@traderader
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DeFi DeGen :: Searching for hidden treasures 🌄
Temple of Doom
Joined January 2020
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Trader of the lost DeFi retweeted
This looks like this could be exactly what I'm investigating. Anyone affected, please contact me or open your ledger and send me pictures so we can confirm if there's a bug in there (pictures: ledger board on top, spy implant below).
nitter.cf/Ledger_Support/status/…
Ledger is investigating reports of loss of funds from users in South East Asia who purchased products from a reseller named CryptoBillis. As a precaution, and pending the results of our investigation, we have asked CryptoBilis to pause all sales and shipments of Ledger devices. We recommend Ledger users who purchased from this reseller in the last 90 days to not initiate set up if you have not done so yet. If you have set up your Ledger device, consider moving assets to a new Ledger signer (with new seed). We will continue to inform customers of updates as the investigation progresses.
Reach out to Ledger customer support through official channels with any questions: support.ledger.com/
Trader of the lost DeFi retweeted
Ledger is investigating reports of loss of funds from users in South East Asia who purchased products from a reseller named CryptoBillis. As a precaution, and pending the results of our investigation, we have asked CryptoBilis to pause all sales and shipments of Ledger devices. We recommend Ledger users who purchased from this reseller in the last 90 days to not initiate set up if you have not done so yet. If you have set up your Ledger device, consider moving assets to a new Ledger signer (with new seed). We will continue to inform customers of updates as the investigation progresses.
Reach out to Ledger customer support through official channels with any questions: support.ledger.com/
All in. Every time. Julia Garner and Anthony Boyle star as Caroline Ellison and Sam Bankman-Fried in this limited series about the love scorned prodigies behind the FTX scandal.
The Altruists premieres November 19.
Trader of the lost DeFi retweeted
"Our main message in client meetings was the following: the biggest systemic risk in the market next year is not France but “something going wrong” in the AI ecosystem: a safety event, a failed IPO, or disappointing revenues. Concentration risk is immense, and it is this dollar negative (and very bond positive) event risk that is most under-priced in markets at the moment."
- George Saravelos, Head of Deutsche FX research
Trader of the lost DeFi 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…
Trader of the lost DeFi retweeted
Goodbye, Poseidon!
An epic 8-year, 8-figure rabbit hole in post-quantum cryptography reaches its dream conclusion. The Ethereum Foundation is abandoning Poseidon for L1, pivoting to SHA or BLAKE. This milestone unlocks ultimate security for lean Ethereum and foreshadows a golden era of hash-based cryptography.
Since 2018, the Ethereum Foundation has invested in magic cryptographic bricks, so-called "SNARK-friendly hashes". In 2019, Poseidon was born. It held strong and became the dominant SNARK-friendly hash, securing billions via zkrollups and zkVMs.
In a stunning reversal, breakthrough SNARK designs show that SNARK-friendly hashes aren't necessary after all. Off-the-shelf traditional hash functions like SHA2 and BLAKE2s can now match Poseidon in a SNARK. In hindsight the key was not SNARK-friendly hashes, but hash-friendly SNARKs.
The secret is doing maths over the smallest prime number: 2. So-called "binary fields" natively speak the language of bits, aligning with the boolean operations inside traditional hashes. This is a stark departure from "prime fields", where awkward large-prime arithmetic makes bit manipulation painfully expensive.
We're talking sci-fi cryptography. 1M traditional hash calls proven per second, on a laptop. Just 100x overhead vs native CPU boolean compute. Nobody predicted such performance, not even the handful of binary-field visionaries. Hat tip to the research geniuses: Jim and Ben with Binius in 2023; Ron, Benedikt and William with Flock in June.
With SHA2, the lean aesthetic of minimal assumptions reaches its climax. The EF's principled stance on pure hash-based cryptography has aged like fine wine. We now enjoy foundations the world can trust for decades and centuries, foundations worthy of the dream of an internet of value.
Speed of deployment is a secondary win. There's no longer a need to wait years for Poseidon cryptanalysis to bake. Emile and Thomas from the EF post-quantum team are moving at breakneck speed with binary fields. The strawmap now points to a production-grade leanVM in 2027, with CL, DL, EL deployments in 2028.
