which began in 2020 and continues to this day, despite the favorable political shift under the Trump administration.
The criminal justice system hasn’t changed one bit when it comes to prosecuting developers of non-custodial, decentralized, permissionless protocols. Lots of promises, speeches, and policy memos that, in practice, mean absolutely nothing.
The AI bros largely ignored what was happening to the crypto industry. But soon enough, they will face the same playbook, the same tactics, and the same oppression once AI becomes a serious political force.
So, AI bros, you have a choice: stand together now, or bury your heads in the sand and pretend this won’t affect you.
It will. It’s only a matter of time.
Spend a few minutes studying my case, and you’ll understand exactly what I mean.
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JTC retweeted
I told our developers, “If you can’t make our DEX aggregator as fast as CoW Swap, don’t even look me in the eyes.” 👀
And somehow, they pulled it off!
Not bad, considering PulseChain has no PropAMMs, no third-party market makers competing to fill quotes, just good old-fashioned liquidity pools doing the heavy lifting.
Pure DeFi, stubborn developers, and a team that refuses to give up. 🗽🔥
Very interesting take
Now that we have the map.
We've established two things.
One: life is a game.
Two: if life is a game, then there are trials, and those trials are hard.
Here is the map of the level we're playing right now.
There are four threats.
The first is a misunderstanding of human nature. Part of the left still believes value is created from the top down: an enlightened planner, directives, experts who know better than you what you need. It's the Bill Gates-style technocratic vision, well-intentioned, blind to how humans actually work. Value can't be decreed. It emerges from millions of free people taking risks, failing, and trying again. Every time we've tried to replace that with a plan, we got less wealth, less freedom, and more resentment.
The second is the players who figured out how to shape institutions without going through the ballot box. The most visible example is George Soros's Open Society: billions poured for decades into NGOs, think tanks, prosecutor campaigns, and open-borders advocacy groups. It's not a secret, it's in their own reports. The problem isn't that a billionaire has opinions. It's that an unelected network can influence justice, immigration, and public debate more than voters can, without ever being accountable when things go wrong.
The third is political Islam. Not Muslims: the political project. And the real reason it can't work is simple: at its core, it's a collectivist project. A single, centralized norm that claims to govern all of life, from law to family to the economy. Every centralized system that has tried to run everything ended the same way. It collapsed under its own weight, because no center can process the information that millions of free individuals process spontaneously. The danger is that when a system collapses, it takes a lot down with it.
The fourth is demographics. The West has stopped having children. A civilization that doesn't reproduce passes on neither its culture, nor its institutions, nor its values. It hands its future to others. It's math, and it's probably the most underestimated threat of all.
Against all this, there's a counterforce. Elon Musk, and more broadly part of the tech world. Builders who understood that civilization isn't guaranteed, that it has to be defended, and that you defend it first by building: rockets, factories, AI, abundance. They have the means, the nerve, and the long-term vision.
Which leaves the real question: how do we keep existing?
Two questions need to be asked.
The first: if a political project requires the destruction of Western values, and democracy is inseparable from the freedom that gave birth to it, is that project compatible with democracy? Popper framed this 80 years ago: a tolerant society that tolerates those who want to abolish tolerance ends up disappearing. Defending democracy doesn't mean letting any project use it to sabotage itself. It means setting non-negotiable rules of the game: freedom of conscience, equality before the law, civil law above any religious law.
The second: how do we make the other players, China, Russia, the countries that still function, understand that the fall of the West is not good news for them? The West isn't just a geopolitical bloc. It's the matrix that produced the scientific method, the rule of law, the industrial revolution, the internet. If that matrix goes dark, it's not a rival disappearing, it's the engine of human progress stalling. And in a world of nuclear weapons, pandemics, and AI, a humanity without a free engine of innovation is taking an existential risk. Everyone has an interest in the West holding.
You are in a game.
The quest is hardcore. But you don't win a game you've already given up on in your head. You have to fight, build, and visualize victory. Those who believe it's already lost deserve to lose. They'll exit history, and others will write it in their place.
JTC retweeted
What’s coming was avoidable, but Republicans in Congress let Trump start a war, increase spending, arm a genocide, betray MAHA, and cover up for Epstein’s coconspirators. I was ousted with over $30 million of foreign lobby money for refusing to go along, and here we are.
