frankbraun
Frank Braun

https://frankbraun.org

Freedom | Privacy | Investing | Programming

The future is private.

Public Key

npub1vmu8mq9fr96c5e97p5ku3ga9507sek7htl9utpddd6t99cwqjersz5hxee

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsxd7rasz53jav2vjlq6twg5wj68lgvm0t4lj79skkka9jju8qfv3cpzemhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wd68ytnzv9hxg9asqzx

Publishing to

relay.nostr.band

Author Public Key

npub1vmu8mq9fr96c5e97p5ku3ga9507sek7htl9utpddd6t99cwqjersz5hxee

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Last Notes

2026-03-25 01:39:48 CET

Living in the early phase of the exponential is both exhilarating and exhausting, while the masses still seem completely unaware of the tsunami that is about to hit them.

2025-12-25 11:08:45 CET

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Sounds like a plan, let’s go!

2025-12-25 11:08:06 CET

For every important person in your life there will be a day when you will see them for the last time.
Just remember that the next time you'll see them.

2025-11-18 14:55:56 CET

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Oh the irony.

2025-11-18 14:55:27 CET

Just use Cloudflare and AWS and you will not have any issues they said.

2025-10-09 01:02:23 CEST

Technology leads, politicians follow.

2025-10-04 09:58:46 CEST

It's hilarious that the concept Homo economicus models humans as consistently rational, when it's actually quite the opposite.

2025-10-01 14:17:26 CEST

What I like about the Zcash community:
Nobody asked me if want to join a Telegram group yet —the standard in most of crypto.
Only Signal groups.
They get it.

2025-10-01 11:49:25 CEST

https://blossom.primal.net/7f3f5ed62effe8fb26397e7556d38bdd9c063f8a3607c2646d2e1e419433e8b7.png

2025-10-01 09:56:03 CEST

Zcash is getting repriced in real time.

2025-09-30 19:20:07 CEST

Being a Zcasher is easy compared to being a gold bug in the 1980s.

2025-09-30 19:08:27 CEST

Was there ever a U.S. government shutdown where the debt ceiling wasn't raised?
"No, we are not going to eat the cookies!"
*dancing around*
"Lets eat the cookies!"

2025-09-30 18:57:41 CEST

Long: BTC, ZEC, XAU
Short: USD, EUR, CHF

2025-09-30 18:36:07 CEST

Time for plan Z.

2025-09-30 18:31:15 CEST

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That’s how ZIP 234 would change Zcash inflation:
https://blossom.primal.net/dc95b88e97ffab5f648868e3c6c0b13d6ef82940adc552298fa799027a17ad8c.png

2025-09-30 18:28:13 CEST

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More details over at Shielded Labs:
https://shieldedlabs.net/nsm/

2025-09-30 18:27:39 CEST

NSM in Zcash
- problem: future security budget (tx fees not enough?)
- constraint: 21M cap
- proposal: Network Sustainability Mechanism
- ZIP 233: establish voluntary burn mechanism
- ZIP 234: smooths the issuance curve (adds burned coins)
- ZIP 235: burn 60% of transaction fees

2025-09-30 17:27:51 CEST

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See forum discussion:
https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/crosslink-early-tokenomics-design/52154

2025-09-30 17:27:06 CEST

Crosslink proposal
- adds assured finality to Zcash by introducing PoS finalizers
- hybrid PoS/PoW ("defence in depth")
- rooster of 100 stake weighted finalizers (they take fee)
- yield for stakers (40% stakers, 40% miners, 20% dev fund)
- staking from Orchard pool
- 21M cap

2025-09-30 14:17:42 CEST

ZSAs (Zcash Shielded Assets)
- Orchard extension enabling the creation, transfer, and burn of custom assets (like ERC-20)
- also allows for NFTs
- assets can be wrapped assets (with bridging)
- same anonymity as shielded ZEC transactions, sharing the pool
- no freeze function

2025-09-29 17:22:22 CEST

Levels of wealth:
- debt
- no debt
- debt

2025-09-29 15:23:57 CEST

My largest holdings in order of size:
BTC
ZEC
XAU

2025-09-29 14:11:45 CEST

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Not really. My guess would be: easier to integrate technically, better relationship management with exchanges, and less “shady” reputation.