As AI becomes exceptional at cryptanalysis, the contrarian bet to avoid riskier structures like lattices and isogenies is visibly paying off. The past weeks have been brutal. Lattice-based "HAWK" and isogeny-based "SQIsign", both signature schemes in NIST's Round 3, have suffered blows. Sources I trust say more blood is coming.
On AI, the open autoresearch trend kicked off by ECDSA[.]fail is spreading fast, with amazing outcomes from zk[.]golf and SNARK[.]fast. Days ago SNARK[.]fast crossed 1.8M BLAKE3/sec proven on an M3 Max. Stay tuned for fresh autoresearch challenges dropping tomorrow.
Also tomorrow: Ethproofs call #10, dedicated to binary fields. Possibly the most noteworthy Ethproofs call yet. Experts leading the charge will present the future of hash-based SNARKs at 2pm UTC. What an incredible time to be alive. To witness history, DM me for a calendar invite :)
Today I can confidently claim that hash-based cryptography has won out for blockchain post-quantum signatures. SNARK succinctness compresses arbitrarily many signatures into one small proof per block. SNARK flexibility yields k-of-n threshold signatures, complex multisigs, and more.
Ultimate security. Uncompromising performance. Full programmability.
Believe in something. Believe in hashes.
Trader of the lost DeFi retweeted
Today I call upon the blockchain industry to calmly begin planning for "bunker mode". My personal recommendation is to set in motion a controlled mass migration of assets to fresh addresses, i.e. addresses whose pubkeys remain hidden behind a hash.
Holders, starting with large and sophisticated ones, should consider moving the bulk of their funds to addresses that have never signed a transaction. And when they do sign one, they should also move remaining funds to a new address (possibly generated from the same seed phrase).
Don't rush. While I believe there is cause for action a rushed migration would do more harm than good. Don't panic either. Moving assets to protected addresses is a simple, preventative step which does not require new cryptography or new wallets.
IMO it is now reasonable to brace for the possibility that ECDSA breaks before qday, in the worst case in months not years. By "break" I mean fast private key recovery (e.g. in one week) on available hardware (e.g. a large GPU cluster).
Recent days have been humbling for human mathematical intuition. Long-held, unquestioned hypotheses have fallen. This includes the n log(n) bound for integer multiplication and the 3SUM conjecture. In hindsight, May's unexpected disproof of the Erdős unit distance conjecture was our warning shot.
Yesterday's OpenAI drop made it clear that mathematical superintelligence is upon us. They say there are weeks where decades happen. We are about to live through weeks where centuries of mathematical progress happen. Could our magic 64-byte ECDSA signatures be too good to be true? Was it just security through obscurity all this time?
Elliptic curves feel especially vulnerable to superintelligence. Curves carry rich structure, with room for fancy tricks like Schoof, Frobenius, pairings. (By contrast, hashes are designed to minimise algebraic structure.)
Separately, as Ewin Tang can attest, an efficient quantum algorithm sometimes foreshadows an efficient classical one. We should be open to the possibility of a classical counterpart to Shor that breaks elliptic curves and RSA at once.
Also noteworthy is the striking under-representation of cryptographic breakthroughs among the 722 mathematical results OpenAI published. I've witnessed first-hand the US government censoring academic quantum cryptanalysis results. Backroom interventionism is my base case.
I urge large, sophisticated actors to lead by example. Project11's "risq list" (bitcoin-risq-list.projecteleven[.]com) is a great tracker of exposed BTC pubkeys. Binance, Bitbank, Robinhood, Bitfinex, and Tether have an opportunity to harden their cold storage. Next month I'll address institutions in London in a live Q&A (forum.ethereuminstitutional[.]org/london-2026).
Again, please do not rush. Wallets holding under 50 BTC enjoy partial cover from "Satoshi's shield", i.e. his 20K exposed addresses that hold 50 BTC each. Load-bearing signers like oracles and L2 security councils should consider rotating ECDSA pubkeys with every signed message and/or multi-signing with a hash-based schemes like SPHINCS.