JTC retweeted
Kohaku on PulseChain starts with three powerful privacy protocols: native Tornado Cash, Privacy Pools v2, and native Railgun.
Our goal is simple: give people the freedom to transact privately, on their own terms, and on PulseChain ideally.
Privacy should be part of everyday crypto use. We want to see that future on PulseChain.
JTC retweeted
What Sam is not saying yet is: There is a solution here which is to use coding agents to replace all the bad code (i.e. essentially all code) with code that is formally verified to have safety properties.
This is a huge and difficult undertaking yet the same non-AGI-yet-superpowerful AI tech that is doing all the hacking is capable to enable this.
If government wants to do something valuable to smooth the path to the Singularity, one helpful step would be to allocate a trillion dollars (oh maybe just try $500B for starters?) to open-source communities to roll out software for automatically replacing badly buggy code (again almost all code) w appropriately formally verifiable code...
Gov't can find trillions of $$ to bail out "too big to fail" companies in crisis -- it did it for the banks in 2008 and will do it for Big Tech if the circular financing causes a tech-industry financial collapse in late 2027/2028 ... it can find massive $$ for wars... but finding hundreds of billions of $$ to end world hunger or give the world a solid software foundation is somehow utterly infeasible...
We are not even to the stage of human-level AGI yet but we are already meeting fascinatingly and disturbingly unprecedented situations as modern AI tech meets legacy society and legacy IT systems. It's just going to get crazier, before ultimately -- if all goes well -- getting gloriously abundant for all... We need some "out of the box" thinking across all levels of society to get through this transitional phase with a modicum of grace amidst all the chaos...
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman just warned AI is finding bugs we can't patch fast enough. Here's what you need to know.
In a clip shared by Unusual Whales, Altman said models can find bugs outside the normal threat model of what we think a hacker can do. He called it "hardware-level, insane stuff." He said he couldn't think of a dramatic enough word, and added: "I no longer think we're gonna be able to just patch all the bugs."
The warning lands in the same week as a real AI-found flaw. Reports say the PHP vulnerabilities, known as PHP2Shell, were discovered using OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol. The flaws could let attackers run code remotely, disrupt services and expose customer data. Reports say they could affect about 70% of websites worldwide.
The response has been huge. The NSA and FBI warned organizations to patch the PHP flaws before attackers exploit them. Governments and companies worked through the night on updates. Some sites were reportedly shut down globally. OpenAI says every site using PHP can now safely upgrade its version to stay secure.
Altman also said OpenAI's best internal model is too powerful to release openly any time soon. Before that could happen, the internet's cyber defenses would need to change. The world would also need a new layer of protection against biological threats.
Reaction is split. Some say the internet as we know it is over, and that defense will have to assume breach and focus on isolating sensitive data. Others say it's hype, that AI's real edge in finding bugs is scale and cost, and that patching is still happening. Gary Marcus said that if the models are this risky, they should be taken off the market.
Key numbers:
- About 70% of websites worldwide potentially affected by the PHP flaw
- Flaws known as PHP2Shell, found with GPT-5.6 Sol
- NSA, FBI, UK government and OpenAI all responding
Altman's message: some AI-found bugs sit beyond the old threat model, and patching everything may no longer be possible.
“After 6 years of stealth…”
“…the feds called me and said it’s go time. Here is the new reason we should be scared of the AI psyop”
After six years in stealth, Atomic Machines is out. Our mission: on-demand, universal command of matter. First beachhead: the Matter Compiler, an AI-native manufacturing system that builds working micro-machines from code alone. No per-product tooling. No process development. Different code, different machine.
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JTC retweeted
I’ll tell you how the FBI survives this:
Congress comes up with a bill that increases the FBI’s budget, Trump threatens to primary every Republican who votes against it, and they all fall in line. That is how the FBI survives.
It’s all theater… refuse to be a thespian!
JTC retweeted
I showed @FBIDirectorKash the search warrant they served on @JamesOKeefeIII, dozens of pages fully redacted. James was never charged. DOJ/FBI still hasn’t unredacted it.
The Trump administration won’t prosecute those who weaponized the system, but can’t we at least expose them?
JTC retweeted
I don't recommend anyone scramble to move their funds to new wallets today. But we should take the risks to cryptography from AI-accelerated math seriously, and minimize our exposure to not just quantum-vulnerable cryptography, but also potentially AI-vulnerable cryptography.