2025-09-29 13:27:15 CEST

Zcash must be the only crypto project where being late (joining almost 9 years in) feels being early.
It's like the early days of Bitcoin, buying coins for under $100, exciting to read up on all the tech, etc.
Just this time with privacy and a workable scalability roadmap.

2025-09-28 21:20:04 CEST

𝛂?
- total global assets (TGA): $1,000T
- market cap gold: $22T (2.2% TGA)
- market cap BTC: $2T (~10% gold, 0.2% TGA)
- undeclared offshore wealth: $10T+ (1%+ TGA)
- privacy coins: $8B (<0.1% offshore wealth, 0.4% BTC)
- ZEC: ~$0.97B (12% privacy coins, 0.01% offshore wealth)

2025-09-28 15:10:19 CEST

POV: You are in a country with transfer tax, high VAT, and high taxes in general:
“Cash or card?”
“Cash.”
“Nice!”

2025-09-27 14:28:22 CEST

Optimists buy gold, pessimists buy cans.

2025-09-27 00:33:25 CEST

Using Zcash as a mixer doesn't work — transactions going in and out can be correlated by time and value.
The only way to break this link is to use it as a store of value.
If the market demands more financial privacy and understands this dynamic, value will accrue to Zcash.

2025-09-27 00:11:23 CEST

Money is technology — technology evolves.

2025-09-25 13:41:01 CEST

The future is private.

2025-09-19 19:17:03 CEST

Get worse to get better.

2025-09-02 22:30:57 CEST

The claim that you lost your coins in a boating accident is more credible if those coins cannot be traced.

2025-09-02 18:05:16 CEST

Who would have thought that we weren't shitposting on Reddit 10 years ago but were training superintelligence.

2025-09-01 10:54:40 CEST

You can define an encoding that maps any blob of data to a single number.
To censor certain data, you'd have to censor certain numbers.
But under a different encoding, those numbers would be different.
So: censor all numbers.

2025-08-31 10:27:42 CEST

Just finished "Zero World Problems: New Standards of Living for the Post-Materialist Economy" by Aaron Clarey, great read.
Should be mandatory reading for the crypto twitter crowd that thinks trading meme coins from mom's basement is the best way to financial independence.

2025-08-26 16:39:37 CEST

If it’s OK to filter transactions with “too much” OP_RETURN data, wouldn’t it be also OK by the same logic to filter CoinJoin transactions with too many inputs and outputs?
After all, what useful purpose do they serve?
They are not transferring value.

2025-08-24 00:25:54 CEST

Seems like we have now reached the “but it just feels better” stage of privacy tech.
For many communism also feels better than capitalism.
How did that work out so far?

2025-08-21 15:21:04 CEST

Your threat model should include sophisticated technical attackers.
But don't forget to include the unsophisticated non-technical religious mob.

2025-08-21 14:42:36 CEST

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With multiple assets in the same shielded pool miners can also not censor based on asset type.
And issuers cannot freeze accounts.
And there can be no risk scoring.
Just a free fee market.
Gasp.

2025-08-21 14:30:27 CEST

Having shielded transactions does not only make coins more fungible, it also makes transactions more censorship resistant.
You cannot censor selectively what you cannot differentiate.
Lesson in there.

2025-08-21 14:21:15 CEST

Bitcoiners: The network is censorship resistant.
Somehow also Bitcoiners: Let’s figure out how we can best filter “undesirable transactions”.