Exiting bunker mode safely will require post-AI cryptography. My inclination is to go all-in on hash-based cryptography and avoid structured mathematical assumptions entirely, whether from curves, lattices, or isogenies. A single battle-tested hash (e.g. from the SHA or BLAKE families) yields plausible post-AI security.
The Ethereum roadmap on strawmap[.]org fully embraces hash-based cryptography with end-to-end formal verification as a response to the quantum threat. Those timelines must now be revisited and accelerated in light of mathematical superintelligence. I'll be pushing for maximum defensive acceleration.
Trader of the lost DeFi retweeted
Cryptography community is deeply worried today.
OpenAI's recent dump of solved problems has nothing cryptographic.
Very high chance that something important for crypto has been broken, but not released yet. Maybe even something fundamental to blockchain tech.
Today I call upon the blockchain industry to calmly begin planning for "bunker mode". My personal recommendation is to set in motion a controlled mass migration of assets to fresh addresses, i.e. addresses whose pubkeys remain hidden behind a hash.
Holders, starting with large and sophisticated ones, should consider moving the bulk of their funds to addresses that have never signed a transaction. And when they do sign one, they should also move remaining funds to a new address (possibly generated from the same seed phrase).
Don't rush. While I believe there is cause for action a rushed migration would do more harm than good. Don't panic either. Moving assets to protected addresses is a simple, preventative step which does not require new cryptography or new wallets.
IMO it is now reasonable to brace for the possibility that ECDSA breaks before qday, in the worst case in months not years. By "break" I mean fast private key recovery (e.g. in one week) on available hardware (e.g. a large GPU cluster).
Recent days have been humbling for human mathematical intuition. Long-held, unquestioned hypotheses have fallen. This includes the n log(n) bound for integer multiplication and the 3SUM conjecture. In hindsight, May's unexpected disproof of the Erdős unit distance conjecture was our warning shot.
Yesterday's OpenAI drop made it clear that mathematical superintelligence is upon us. They say there are weeks where decades happen. We are about to live through weeks where centuries of mathematical progress happen. Could our magic 64-byte ECDSA signatures be too good to be true? Was it just security through obscurity all this time?
Elliptic curves feel especially vulnerable to superintelligence. Curves carry rich structure, with room for fancy tricks like Schoof, Frobenius, pairings. (By contrast, hashes are designed to minimise algebraic structure.)
Separately, as Ewin Tang can attest, an efficient quantum algorithm sometimes foreshadows an efficient classical one. We should be open to the possibility of a classical counterpart to Shor that breaks elliptic curves and RSA at once.
Also noteworthy is the striking under-representation of cryptographic breakthroughs among the 722 mathematical results OpenAI published. I've witnessed first-hand the US government censoring academic quantum cryptanalysis results. Backroom interventionism is my base case.
I urge large, sophisticated actors to lead by example. Project11's "risq list" (bitcoin-risq-list.projecteleven[.]com) is a great tracker of exposed BTC pubkeys. Binance, Bitbank, Robinhood, Bitfinex, and Tether have an opportunity to harden their cold storage. Next month I'll address institutions in London in a live Q&A (forum.ethereuminstitutional[.]org/london-2026).
Again, please do not rush. Wallets holding under 50 BTC enjoy partial cover from "Satoshi's shield", i.e. his 20K exposed addresses that hold 50 BTC each. Load-bearing signers like oracles and L2 security councils should consider rotating ECDSA pubkeys with every signed message and/or multi-signing with a hash-based schemes like SPHINCS.
Exiting bunker mode safely will require post-AI cryptography. My inclination is to go all-in on hash-based cryptography and avoid structured mathematical assumptions entirely, whether from curves, lattices, or isogenies. A single battle-tested hash (e.g. from the SHA or BLAKE families) yields plausible post-AI security.
The Ethereum roadmap on strawmap[.]org fully embraces hash-based cryptography with end-to-end formal verification as a response to the quantum threat. Those timelines must now be revisited and accelerated in light of mathematical superintelligence. I'll be pushing for maximum defensive acceleration.