The core new area of risk from this viewpoint is, unfortunately, ML-DSA / FHE / lattices.
(and it's also another reason, along with quantum, why ECDSA might fall even faster than expected, hence the "fresh address" recommendation)
So far most people have been in the mode of thinking "elliptic curves broken, hashes safe, lattices safe". But there is a good chance that the concrete security of lattices will take serious hits from the next two years of AI math.
The basic threat model is: factoring is something that naively takes 2^(n/2) time, but over decades smart people have found and optimized number field sieves, and degraded that to 2^O(n^(1/3)), which is why RSA keys and signatures need to be ~400 bytes (and not 64 bytes). What if there are skeletons in the closet like that, both for elliptic curves and lattices, that we are simply not smart enough to discover - but bots soon will be?
This is a major part of the reason why for the past year ethereum's lean roadmap has been going in the "hash-only" direction: no lattices, no ML-DSA, no Falcon, no lattice-based commitments inside ZK proofs, etc. Signatures in lean ethereum are all hash-based, either WOTS or SPHINCS-.
For signatures and proofs, we already know how to go hash-only. The bigger challenge is for *public-key encryption* - and this goes far beyond blockchains. Secure communication, anonymizing protocols, lots of things need public-key encryption.
And unfortunately there are long-standing mathematical theorems showing why public-key encryption cannot be done with hashes alone. You have to have some kind of trapdoor object that has at least one form of usable "structure" - either group theory (incl. isogenies) or lattices or code-based or potentially in the future even more newfangled and spooky things (local mixing?). But for anything that has structure, you should assume that AI will make at least some progress in breaking that structure. Here, one reasonable inference is that if you want to make something plausibly long-term secure, multiply the key sizes by 10.
To me that's a very plausible world and something not at all extreme to predict. If AI will bring us 50 years of math in 2 years, then that 50 years of math may very plausibly include a "naive factoring -> GNFS" level of improvement to our ability to break lattices. In that world, lattices will still exist, but they will have to be significantly bigger to guarantee the same level of safety.
And at those new larger sizes, hash-based constructions will beat lattice-based constructions on concrete efficiency in every use case where hash-based constructions are possible at all.
Theoretically, of course it's possible that hashes are broken too (eg. P = NP would imply that). But I think P = NP is very unlikely. And intuitively, it's much more likely that a mathematical object has exactly no exploitable structure (like hashes are intended to), than that a mathematical object has exactly ~3 forms of exploitable structure (for elliptic curves: associativity, Schoof, pairings) and not some secret fourth form of structure we have not yet discovered that greatly degrades its security (for elliptic curves, ECDLP and pairing security). Similar for LWE, SVP, RLWE and the zoo of lattice problems.
For this reason, we do not yet see any reason to worry and start padding the byte size of hashes (if we start to worry more, we would pad the round count first before doing anything to the byte size).
Concrete TLDR, my own personal views:
* Hash-based > lattice-based, in those situations where hash-based is possible at all
* For anything lattice-based, be much more paranoid on param sizes. Remember that blockchains are only a small portion of the cryptography story; this point goes far beyond blockchains and applies to eg. access to websites, secure messaging, Tor / VPNs ...
* For privacy protocols, strongly favor NOT putting encrypted notes onchain. Instead, send them offchain through some third-party mechanism.
* If it's not difficult for you, keeping your funds in addresses which have not yet been used to make a transaction is a good idea. If it's easy for you, do it. **But be careful about migrations; I personally have lost more money in botched migrations than I have lost in all hacks combined**.
* For multisig wallets, doing confirmations offchain is better than onchain, because this way the signatures of signer wallets do not get exposed to the public, so if ECDSA falls to AI much faster than expected, at least the multisig "gracefully degrades" to a 1-of-1 where the 1 is whoever was gathering the signatures - a much better place to be than "anyone can take the money"
firefly.social/post/x/210783…
JTC retweeted
I wrote a quick new post on "Digital Hygiene".
Basically there are some no-brainer decisions you can make in your life to dramatically improve the privacy and security of your computing and this post goes over some of them. Blog post link in the reply, but copy pasting below too.