2025-08-18 21:04:12 CEST

I think there are usually no big reasons for short term price movements.
The Monero drama had a short term price impact and now that seems to be reverting. But generally it's more people are buying than selling that makes number go up and vice versa.
Both Monero and Zcash are down about 20% in USD term compared to one month ago while Bitcoin is mostly flat in that time frame.
And one month is still a rather short time frame.
The question that interest me much more than the infighting: Why are privacy coins in general underperforming at the moment?
Is it because we are still pretty early in the bull part of the cycle and privacy coins come later in the cycle?
Right now ETH is picking up, but SOL is still not really pumping. So from that perspective it might still be early "alt season".
Does the market simply not value privacy and we just have to accept it?
Or is it a communication problem that can be solved with better education and marketing?
Or is it something else entirely?

2025-08-18 01:29:41 CEST

While Solana celebrated a new record of 92,628 tx/s the dominating "problem" in Bitcoin seems to be how to best filter "spam" transactions while the mempool sits mostly empty.
Sad.

2025-08-16 19:56:12 CEST

"The bearing of a child takes nine months, no matter how many women are assigned."
— Frederick Phillips Brooks Jr, The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering (1975)

2025-08-15 16:09:45 CEST

The free market is a harsh mistress.

2025-08-12 23:20:51 CEST

The threat model for my life is: It's complicated.

2025-08-12 23:00:16 CEST

https://blossom.primal.net/a8500dcc1214933074ad7f2eb614897280d2b5c7e9f50feba06ec7c9acb1023f.jpg

2025-08-12 15:13:12 CEST

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I don’t think so, here is my full argument:
https://frankbraun.org/layer1/

2025-08-12 13:45:31 CEST

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No, I haven’t looked into that.

2025-08-12 13:44:27 CEST

Less ego leads to more success.
It allows you to learn and adapt.
The real cost is not making a mistake, it's defending it.

2025-08-12 13:34:03 CEST

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/benjaminpirus/2019/09/30/mcafee-explains-rationale-for-why-he-still-sees-1-million-bitcoin-by-2020/

2025-08-12 13:33:52 CEST

“What if a plumber came and fixed your sink and you paid him $40? He went into the bank and he goes, ‘I’d like to cash this check. Mr. McAfee wrote it to me and I’d like my $40, and, while you’re there, would you please tell me what his balance is, and, from now on, forever, would you please inform me every time he has an incoming wire or deposit, and every check that he writes, and to whom?’”
“That’s what bitcoin is,” McAfee said. “Would you be happy if your bank did that?” He added, “Please, you know you wouldn’t. We know, if anybody has any sense, and if you understand human nature, then privacy coins will be the winner.”
Privacy coins, also sometimes referred to as anonymous coins, are cryptocurrencies such as monero (XMR) and zcash (ZEC) that tout capabilities to hide transactions and other activities.
(from a John McAfee interview with Forbes in 2019)

2025-08-11 13:49:45 CEST

https://blossom.primal.net/f554dcfa9a647877277e96adff42e7e5e4ab4a10791b51c7c8ef49dd203f71a8.jpg

2025-08-11 13:31:49 CEST

Buying one Bitcoin today is the equivalent of a boomer buying a house in the 1980s.
You buy it, do nothing, and you'll get rich.
And the world will go to shit and the next generation will hate you.
Or how are we going to separate money and state with a transparent ledger?

2025-08-10 17:05:27 CEST

Some cryptocurrency tribes build bridges and trade with other tribes.
Others go to war and isolate themselves.
Which strategy is more likely to succeed in the long run?

2025-08-10 16:29:09 CEST

Freedom technology invariants
https://frankbraun.org/invariants

2025-08-10 14:54:55 CEST

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Weaponize autism, reclaim the internet ✊

2025-08-10 14:54:33 CEST

I have this theory that a lot of social media is dominated by psychopaths, narcissists, and autists.
Psychopaths don't give a shit if people like them or not. Narcissists feed on any form of attention. And autists are so obsessed with a topic that they can ignore the hate.