Trader of the lost DeFi retweeted
Apparently one of the frontier labs is in touch with the EF as they believe they’ve broken some non-trivial components of Ethereum’s cryptography
Trader of the lost DeFi retweeted
Huge. Getting this done means at least more than 3x L1 scale, 2.5x increased contract size and a ton more useful features.
Trader of the lost DeFi retweeted
there are NK / bad actors in the conference btw
especially at high profile rich people events, expect them to be there
lots of wolf in sheeps clothing
A friend's Fomo wallet got emptied for $4m today
Don't use conference wifi
Don't scan a stranger's qr code
Don't leave your belongings unattended
Stay safe out there.
Trader of the lost DeFi retweeted
First time in 7,5 years in crypto that i went to a crypto conference (long tweet).
Contrary to what you see on your twitter stream by your favorite crypto influencer on dubai, here a serious look behind the surface of token 2049 & dubai: the positive & the negative.
I thought, ´well, war is close, so why not get as close as possible and leave the safe mountain´.
´You came down the mountain and went to Dubai?´
Yes.
Last time i left the mountain for a longer time ftx collapsed, lol, this time dubai was under water, and the turbulence in the plane so bad on arrival i vomited all over, but i still laughed my ass off, so funny when the body goes all haywire.
I live in nature, so i sometimes visit cities when i go for trips, mainly to observe how humanity is doing and stay up to date a bit on technological progress etc.
So lets look at the negative & the positive of dubai & token 2049
Observations:
The negative of Dubai:
- Absolute soul crushing place. Superficiality & decadence and outward pretending been taken to the next level there.
- Even worse soul crushing slavery for the 89% of imported workers that maintain the rich, disgusting really. And yes, i know it is like that in many places in the Middle-East and the world, but here it is so ´normalized´ to have that slave labour army everywhere while the rest sips champagne. They smile to you, but behind the fake smiles is a lot of suffering. People love dubai, but they refuse to go see the super ugly side, which is workers from india, pakistan, bangladesh, that are paid 1 or 2 dollars an hour, while serving the super rich, living in horrendous conditions. Went to visit a part of Dubai where they live, not easy to get, and pfff....
- No nature, no trees, no resistance they have to disasters at all. Everything, literally everything is imported, people, food, animals, all of it. If somehow the global economy suffers, they will crash hard, but they will also bounce hard
- The negative energy this place is accumulating, with the emphasis of money & decadence and how they treat the workers will destroy this place. Morally speaking, or from a humane perspective, this cannot keep going like this and they will pay a heavy price for it one day. Although it will probably get even worse, all workers will soon be replaced by robots and send back to their slums in asia.
- all the airconditioned air is dead ´air´. It is energetically messed up because everywhere you go the air is charged by these airconditioning machines. And outside it is insanely hot. Looking forward to live mountainair again. Long term it is super unhealthy to permanently live in airconditioned air, i know most people are not sensitive enough to feel it, but it really is bad for one´s health.
The positive of Dubai
- Dubai is like the best teaching ground ever if you really observe well. So many rich people, and most still so unhappy. Money, consumption, bullshit, superficiality. And so much pain. Conclusion? Material wealth does not bring happiness, goh...what a surprise right. Good place to consume all the toys & parties & bars & distractions to then finally realise there is more in life
- Business climate is amazing. Perfect place if you want to network or really have the determination to make it financially. Like a copy of singapore. So impressive they build all these so fast, and keep making it very easy regarding crypto regulations, opening business, attracting workers etc. I wish Europe would do business so easily
- this place will become the capital of crypto if this keeps going, so many whales and og´s already live here, it is a magnet for it
- nice mix of cultures and genetics, creates physically beautiful people, like you see in so many large cities in the world, also nice to see there are still women & men here, emphasis on family, but let´s skip the anti-woke comment part, you get what i mean.
- feels like walking around in a live gta game, really, with all the supercars, models everywhere, weird characters, criminal types, and extraordinary decadence. So surreal it is unbelievable. Never laughed so much in a week.