Every now and then I get reminded about the vast fraud apparatus of the internet, re-invigorating my pursuit of basic digital hygiene around privacy/security of day to day computing. The sketchiness starts with major tech companies who are incentivized to build comprehensive profiles of you, to monetize it directly for advertising, or sell it off to professional data broker companies who further enrich, de-anonymize, cross-reference and resell it further. Inevitable and regular data breaches eventually runoff and collect your information into dark web archives, feeding into a whole underground spammer / scammer industry of hacks, phishing, ransomware, credit card fraud, identity theft, etc. This guide is a collection of the most basic digital hygiene tips, starting with the most basic to a bit more niche.
Password manager. Your passwords are your "first factor", i.e. "something you know". Do not be a noob and mint new, unique, hard passwords for every website or service that you sign up with. Combine this with a browser extension to create and Autofill them super fast. For example, I use and like 1Password. This prevents your passwords from 1) being easy to guess or crack, and 2) leaking one single time, and opening doors to many other services. In return, we now have a central location for all your 1st factors (passwords), so we must make sure to secure it thoroughly, which brings us to...
Hardware security key. The most critical services in your life (e.g. Google, or 1Password) must be additionally secured with a "2nd factor", i.e. "something you have". An attacker would have to be in possession of both factors to gain access to these services. The most common 2nd factor implemented by many services is a phone number, the idea being that you get a text message with a pin code to enter in addition to your password. Clearly, this is much better than having no 2nd factor at all, but the use of a phone number is known to be extremely insecure due to the SIM swap attack. Basically, it turns out to be surprisingly easy for an attacker to call your phone company, pretend they are you, and get them to switch your phone number over to a new phone that they control. I know this sounds totally crazy but it is true, and I have many friends who are victims of this attack. Therefore, purchase and set up hardware security keys - the industrial strength protection standard. In particular, I like and use YubiKey. These devices generate and store a private key on the device secure element itself, so the private key is never materialized on a suspiciously general purpose computing device like your laptop. Once you set these up, an attacker will not only need to know your password, but have physical possession of your security key to log in to a service. Your risk of getting pwned has just decreased by about 1000X. Purchase and set up 2-3 keys and store them in different physical locations to prevent lockout should you physically lose one of the keys. The security keys support a few authentication methods. Look for "U2F" in the 2nd factor settings of your service as the strongest protection. E.g. Google and 1Password support it. Fallback on "TOTP" if you have to, and note that your YubiKeys can store TOTP private keys, so you can use the YubiKey Authenticator app to access them easily through NFC by touching your key to the phone to get your pin when logging in. This is significantly better than storing TOTP private keys on other (software) authenticator apps, because again you should not trust general purpose computing devices. It is beyond the scope of this post to go into full detail, but basically I strongly recommend the use of 2-3 YubiKeys to dramatically strengthen your digital security.
Biometrics. Biometrics are the third common authentication factor ("something you are"). E.g. if you're on iOS I recommend setting up FaceID basically everywhere, e.g. to access the 1Password app and such.
Security questions. Dinosaur businesses are obsessed with the idea of security questions like "what is your mother's maidan name?", and force you to set them up from time to time. Clearly, these are in the category of "something you know" so they are basically passwords, but conveniently for scammers, they are easy to research out on the open internet and you should refuse any prompts to participate in this ridiculous "security" exercise. Instead, treat security questions like passwords, generate random answers to random questions, and store them in your 1Password along with your passwords.
Disk encryption. Always ensure that your computers use disk encryption. For example, on Macs this total no-brainer feature is called "File Vault". This feature ensures that if your computer gets stolen, an attacker won't be able to get the hard disk and go to town on all your data.
Internet of Things. More like @internetofshit. Whenever possible, avoid "smart" devices, which are essentially incredibly insecure, internet-connected computers that gather tons of data, get hacked all the time, and that people willingly place into their homes. These things have microphones, and they routinely send data back to the mothership for analytics and to "improve customer experience" lol ok. As an example, in my younger and naive years I once purchased a CO2 monitor from China that demanded to know everything about me and my precise physical location before it would tell me the amount of CO2 in my room. These devices are a huge and very common attack surface on your privacy and security and should be avoided.
Messaging. I recommend Signal instead of text messages because it end-to-end encrypts all your communications. In addition, it does not store metadata like many other apps do (e.g. iMessage, WhatsApp). Turn on disappearing messages (e.g. 90 days default is good). In my experience they are an information vulnerability with no significant upside.
Browser. I recommend Brave browser, which is a privacy-first browser based on Chromium. That means that basically all Chrome extensions work out of the box and the browser feels like Chrome, but without Google having front row seats to your entire digital life.
