This is especially important to watch given recent events. Between the Tea app drama and laws like we’ve seen from the UK it’s clear that progress is needed in the digital ID space.

dear ethereum community, we need to fix and prevent this in order to both scale to, and protect the world. the next wave of apps will ask for a selfie and a passport page before you can even press play. that is a privacy leak waiting to happen and it does not help the apps, because storing millions of passports is a liability. remember the recent tea app breach when ids leaked? spotify does not want that headline. zero knowledge proofs give us a cleaner path. with one tap your wallet can show spotify only one fact: i am over 18 > no birth date > no address > no id number, nothing else. the math proves the claim while every other field stays hidden. everyone wins > users keep their personal data at home > spotify and every other platform cut storage cost and breach risk > regulators still get the age gate they want this is already possible with some of the zk snark tools that exist; what we are missing is polished ux that meets other companies where they are and loud education. ethereum fixes this. the world just needs to see it. proofs not passports.

The people are right. My profile picture was way out of date. Let’s just say I became a better cook since then and leave it at that.

A disappointing item is the report’s coverage of the FinCEN CVC Mixing rulemaking. The report punts on offering a firm recommendation here, merely saying that Treasury should consider next steps. Coin Center strongly advocates for the abandonment of that rulemaking or else its significant narrowing. As the original NPRM was drafted, CVC mixing was defined to include all manner of entirely legitimate privacy-preserving activities that crypto users can and should perform, such as avoiding address reuse. By consequence the original NPRM effectively would label as a “primary money laundering concern” the entirely legal and purely domestic activities of ordinary Americans. The report doesn’t advocate for that bad rulemaking but it certainly equivocates as to whether that proposed policy was a mistake and should be dropped before the rule goes final. It was a mistake and should be abandoned. American would hardly be a welcoming home for crypto if the normal and safe way of using it to protect your privacy was classified as a primary money laundering concern. 4/

Today the President’s Working Group on Digital Asset Markets released their long awaited report, framing the administration’s goals for crypto policy. Here’s a quick reaction thread focused on Coin Center’s top issues, individual liberty, privacy, and commonsense taxation. 1/

The outcome of the Tornado Cash case will have a huge effect on the remainder of my working life. IMHO everything worth building in this space is going to piss off one powerful entity or another. If writing powerful code isn’t protected by law, then we can’t build anything worth building out in the open. Everything worth building will have to be built by anons or non-US citizens. If having your code be used by criminals is sufficient to make you a criminal, then we cannot legally build *anything* that is permissionless. If Roman loses, my options are: - go work on some gatekept, permissioned, centralized, cucked project that doesn’t empower anyone — (I’d rather become a goat herder) - go underground and build illegal code anon (mad respect for people who do that, but I have a family to raise and I’ve seen enough prison movies to not want to go there) - leave tech and do… whatever non-tech people do. Herd goats or something. The jury has a lot of lives and careers in their hands and probably don’t even realize it.

Sitting in on Storm’s trial, I can’t help but feel violated in getting an up close experience of how the government can cherry pick information that’s been collected on you (e.g., transactions, messages, IP address activity) and paint any picture of you that they want. Just further solidifies why privacy is a foundational protection against government abuse; why it matters so damn much that people can build privacy-preserving technology.

fixing the block rewards taxation simultaneously is: fair, promotes decentralization and promotes validation within the United States it is somehow a win-win-win

The President’s Digital Assets Working Group Report is coming out today. It will be expansive. Coin Center is watching for two issues in particular: - Fix tax treatment of block rewards - Walk back dangerous surveillance proposals.

We are about to experience an age of unprecedented censorship and surveillance and some people are applauding it because they have the forethought of a sea urchin.