The negative of token 2049:
- More convinced than ever that crypto will change nothing. It is the same greedfest as the previous money system and it will not improve human contentment, only inner work can do that. Already knew all that, but nice to see it directly. Human consciousness development stays far behind our technological progress. We are still the same nasty monkeys, just with bigger sticks so to speak. So much progress to make on the inner front
- Super funny to see ugly cryptotraders in the morning at breakfast with their laptops and graphs on the screen who are sitting their with escorts and surely pay for a ´girlfriend experience´.
- hilarious to see mostly young men walk around the conference like ´what i am doing here, who do i talk to, how do i connect to people, and so many have so utterly lost their social skills through only looking at the screen that they really don´t even know how to communicate´. Seeing this crowd, i should really open inner development centers.
- army of wanna be vc fund managers, who probably manage 2 dollars, who then out of boredom sit on camels or play video games or go to a crypto fight night.
- most of these idiotic famous influencers are actually idiotic in real life too, no surprise of course. most totally lost and are miserable even though rich financially ,again no surprise.
- a bit disappointed with new projects, feels this cycle way too much attention is on the degen side.
The positive of token 2049:
- A lot of original people are in crypto, that is for sure, so that is nice to see, besides a lot of wannabees and influencers etc, still met and saw a lot of very intelligent people.
- So funny that all these people came for a cryptoconference and enjoy the wealth & luxury, and got stuck on airports or flooded roads, karma (action-reactoin), a beautiful lesson learned in patience and letting go of expectation for many
- Main reason to go down there was to see who i am trading against (no wonder i made good $, large part of the people is super impatient and emotionally unbalanced), finally observe the crypto crowd in real life, and spend time in person with some people i respect enormously. I like to say thank you in person to people that have been an inspiration to me in my life, so i did.
- runes & ordinals will do exceptionally well, so many people were talking about it. knew it was a hype, but not that it was going to be that big. will be massive
- solana will keep doing well too, the developer army they have is impressive to say the least. can see solana going to at least 500, who knows maybe 1000 even this cycle, if they fix the chain and speed it up.
- excellent to be anonymous, and stay low key, as i ve done for years. Some very wealth people i talked to all said it is not worth it to be in the spotlight, and some would even prefer to return to being anonymous and not known at all, too much hassle and shit and danger when you become a target.
- of course the decadent fake superficial crypto influencers love dubai, because what you are, you attract, so if you want superficiality, you can find plenty of it there. Most serious people i met who live there want to leave and go back to be closer to nature, a positive sign
- Was fortunate enough to spend most of the time with crypto OG´s outside of the conference, and it gives a way better real perspective than the quite ´superficial´ conference. There are some great founders & OG´s in crypto that do not get the respect and attention with their long term vision they deserve. Amazingly enough most of them are super interested in inner development. They are obviously rich beyond imagination in financial wealth, bust most are still searching for real contentment, balancing their energies, and expansion of consciousness, so in a way they are still searching for real wealth (on the inside), which is a great thing, because if you start looking, you often find things. Convinced me to redouble my efforts on bringing more good info on inner development to a broader public.
Conclusion:
Was the first time, and the last time i´ll attend a crypto conference, better meet people outside of it. Also nothing to really learn of seeing so many humans on a pile again, it is the same madness that has been going on for 1000s of years, same cycle of suffering that just repeats and repeats, as all esoteric traditions ve been saying for 1000s of years. The one on one conversations is where the real value is, to be able to go in depth.
Also, once again, going against the herd in crypto will make you successfull: sell when others buy, buy when others sell, don´t look for attention, and be original and don´t do what others do.
Lovely to hear that some people i respect a lot and became even better friends with will come to visit the humble mountain soon to spend time there.
Awe that flying is possible. Most people do not realise or appreciate enough how great it is that we have this technology which nobody would be able to believe 100 years ago, we are monkeys after all that came from trees.
Walking around dubai was like walking in a amusement parc movie kind of dream of surreality. Stunning that we create so much material stuff, and are still so discontent as a species. Crypto or bitcoin will not save the world, but the world does not need saving, only humans that find out what the ´I´ is and change the world from the inside out. Enjoyed the show a lot.
