Philosophy & Decision Theory
Philosophy consumed the bulk of the week, split across three threads: a revival of Mozi as proto-EA and proto-d/acc thinker, a defense of effective altruism against strategic rebranding, and a calibration exercise on corporate marketing. The Mozi thread opened on September 17 with @vitalikbuterin calling the ancient Chinese philosopher 'surprisingly close to being a proto-effective-altruist' who valued universal love and efficient resource allocation [1]. He then extended the connection to his own d/acc framework: Mozi's Books 14 and 15 are 'basically open-source city defense manuals' whose 'explicit goal was to upgrade people's knowledge of defensive arts, and thus shift the offense/defense balance further toward defense' [1]. The argument is that Mozi saw offensive war as the primary example of behavior that benefits perpetrators at a small cost while imposing large costs on victims — and that this is why universal love, not nationalism, is the rational stance [1]. When a reply suggested Mozi was a proto-libertarian, he corrected: 'I would say 老子 is the one closer to libertarianism' [2]. The d/acc thesis got its own standalone post the next day using soundproof walls as a metaphor: better technology solved a problem that used to require restrictive behavior rules, and he asked, 'What are the "soundproof walls" of the 21st century that we have not yet built or sufficiently deployed?' [3]. The EA thread was the week's most substantive philosophical engagement. @vitalikbuterin opened by criticizing people who 'clearly continue to believe >80% of the core effective altruist beliefs' but disavow EA 'purely strategically, purely because they sense that dunking on EA is cool now' [4]. His position: 'Yes, effective altruism was a significant part of my intellectual upbringing and its core values of care for others, cosmopolitanism and rigor around effective resource allocation continue to be very important to me' — while pointing to his 'Galaxy brain' essay for specific disagreements with the AI-risk-focused subset [4]. When challenged on EA's track record, he pushed back hard: 'Hundreds of thousands of lives saved by global health interventions, hundreds of millions of factory farm animals enduring at least a little less cruelty in their lives, all that no one will ever hear about because it's not a sexy media story' [4]. On the rebranding critique that 'effective altruism dunks on altruism,' he defended the name: 'basically yes: lots of people donate massive amounts of money to feel-good charities that pull on people's heartstrings but actually create only a medium-sized improvement in one person's life per $100,000, when they could have been ten or a hundred times more effective' [4]. And on blacklisting fears: 'If you are not on at least one blacklist, you have not truly lived' [4]. The marketing post was a calibration exercise: screenshots of the Philip Morris website with the reminder that 'they're a leading cigarette company,' offered as 'a good calibration point for how good modern marketing is at dressing up pretty much any corporate (or, for that matter, government) behavior and making it sound responsible and safe' [5].
Mozi, d/acc, and defense as philosophy: Surface Mozi as a proto-EA and proto-d/acc thinker whose open-source defense manuals aimed to shift the offense/defense balance toward defense [1]. Use soundproof walls as a metaphor for technology that solves social problems without restrictive rules [3]. Correct that Laozi, not Mozi, is closer to libertarianism [2].
Defending effective altruism: Refuse to strategically disavow EA despite social pressure, owning it as intellectual upbringing while pointing to specific disagreements in the 'Galaxy brain' essay [4]. Counter that EA's global health interventions saved hundreds of thousands of lives and that the 'effective' label is justified because most charitable giving is dramatically less efficient than it could be [4].
Marketing as calibration: Use Philip Morris's website as a calibration test for how well modern marketing can dress up harmful corporate or government behavior as responsible [5].
Privacy & Cypherpunk Advocacy
Privacy got two sharp statements. The first was a direct response to @gakonst's claim that privacy is dead: 'It's only dead if you give up. I'm not giving up on privacy. I'm doubling down' [6]. The second was political: sharing exit poll data showing the liberal opposition party Yabloko's candidate leading in a Russian election, he argued there 'continues to be a lot of quiet dissent against the regime, which expresses itself any time some kind of channel appears' [7]. His most-discussed post of the week — 98 replies — framed the realistic goal: 'The goal is not to literally get Putin to politely step off his chair; the election is of course manipulated to hell on multiple levels, and even if he loses he will just ignore it. Rather, the realistic goal is to delegitimize the regime as much as possible, denying it the internal cohesion it needs to pursue the total war path so that it has no choice but to take the peace path' [7].