2025-08-10 14:44:02 CEST

If you want to have an impact there will be haters, it's just the law of the universe.

2025-08-09 13:27:37 CEST

I just finished my first rewrite in Rust.
Does that complete my initiation?

2025-08-08 13:32:38 CEST

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I don’t think life will ever be fair, but I would like a freer world.

2025-08-08 12:46:07 CEST

So many layers in this picture.
https://blossom.primal.net/dd6e496471197592eba6b215487f39b3940e0085e7b05650366761b7f4cb82e2.jpg

2025-08-08 11:20:58 CEST

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Exactly. At most they will tell you that the inflation rate is 2-3%.

2025-08-08 11:03:07 CEST

Long degeneracy, short common sense.

2025-08-08 11:02:56 CEST

I talked to a banker in rural Bavaria yesterday and he told me how people were taking out 100k EUR in cash when they had negative interest rates and stored it in a barn.
And then put it back in their normal bank account when they were back at 0% interest.
Normies are so cooked.

2025-08-06 13:47:56 CEST

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David Heinemeier Hansson

2025-08-06 09:49:14 CEST

I'm not sure if the Linux community realizes how big of a deal it is that DHH took an interest in the Linux desktop experience.
This is going to cost Apple billions of dollars in revenue. And rightly so.

2025-08-05 23:37:57 CEST

OK, maybe I was wrong on Rust, it's growing on me.

2025-08-05 23:28:19 CEST

Great intro on Zcash and how its privacy compares to Monero from Arjun Khemani:
https://www.scifi.money/

2025-08-04 21:02:30 CEST

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I think cancellations have been cancelled.

2025-08-04 20:42:14 CEST

I just added Litecoin (MWEB) to my donation page.
Not because somebody asked for it, but as a testament to the upgradability of old protocols.

2025-08-04 20:21:43 CEST

Becoming a verb is a sign of the highest level of adoption: to google, to venmo, to tweet (dang!)
When "to zashi" is commonplace ("zashi me the money", "just zashi it", etc.) Zashi app and financial privacy will have won.
Internet, do your thing 😉

2025-08-04 17:18:23 CEST

I just tried to figure out how to best announce updates to my blog and settled on an Atom feed and a Signal group.
https://frankbraun.org/#subscribe
I didn't want to deal with the complexities and privacy issues of an email list or a Substack and keep the website purely static for now.
Signal has a group size limit of 1000, but as the famous Kevin Kelly says, 1000 True Fans is all you really need anyways 😉
https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/

2025-08-03 13:16:11 CEST

Pair programming is the new default modus operandi.

2025-08-02 15:22:15 CEST

Never trust a politician you haven't compromised yourself.

2025-08-02 13:30:26 CEST

You cannot be both a Bitcoin Maxi and Monero Maxi at the same time.
If you join a religion, you have to decide.

2025-08-02 12:30:36 CEST

Running Zebrad, fully synced 🦓

2025-08-02 11:41:18 CEST

You cannot be a successful solopreneur without being a successful shitposter.
Shitposting is as important as coding.

2025-08-01 12:52:34 CEST

Is the Bitcoin country going off the rails?
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/1/el-salvador-approves-indefinite-presidential-re-election

2025-08-01 11:12:03 CEST

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Yes, it's a scary realization that there are people out there who genuinely don't care about other people or, maybe even worse, actually lack the ability to care.
And for some reason we still have this inhibition to expose them, even if we have proof.

2025-07-31 17:40:07 CEST

After over two decades of C and over one of Go it's about time to really learn Rust. I attempted it before and wrote some code in it, but never to the level that it really stuck in my brain. Digesting "the book" right now.

2025-07-31 11:42:56 CEST

That feeling when you only have two administrative tasks to do and then you can code all day, but you have a hard time getting yourself to do them.

2025-07-31 02:47:49 CEST

Privacy is a human right.
But it's not granted, it has to be taken.