Looking forward to touching some green and gardening again tomorrow
Being a human and humanity is amazing.
Gratitude for this existence
Trader of the lost DeFi retweeted
Been to a token2049 event once, will never go again. My description of the time i went in Dubai is the most viral post i have ever done, below the link again for fun
Biggest lesson is that the absolute biggest idiots & clowns get invited to talk, which they love of course to boost their egos, with the exception of a couple of smart people as well but that is very rare. Most of it all is pretense, useless networking, sh*tty projects presenting themselves, and useless luxury indulgence to make you feel you are part of something important
In general you better stay away from these, all a waste of time in my humble opinion
nitter.cf/Innerdevcrypto/status/…
First time in 7,5 years in crypto that i went to a crypto conference (long tweet).
Contrary to what you see on your twitter stream by your favorite crypto influencer on dubai, here a serious look behind the surface of token 2049 & dubai: the positive & the negative.
I thought, ´well, war is close, so why not get as close as possible and leave the safe mountain´.
´You came down the mountain and went to Dubai?´
Yes.
Last time i left the mountain for a longer time ftx collapsed, lol, this time dubai was under water, and the turbulence in the plane so bad on arrival i vomited all over, but i still laughed my ass off, so funny when the body goes all haywire.
I live in nature, so i sometimes visit cities when i go for trips, mainly to observe how humanity is doing and stay up to date a bit on technological progress etc.
So lets look at the negative & the positive of dubai & token 2049
Observations:
The negative of Dubai:
- Absolute soul crushing place. Superficiality & decadence and outward pretending been taken to the next level there.
- Even worse soul crushing slavery for the 89% of imported workers that maintain the rich, disgusting really. And yes, i know it is like that in many places in the Middle-East and the world, but here it is so ´normalized´ to have that slave labour army everywhere while the rest sips champagne. They smile to you, but behind the fake smiles is a lot of suffering. People love dubai, but they refuse to go see the super ugly side, which is workers from india, pakistan, bangladesh, that are paid 1 or 2 dollars an hour, while serving the super rich, living in horrendous conditions. Went to visit a part of Dubai where they live, not easy to get, and pfff....
- No nature, no trees, no resistance they have to disasters at all. Everything, literally everything is imported, people, food, animals, all of it. If somehow the global economy suffers, they will crash hard, but they will also bounce hard
- The negative energy this place is accumulating, with the emphasis of money & decadence and how they treat the workers will destroy this place. Morally speaking, or from a humane perspective, this cannot keep going like this and they will pay a heavy price for it one day. Although it will probably get even worse, all workers will soon be replaced by robots and send back to their slums in asia.
- all the airconditioned air is dead ´air´. It is energetically messed up because everywhere you go the air is charged by these airconditioning machines. And outside it is insanely hot. Looking forward to live mountainair again. Long term it is super unhealthy to permanently live in airconditioned air, i know most people are not sensitive enough to feel it, but it really is bad for one´s health.
The positive of Dubai
- Dubai is like the best teaching ground ever if you really observe well. So many rich people, and most still so unhappy. Money, consumption, bullshit, superficiality. And so much pain. Conclusion? Material wealth does not bring happiness, goh...what a surprise right. Good place to consume all the toys & parties & bars & distractions to then finally realise there is more in life
- Business climate is amazing. Perfect place if you want to network or really have the determination to make it financially. Like a copy of singapore. So impressive they build all these so fast, and keep making it very easy regarding crypto regulations, opening business, attracting workers etc. I wish Europe would do business so easily
- this place will become the capital of crypto if this keeps going, so many whales and og´s already live here, it is a magnet for it
- nice mix of cultures and genetics, creates physically beautiful people, like you see in so many large cities in the world, also nice to see there are still women & men here, emphasis on family, but let´s skip the anti-woke comment part, you get what i mean.
- feels like walking around in a live gta game, really, with all the supercars, models everywhere, weird characters, criminal types, and extraordinary decadence. So surreal it is unbelievable. Never laughed so much in a week.