other
Local AI was a recurring technical thread outside the taxonomy. @vitalikbuterin reported that Qwen 3.8 flash on his Strix Halo laptop is 'truly impressive' and that 'we're very close to the point where you can just use local models for a large share of tasks,' with a privacy-preserving orchestration workflow — using local models to mediate queries to powerful remote models so personal information doesn't leak — becoming viable [8]. On phone inference, he agreed the bar for mass adoption is running frontier models on a fully offline phone and described the right architecture as 'extreme MoE (including newer varieties like ngrams), eg. you want like 100B params most of which live on disk and only <1B get activated per token' [9]. So far he's gotten 'like 10 TPS with 1B models that break if you try to use them for anything interesting' [9].
Also this week
Ethereum Protocol & Roadmap (~12%): Formal verification was the week's technical through-line. @vitalikbuterin argued that AI hacking doesn't doom cybersecurity — it flips it toward defense, because if AI can prove mathematical theorems like Navier-Stokes and FLT, it can also prove 'this program is secure' as a theorem [10]. His most detailed post on the topic — ~44k views — laid out the nuance: 'secure' hides enormous complexity in its definition, covering everything from forged messages to side-channel key leakage to metadata exposure [10]. But definitions are 'additive' — two groups with definitions A and B can prove both, while code is not additive because a bug in either sinks the whole thing [10]. The historical failure mode of verifying only a self-declared critical portion must end: 'sorry, you have to verify over literally your entire program, including database, networking, any caching layers, everything. Modern AI can do it' [10]. When @TokenizeBull pushed back that the TCB (trusted computing base) doesn't disappear, the spec is the bottleneck not the proof, and attackers get the same AI, @vitalikbuterin's reply was blunt: 'we pretty much have to do the hard thing, and push the open source, secure and verifiable paradigm up and down the full stack, including operating systems and including hardware. Fatalism that the hardware layer has fifteen skeletons in the closet that nobody can understand is a thing that has to be challenged, attacked and overturned explicitly' [11]. This is Ethereum's direction: 'There is no future for blockchains — especially blockchains with scalability and privacy — without doing this' [10].
Personal & Humor (~12%): Light moments included complimenting a fan-made Mozi translation site in Chinese — 'It's a beautiful site, 谢谢你的贡献！' [12] — and musing that 'there's a type of wild beast that's literally just called a "wildebeest"' [13]. He also clarified that an article cross-posted automatically to Farcaster, Lens, and Bluesky via Firefly, which he described as a cypherpunk workaround [14].
Top conversations
98 replies · 67.2k viewsHis most-replied post (98 replies) argued that Russia's manipulated elections still serve to delegitimize the regime by surfacing quiet dissent, denying it the internal cohesion needed for total war [7]. [7]
84 replies · 35.2k viewsA throwaway observation that wildebeests are 'literally just called a wildebeest' drew 84 replies, mostly banter [13]. [13]
78 replies · 52.3k viewsAsked what the 'soundproof walls of the 21st century' are — technology that solves social problems without restrictive rules — and drew 78 replies engaging with the d/acc thesis [3]. [3]
Retweets
65.9k views@thedaofund announced ETHSecurity Initiatives, a community-funded model for onchain security work where people propose, fund, and build security projects [15]. [15]
29.3k views@ethereumfndn promoted the 15th EF Protocol Cluster AMA on r/Ethereum, covering post-quantum Ethereum, L1-zkEVM, formal verification, state, finality, and privacy [16]. [16]
26.5k views@ethereumfndn highlighted round two of ETHSecurity Initiatives from @thedaofund, framed as 'shared security, funded by the community it protects' [17]. [17]
11.2k views@kaepora shared a Verifpal milestone: formally verifying TLS 1.3 with concurrent sessions and staged compromise [18]. [18]
10.3k views@leekt216 shared FrameTx Toolkit and vFrames, two tools for experimenting with frame transactions, with a demo and open-source code [19]. [19]
Calls
- ▲ LONGcryptocurrencyHolding ~90% of net worth in cryptocurrency is an implicit bet that cybersecurity is naturally defense-favoring and that AI-powered formal verification will make software provably secure. [10]
