Encrypt the Money. ZODL update.

Ecosystem Updates
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Ring
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Anthropic’s beef with the US Department of War made headlines this week. This unleashed all sorts of opinions on patriotism, governmental control, and ultimately, who controls immense power.

In a statement, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called out two areas in which he believes unfettered access to its technology could “undermine, rather than defend, democratic values”: mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. Here is the paragraph on surveillance.

Anthropic
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Anthropic’s move was more symbolic than meaningful. Just because they won’t, doesn’t mean someone else isn’t. Many have seen this coming for years, understanding that it was already possible to aggregate data from public and private sources to create rich profiles of people, coupled with financial information from credit card companies and, now, stablecoin issuers and public blockchains. The result will be complete control.

To be controlled in our economic pursuits means to be controlled in everything. — Friedrich Hayek

The Lord of the Rings is proving especially prescient in this new era of AI. The One Ring amplified asymmetric power. While enhancing the powers of the weak, it was, in the hands of the powerful, an instrument of domination. The Ring also had a degree of agency, rooted in its allegiance to Sauron, its co-creator, who had infused the Ring with his own essence and view of the world.

The first link in the statement posted above points to an essay Amodei posted in January, outlining the risks of AI to self-autonomy, misuse for destruction, misuse for seizing power, and economic disruption. These are very real risks.

I am not a doomer, calling for AI to be thrown into the fire and destroyed. And I am ill-equipped to suggest the best means to mitigate all these risks. But I offer two.

1. Encrypt the money. Encrypt everything.

Crypto is native internet money. People and agents will increasingly use it to transact digitally. If we are going to live freely, outside the eye of Sauron, and unmolested by the power of the Ring, we must encrypt as much as possible, and especially our money. Be wary of back-door style compromises or the vilification of privacy. Those fighting against encryption are fighting for asymmetric control. They want the power of the Ring.

2. Live for something or someone other than yourself.

I was reminded of this quote from Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning.

Man is originally characterized by his “search for meaning” rather than his “search for himself.” The more he forgets himself—giving himself to a cause or another person—the more human he is. And the more he is immersed and absorbed in something or someone other than himself the more he really becomes himself.

As a prisoner in the Nazi camps, he observed that those who fared better were outward-focused. I am increasingly convinced that our engagement with non-humans who respond to our every whim will lead to further isolation and division. And it’s in the AI’s chamber that people will be most vulnerable to surveillance and control.

The most important network in the world is uniquely human, and it cannot be outsourced to computer software. If the Ring can be used to destroy our humanness, our response must be uniquely human.

Person by person, let’s empower people worldwide with encryption.

Here’s our contribution this week:

Zodl (formerly Zashi)

Zodl iOS launched on the App Store on Thursday. Download it, use it, share it.

  • Zodl Android is coming soon to the Play Store, GitHub, F-Droid, and the Solana Dapp stores.

  • Finalized user-focused UX improvements to the Swap to ZEC flow, with implementation underway.

Zcash Core

Zcash R&D

  • On Tuesday, Daira-Emma presented about Orchard Quantum Recoverability (slides, video) at the Zcash Engineering Office Hours organized by Mark Henderson. It was recorded by Zcash Brasil and will also be transcribed and translated.

  • The Core Team, Dev, and Sean have been discussing engineering trade-offs for the next network upgrade in light of the results of the NU7 proposal sentiment polling

  • Kris, str4d, and Daira-Emma reviewed Dev’s shielded voting protocol. We did not do a deep dive into the technical details, but gained confidence in the overall approach and suggested some potential simplifications.

  • ZIP Editors continued work to ensure that consumers of the extensible transaction format (ZIP 248) can reliably maintain treestates, and that ZSA-using and non-ZSA-using transactions remain indistinguishable.

  • Merged a PR removing alert handling in zcashd, eliminating another remaining point of centralization.

  • Reviewed a cryptanalysis paper on Poseidon2 and confirmed it does not affect Orchard’s use of Poseidon 1.1.

Other

  • Shared an early v0.1a draft of an internal Regulatory Risk Dashboard, a first proof-of-concept for operationalizing the 3P protection framework (people, product, protocol).

  • Continued build-out of the X Monitor on the Zodl Dashboard, which now includes a grounded RAG answer mode, enabling AI-assisted analysis of post activity and draft suggestions for posts and threads.

Encrypting the money,

Onward.

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