The negative of token 2049:
- More convinced than ever that crypto will change nothing. It is the same greedfest as the previous money system and it will not improve human contentment, only inner work can do that. Already knew all that, but nice to see it directly. Human consciousness development stays far behind our technological progress. We are still the same nasty monkeys, just with bigger sticks so to speak. So much progress to make on the inner front
- Super funny to see ugly cryptotraders in the morning at breakfast with their laptops and graphs on the screen who are sitting their with escorts and surely pay for a ´girlfriend experience´.
- hilarious to see mostly young men walk around the conference like ´what i am doing here, who do i talk to, how do i connect to people, and so many have so utterly lost their social skills through only looking at the screen that they really don´t even know how to communicate´. Seeing this crowd, i should really open inner development centers.
- army of wanna be vc fund managers, who probably manage 2 dollars, who then out of boredom sit on camels or play video games or go to a crypto fight night.
- most of these idiotic famous influencers are actually idiotic in real life too, no surprise of course. most totally lost and are miserable even though rich financially ,again no surprise.
- a bit disappointed with new projects, feels this cycle way too much attention is on the degen side.
The positive of token 2049:
- A lot of original people are in crypto, that is for sure, so that is nice to see, besides a lot of wannabees and influencers etc, still met and saw a lot of very intelligent people.
- So funny that all these people came for a cryptoconference and enjoy the wealth & luxury, and got stuck on airports or flooded roads, karma (action-reactoin), a beautiful lesson learned in patience and letting go of expectation for many
- Main reason to go down there was to see who i am trading against (no wonder i made good $, large part of the people is super impatient and emotionally unbalanced), finally observe the crypto crowd in real life, and spend time in person with some people i respect enormously. I like to say thank you in person to people that have been an inspiration to me in my life, so i did.
- runes & ordinals will do exceptionally well, so many people were talking about it. knew it was a hype, but not that it was going to be that big. will be massive
- solana will keep doing well too, the developer army they have is impressive to say the least. can see solana going to at least 500, who knows maybe 1000 even this cycle, if they fix the chain and speed it up.
- excellent to be anonymous, and stay low key, as i ve done for years. Some very wealth people i talked to all said it is not worth it to be in the spotlight, and some would even prefer to return to being anonymous and not known at all, too much hassle and shit and danger when you become a target.
- of course the decadent fake superficial crypto influencers love dubai, because what you are, you attract, so if you want superficiality, you can find plenty of it there. Most serious people i met who live there want to leave and go back to be closer to nature, a positive sign
- Was fortunate enough to spend most of the time with crypto OG´s outside of the conference, and it gives a way better real perspective than the quite ´superficial´ conference. There are some great founders & OG´s in crypto that do not get the respect and attention with their long term vision they deserve. Amazingly enough most of them are super interested in inner development. They are obviously rich beyond imagination in financial wealth, bust most are still searching for real contentment, balancing their energies, and expansion of consciousness, so in a way they are still searching for real wealth (on the inside), which is a great thing, because if you start looking, you often find things. Convinced me to redouble my efforts on bringing more good info on inner development to a broader public.
Conclusion:
Was the first time, and the last time i´ll attend a crypto conference, better meet people outside of it. Also nothing to really learn of seeing so many humans on a pile again, it is the same madness that has been going on for 1000s of years, same cycle of suffering that just repeats and repeats, as all esoteric traditions ve been saying for 1000s of years. The one on one conversations is where the real value is, to be able to go in depth.
Also, once again, going against the herd in crypto will make you successfull: sell when others buy, buy when others sell, don´t look for attention, and be original and don´t do what others do.
Lovely to hear that some people i respect a lot and became even better friends with will come to visit the humble mountain soon to spend time there.
Awe that flying is possible. Most people do not realise or appreciate enough how great it is that we have this technology which nobody would be able to believe 100 years ago, we are monkeys after all that came from trees.
Walking around dubai was like walking in a amusement parc movie kind of dream of surreality. Stunning that we create so much material stuff, and are still so discontent as a species. Crypto or bitcoin will not save the world, but the world does not need saving, only humans that find out what the ´I´ is and change the world from the inside out. Enjoyed the show a lot.
