What are Bitcoin Runes and why I love them? Bitcoin was originally built to do one thing and one thing only - hold and transfer BTC. But the world wants to do moar with Bitcoin. For example, use it to create, trade and transfer other assets, that aren't necessarily BTC. The talented Mr. Casey Rodarmor created the Runes protocol as a way to "etch" into Bitcoin messages fungible tokens (like ERC20 style). The safety of these Runes isn't guaranteed by Bitcoin's core protocol, but rather relies on indexers to parse and interpret them correctly. The data about Runes isn't screened and verified by Bitcoin miners, which means they don't have the safety of Bitcoin. But nevertheless users do trade in them and find them interesting. Why do I like them? I am a Bitcoin Maxi in the following sense: I want Satoshi's invention to be the infrastructure on which most digital assets of value or based on. I want this to empower humans and increase their freedom. But (!) this requires Bitcoin to allow more economic activities than just hodling and transferring BTC. So Runes is one such activity that, I hope, will lead Bitcoiners to want and do more, like apply an OP_CAT soft fork. THE END.

Whenever I use the conventional banking system, whenever I think of getting a phone call or a message saying I can’t do this or I can’t do that with my money, whenever I read about bans and freezes in conventional banks, I think to myself: “Crypto is gonna conquer the world.”

Wrong question: Starknet is ..

What's OP_CAT and why do I care about it? Bitcoin's computer is a bit like a clunky scientific calculator, the kind used in high school. Each button is called an "op_code." And from time to time, the Bitcoin community may agree on adding a new button. OP_CAT is one such potential button. Satoshi added it, then removed it, back in the day. What OP_CAT does is something pretty simple: it joins together two strings of characters, like "copy-paste", so it's a pretty simple and safe button. But if you add it to the scientific calculator that is Bitcoin, suddenly you allow Bitcoin's computer to verify ZK-STARKs and other proof systems. It opens the way to rollups and massive scale, in a self-custodial way that stays true to Bitcoin's and Satoshi's principles. I'm 100% sure Satoshi isn't around. If s/he were, s/he’d have had OP_CAT (and many other op_codes) on Bitcoin long, long ago.

Love this talk by @peter_szilagyi , especially this: "What I think Ethereum should do is go back to allow anyone to run it (a node) on a toaster." Agree!!!

GM world. Which crypto podcast is your favorite? Share your recommendations pls 🔥

Core principles matter.

The part I love best about being StarkWare CEO is listening to, and being corrected by, my team members who are smarter and more knowledgable than me.

Story time -- The fastest prover in the west and how it came about. When we founded StarkWare in 2018 we set to build the first production-grade STARK prover. At the time, the limiting factor was gas cost on Ethereum. It was simplest and cheapest to build a prover using huge numbers (256-bit ones). This led to a simple STARK prover that we knew could be made more efficient by reducing field size. Fast forward to 2023. The whole world by now is convinced that zkSTARKs are the end game, and many teams start to build systems using small fields, that lead to faster provers. In summer 2023 we started a project to pick the next gen proving technology. We surveyed all existing proving technologies -- SNARKs, folding based stuff, GKR, and more. We very very quickly realized that the dominating performance factor is the size of the finite field is what matters, and 32 bit primes are best. Why? (1) all modern HW architectures are optimized for those, (2) why prime (and not binary?) because GPUs don't support binary multiplication well. OK, so that leaves us with proving technologies like GKR and STARK, over 32b primes. Now we faced a problem. The very best field for fast computation is M31, but it lacks the group structure to have fast STARKs. Luckily, the brilliant trio -- Ulrich Habock (then at Polygon, now full time at StarkWare), David Levit, and Shahar Papini figured out a way to use the "circle group" over M31 to get an optimal solution. The new team started implementing the math. In the very most efficient way we could think of, testing and validating efficiency, and also building it in a way that's modular enough for other teams to use. At the same time, the AIR constraint infrastructure was rebuilt from scratch, based on our previous experience, to lead to something that's sound and efficient. And now, Stwo is entering production in Starknet, reducing costs and latency. The benchmarks we tested are out of this world. At the same time, multiple external teams are using it to build their infra. I think it'll be the proving gold standard open source prover, and y'all are invited to use it. THE END.

Why am I bullish on Starknet? Best tech. True, TVL and DeFi volume could go higher. But I am thinking long term. The ecosystem is brewing, waiting for another spark, and the spark will come. And when it does, users and devs will discover that best tech means best UX, best security, best features, and those will not be reduced once activity goes up. Why is it the best tech? - Next-gen and best-ever smart contract language. Yes, Cairo is much better than Solidity or Solana’s Rust. - Next-gen smart accounts (thanks to native account abstraction) -> better UX for end users, along with top-tier self-custodial security. - Largest compute power on-chain -> Perp exchanges, gaming devs, and other heavy compute apps can run complex logic you won’t find anywhere else in blockchain. - Safest connectivity to Bitcoin and Ethereum. - The only L2 actively moving toward full, true decentralization. - Most redundancy when it comes to sequencers and provers. The safest, fastest, most sound proving tech out there. So I'm thinking long term, and I'm super bullish on Starknet. And you should be too.