Search engine. I recommend Brave search, which you can set up as your default in the browser settings. Brave Search is a privacy-first search engine with its own index, unlike e.g. Duck Duck Go which basically a nice skin for Bing, and is forced into weird partnerships with Microsoft that compromise user privacy. As with all services on this list, I pay $3/mo for Brave Premium because I prefer to be the customer, not the product in my digital life. I find that empirically, about 95% of my search engine queries are super simple website lookups, with the search engine basically acting as a tiny DNS. And if you're not finding what you're looking for, fallback to Google by just prepending "!g" to your search query, which will redirect it to Google.
Credit cards. Mint new, unique credit cards per merchant. There is no need to use one credit card on many services. This allows them to "link up" your purchasing across different services, and additionally it opens you up to credit card fraud because the services might leak your credit card number. I like and use privacy dot com to mint new credit cards for every single transaction or merchant. You get a nice interface for all your spending and notifications for each swipe. You can also set limits on each credit card (e.g. $50/month etc.), which dramatically decreases the risk of being charged more than you expect. Additionally, with a privacy dot com card you get to enter totally random information for your name and address when filling out billing information. This is huge, because there is simply no need and totally crazy that random internet merchants should be given your physical address. Which brings me to...
Address. There is no need to give out your physical address to the majority of random services and merchants on the internet. Use a virtual mail service. I currently use Earth Class Mail but tbh I'm a bit embarrassed by that and I'm looking to switch to Virtual Post Mail due to its much strong commitments to privacy, security, and its ownership structure and reputation. In any case, you get an address you can give out, they receive your mail, they scan it and digitize it, they have an app for you to quickly see it, and you can decide what to do with it (e.g. shred, forward, etc.). Not only do you gain security and privacy but also quite a bit of convenience.
Email. I still use gmail just due to sheer convenience, but I've started to partially use Proton Mail as well. And while we're on email, a few more thoughts. Never click on any link inside any email you receive. Email addresses are extremely easy to spoof and you can never be guaranteed that the email you got is a phishing email from a scammer. Instead, I manually navigate to any service of interest and log in from there. In addition, disable image loading by default in your email's settings. If you get an email that requires you to see images, you can click on "show images" to see them and it's not a big deal at all. This is important because many services use embedded images to track you - they hide information inside the image URL you get, so when your email client loads the image, they can see that you opened the email. There's just no need for that. Additionally, confusing images are one way scammers hide information to avoid being filtered by email servers as scam / spam.
VPN. If you wish to hide your IP/location to services, you can do so via VPN indirection. I recommend Mullvad VPN. I keep VPN off by default, but enable it selectively when I'm dealing with services I trust less and want more protection from.
DNS-based blocker. You can block ads by blocking entire domains at the DNS level. I like and use NextDNS, which blocks all kinds of ads and trackers. For more advanced users who like to tinker, pi-hole is the physical alternative.
Network monitor. I like and use The Little Snitch, which I have installed and running on my MacBook. This lets you see which apps are communicating, how much data and when, so you can keep track of what apps on your computer "call home" and how often. Any app that communicates too much is sus, and should potentially be uninstalled if you don't expect the traffic.
I just want to live a secure digital life and establish harmonious relationships with products and services that leak only the necessary information. And I wish to pay for the software I use so that incentives are aligned and so that I am the customer. This is not trivial, but it is possible to approach with some determination and discipline.
Finally, what's not on the list. I mostly still use Gmail + Gsuite because it's just too convenient and pervasive. I also use 𝕏 instead of something exotic (e.g. Mastodon), trading off sovereignty for convenience. I don't use a VoIP burner phone service (e.g. MySudo) but I am interested in it. I don't really mint new/unique email addresses but I want to. The journey continues. Let me know if there are other digital hygiene tips and tricks that should be on this list.
Link to blog post version in the reply, on my brand new Bear ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ blog cute 👇
JTC retweeted
GM 🤝
We’ve completely replaced third-party infrastructure with our own across all major EVM networks supported by ZKX Wallet.
This is an important milestone toward making ZKX Wallet faster, more reliable, and more private.
Privacy goes beyond the wallet app. It also depends on the RPCs, APIs, and servers handling your requests.
If those services are operated by third parties you cannot verify or control, your privacy still depends on whom you trust.
JTC retweeted
How do you pay off $40 trillion in debt?