Looking forward to touching some green and gardening again tomorrow
Being a human and humanity is amazing.
Gratitude for this existence
Trader of the lost DeFi retweeted
It's been 10 days since the plasma:native unlock and 70% of the 1.67B unlocked tokens have not moved.
Of the remaining 491M, 297M has gone to exchanges (team mostly to Kraken, investors to Binance, Bybit and Coinbase) and 184M to other wallets.
Disclosure: Kairos Research holds XPL
Trader of the lost DeFi retweeted
JUST IN: ZachXBT asks for donations after spending $349.7K of his own money to investigate $1B+ crypto exploits.
The request came after he revealed the full story behind one of his riskiest investigations yet.
He says he used the money to pose as a laundering client inside a Chinese syndicate moving funds for DPRK.
The trail led to “Jimmy Green,” a Telegram user allegedly helping move funds from the $1.5B Bybit hack.
To keep Jimmy talking, ZachXBT says he had to accept a 5% loss on every order.
Over time, Jimmy appeared to trust him, sharing wallet addresses, screenshots and bridge transactions in real time.
ZachXBT says he matched those flows on-chain, and evidence eventually helped Tether freeze $442K USDT.
He says he is now seeking grants and donations to keep taking on high-risk investigations like this.
He also revealed he is currently sitting on “significant findings” from other cases.
Trader of the lost DeFi retweeted
David Friedberg: Rising Rates Could Trigger a Banking Shock Right Before the Midterms
@friedberg:
“We've got a rate problem.
In the last 30 days or so, right, we've seen short-term rates on treasuries climb by 60 basis points.
And so this massive increase in rates is obviously going to impact people's ability to refinance their home, buy a new car, purchase things on credit, and the majority of Americans fall under that umbrella.
And I think there's also kind of an economic challenge ahead with the rate problem, and I would argue, as I always do, that the rate problem is fundamentally rooted in the federal government and the insane spending.
And if you look at the impact that this rate is gonna have on banks, there's 4295 banks that have positive equity that report FDIC, their balance sheets every month.
Based on the actual reported balance sheet of these banks, about 95 banks are going to see an impairment of more than 20% of their equity in the last 30 days or so.
And those reports start to come out on October 30th. So the thing I worry a lot about is on October 30th, we're going to kind of see all these financial reports coming out from all the banks, all the lending institutions, and there's about 95 of them that are going to say, ‘Hey, we've got more than 20% impairment charge on our equity.’
That's going to be a massive shock, and then what are the implications of that?
And that's where we're going to start to wake up to the fact that the rate problem isn't just a purchasing problem for consumers, but it may actually have a bit of a rippling effect here in the economy, starting with the financial institutions.
So they publish their next monthly reports on the September 30th ending period on October 30th, and unfortunately, it coincides right with the election cycle.”
1/ How I infiltrated a Chinese organized crime syndicate that has laundered $1B+ across multiple exploits for Lazarus Group.
Posing as a client, I gathered intel that helped action freezes for the Feb 2025 Bybit exploit and attribute illicit activity onchain.
bro zachxbt is actually insane
this man went undercover as a money laundering client
spent $350K of his OWN money to gain the trust of a chinese launderer who was moving bybit hack funds for north korea
the guy started sharing everything. screenshots. wallet addresses. bridge transactions. in real time
zach was matching every single transaction on-chain as the guy was sending them
traced $12M+ across bitcoin, ethereum, solana, and tron
got tether to freeze $442K from the evidence alone
and the funniest part? in between discussing how to launder funds for north korea this guy was casually talking about playing mahjong and his weight loss plan 😭
bro thought he was talking to a client. he was talking to the most dangerous investigator in crypto
and zach funded this entire operation himself. $350K out of pocket. no guarantee he'd ever see it back
this is not the FBI. this is one guy with a laptop and a blockchain explorer
different breed
1/ How I infiltrated a Chinese organized crime syndicate that has laundered $1B+ across multiple exploits for Lazarus Group.
Posing as a client, I gathered intel that helped action freezes for the Feb 2025 Bybit exploit and attribute illicit activity onchain.