2025-07-31 01:40:16 CEST

We now have billionaire tech founders themselves code decentralized peer-to-peer messaging application that operate over bluetooth mesh networks.
I'm not sure the censorship bureaucracy knows what they are up against.

2025-07-30 23:53:02 CEST

Mandatory age verification which requires attested applications attacks the very base layer of freedom technology — secure devices.
Think about that for a second.

2025-07-30 23:52:01 CEST

Everybody is shopping, but not everybody wants to be free.

2025-07-30 21:34:18 CEST

What if programming is art?
https://frankbraun.org/art

2025-07-30 11:06:05 CEST

This privacy stuff is getting out of control, I cannot tell if my patrons are famous OGs or random plebs.

2025-07-28 21:48:21 CEST

Privacy needs to be baked into L1
https://frankbraun.org/layer1/

2025-07-27 12:18:35 CEST

I find it interesting how my entire mindset shifted around fiat.
Normie friends tell me they need fiat in a "savings account" to feel safe.
I cannot sleep well if I have a lot of fiat sitting somewhere.
How can you sleep if you are sitting on a melting ice cube?
I only feel safe if I'm short fiat.

2025-07-26 19:10:53 CEST

Saving is not only necessary for capital accumulation, it's also a necessity for monetary privacy.

2025-07-26 19:06:59 CEST

With the rapid improvements of AI technology it's best to assume that any information that can be derived, will be derived.

2025-07-26 17:34:18 CEST

I just installed a tool which I wrote in Go almost 10 years ago.
No sudden compiler errors. No standard library incompatibilites. And no fricking incompatible source-level changes (👋 Python, Ruby, Perl, Swift, PHP, and Scala).
It just worked.
That way I can focus on the actual problem, not the tooling.
There is enough complexity in the problem domains, we don't need more complexity in the programming languages.
Boring is good, boring is productive.
All hail the Go compatibility guarantee from the 1.0 release:
https://go.dev/doc/go1compat
And they are still not planning to break it:
https://go.dev/blog/compat
Respect 🫡

2025-07-26 13:35:54 CEST

I added an Atom feed to my blog.
https://frankbraun.org

2025-07-25 20:51:12 CEST

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What am I missing?

2025-07-24 01:26:14 CEST

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The miners don’t have additional information compared to the data in the blockchain. The only information a miner could possibly gain is where a transaction originated, but that can be obfuscated with Tor or a mixnet like Nym.

2025-07-23 23:55:18 CEST

Keystone hardware wallet test with shielded Zcash
https://frankbraun.org/keystone
#Zcash

2025-07-23 19:37:47 CEST

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I’m usually only concerned with user privacy and not miner privacy. For user privacy the infrastructure requirements don’t matter.
Monero’s PoW algorithm is deliberately hard to accelerate on ASIC/FPGA. Zcash’s PoW algorithm was designed to be GPU-friendly, but is now mainly mined on ASICs.
So currently for miner anonymity Monero has the lead.
However, Zcash is planning to move to a hybrid PoW/PoS algorithm and that might change the situation.
Are you concerned with miner privacy?

2025-07-22 22:43:24 CEST

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There are currently three different shielded pools (basically three iterations of the zero-knowledge proof tech) and only the first one had a possible inflation bug.
You cannot audit the inside of a shielded pool, that’s not compatible with the privacy guarantees.
However, each pool has a so called turnstile mechanism which ensures that there are never more coins leaving the pool than coins that have entered it.
The bug in the first pool was fixed in 2018 and given how long ago that was and how little coins still remain in the pool it is very unlikely that the bug has ever been exploited. There is additional evidence that it hasn’t, which I’m sure you can easily find.
The latest iteration (the Orchard pool) also doesn’t have a trusted setup anymore.

2025-07-22 22:33:42 CEST

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I don’t understand your question. IRL = in real life, right?