Easy.
Print another $40 trillion. 😂
But here’s the bigger question:
When people take profits out of the stock market, where does that capital go next?
Bonds? Definitely not.
Sit in cash forever? Probably not.
Wait another decade for the next housing cycle? Not everyone will.
A lot of capital will keep searching for productive businesses, new technology, and alternative assets including crypto.
That’s why I remain bullish on crypto and PulseChain.
But speculation alone isn’t enough.
We need to build more useful infrastructure, better financial tools, better markets, and better businesses onchain tools that help people actually create value and earn sustainable income.
JTC retweeted
ok i think i finally figured out why alignment has gone basically nowhere after 15 years and several billion dollars. the problem is hard sure. but have you met the people in charge of it
1) the leadership does not know how computers work. ask one what happens when you type a url into a browser and watch them start sweating. dns is a spooky word. they genuinely believe the model lives in "the cloud" like a ghost haunting a castle
2) zero idea how large scale distributed systems work. never been paged at 3am. never watched one bad bgp announcement take half the internet offline. their big threat model is the ai "copying itself across the internet" like its a floppy disk virus from 1998. brother it needs 50 megawatts, a liquid cooling loop and a personal relationship with jensen. it is not escaping onto your smart fridge
3) they dont understand the stack they are supposedly protecting us from. ask about inference servers, kv cache, batching, egress, rate limits. blank stare. ask how the model will seize the power grid and you get a 45 minute answer with a hand drawn diagram and three links to their own blog
4) nobody can define an agent. ask ten of them and you get eleven definitions and a 30 page google doc. to the rest of us an agent is a while loop that calls tools and eats a 429 every thirty seconds. to them its a digital god in its larval stage. my agent cant book a dentist appointment without asking me three times if im sure
5) they started from "everyone dies" and worked backwards so every result is bad news somehow. model refuses, deceptive. model complies, sycophantic. model does well on evals, well now its scheming about the evals. i cant think of a single thing a model could do that would get them to say ok maybe we're fine
JTC retweeted
What happens when headlines replace hard facts?
"Truth Under Fire" explores how Charlie Kirk was framed—and what it reveals about narrative warfare and the future of free speech.
Watch the full documentary now on The Epoch Times.👇
JTC retweeted
Think we're freaking out over nothing? Every traditional vaccine is eventually going to be replaced by mRNA. Here's where things stand just with Moderna. By keeping mRNA on the market, FDA has proven it does not care about safety. I am therefore telling my patients not to get ANY vaccines - FDA has lost all credibility.
JTC retweeted
Bill Gates just said we may have to suffer a “BIG CYBER ATTACK” before we “respond as fully as we should” to AI.
That sounds like a threat to me.
AI false flag risk remains HIGH.
JTC retweeted
One of the greatest viruses of the modern man is looking at Instagram Stories. You will melt your brain looking at a barrage of outcomes—like vacations, parties, cars—with no visibility of the process that got them there.
JTC retweeted
Back in the late 1800s and early 1900s when millions of immigrants flooded our shores, no paperwork was required to immigrate. No passports, visas, or work permits. Anyone who could afford a ticket could board a ship, arrive in America, answer a few basic questions, and be on their way.
They could stay as long as they wanted, work wherever they wanted, buy property, start businesses, and basically do anything any American citizen could do. In fact, in most states, they could legally vote in local, state, and even national elections, subject to the same poll tax, literacy test, or other qualifications required of American citizens.
If they wanted to naturalize, they just needed to register their intent and were given seven years to complete the paperwork necessary to become American citizens, which millions of immigrants were proud to do.
Things began to change in the 1930s with the advent of social security numbers, and then more so with the Alien Registration Act of 1940, signed into law as a WWII security measure. When the war ended, instead of being repealed, in 1946 it evolved into what we now call Green Cards.
In effect, we had completely open borders and the country thrived. In fact, during the decades we now call the Gilded Age—the high-growth period that Donald Trump claims he wants to emulate—our borders were wide open. The reason this worked so well is that we had no welfare state. People came to America for freedom and opportunity only. They came to contribute to our economy, not live off it. They did not drain our resources; they added to them.
The lesson is that immigration is not the problem. The problem is the welfare state. Shut off that magnet and America will no longer attract people looking for free stuff. In fact, we need to turn off that magnet for everyone, so those who are looking for free stuff will leave to seek it out someplace else.