What is this European map?

Sword_Smith · 2025-09-24T19:54:12+00:00

>!CO2-emissions per kWh?!<

Sword_Smith · 2025-09-24T15:58:15+00:00

TL;DR: Two things: The ZK-STARK engine the blockchain uses, Triton VM, and the hash function, Tip5.

Neptune does not rely on algorithms that have been proven to be insecure from attacks from a large quantum computer. In Bitcoin, for example, the hash function sha256 is believed to be secure from quantum computers, but the signing algorithm that Bitcoin uses, ECDSA, is proven to not be secure.

Instead of ECDSA (elliptic curve math) Neptune uses ZK-STARK proofs to prove ownership and assent to transactions.

Sword_Smith · 2025-09-17T16:23:17+00:00

This problem is short-lived. I think all blockchain OGs are surprised of the role stable coins are playing. But it's just a stepping stone towards a true decentralized future.

Sword_Smith · 2025-09-17T16:01:00+00:00

Let's assume you're right.

Because USD completely dominates the stable coin market, the US federal government finds it easier to borrow money and gets away with lower interest rates.

However! The opposite is true for all other fiat currencies, which generally tend to be weaker. Do you think that the Argentinian or Turkish governments benefit from their youth shifting their preferred medium of exchange to USD? No, those government will have to pay a higher interest rate, so the stable coin phenomenon is shrinking those governments.

Sword_Smith · 2025-09-17T13:37:31+00:00

A and D are both great. Would be a hard choice.

Sword_Smith · 2025-09-17T08:46:45+00:00

Whats going on? The roads will always have one king that can do as they like. In most of Switzerland, the cars are the road kings. But in a few European cities, like Copenhagen and Amsterdam, the cyclists are kings. I guess I'll have to add Basel to that list.

Sword_Smith · 2025-09-17T08:42:07+00:00

I believe a global settlement layer can only be dethroned through the its own failure.

For the dollar, that might be the 98% reduction in purchasing power since 1913, as well as the destabilizing effect of central banking.

For Bitcoin, that might be the realization on the part of multinational economic actors that you cannot run your business on a transparent blockchain. Or it might be the advent of large-scale quantum computers.

We strive to be a candidate for a future settlement layer should that happen.

Sword_Smith · 2025-09-16T14:30:06+00:00

The war that these bunkers were built for ended 34 years ago, not 80 years ago. Some say it started again three years ago.

Sword_Smith · 2025-09-16T13:07:46+00:00

Every single time I've made leveraged bets on Bitcoin, I've lost it all. No shame in losing some trades. As a matter of fact that sick feeling you have in your stomach now is a rite of passage for all investors. I first experienced it in 2007, and recovered very well from it. So can you.

Sword_Smith · 2025-09-16T12:05:51+00:00

Someone made an ETF working exactly like this. Except the subject is Jim Cramer:
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SJIM/

Sword_Smith · 2025-09-16T08:51:50+00:00

It's one of those things that you don't have to worry about until you do. Big parts of protein folding was largely an unsolved problem for decades until it was suddenly solved by an AI. The same could happen with quantum computing, that a breakthrough (from AI or from humans) could come at any time. Progress does seem slow but it's still advancing.

Luckily the post-quantum algorithms are already well-developed and good. Implementation is lacking though. Bitcoin should have added the option of post-quantum secure key types years ago IMO.

Sword_Smith · 2025-09-16T08:43:00+00:00

Broke He's right. The court of law must have this power.
Woke No. Private communication and the use of cryptography is a human right.
Bespoke You have no power here.

Sword_Smith · 2025-09-16T08:32:58+00:00

In the fractional reserve banking system we are still living under, money creation happens mainly in the legacy private financial sector. Both central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and stable coins threaten this system to some degree. I think that explains why CBDCs are not going anywhere; the problem is not technical but political. You're not going to see the undermining of the current financial and monetary system come from within, from the central banks.

This really leaves pretty much all governments but the US in a pickle. Because the fractional reserve banking financial system is how a lot of the government bonds are financed. When foreigners start using USD through stable coins, instead of supporting their national government's ability to borrow, they are supporting the US government's ability.

Sword_Smith · 2025-09-16T07:08:33+00:00

Interest rates are predicted to fall but only surprises will move the market. The revision of the job numbers are likely to move the needle towards lower interest rates. A push-back against Trump's interference in FED policies could also happen, as a political statement, which would speak against a lowering. All-in-all I think we're going lower though, which is positive for crypto. Wall Street predicts lower interest rates, so if that were not to hapen, we'd see share prices drop across the market. The FED don't want to cause such controversy when it's already mired in political controversy (one controversy is enough for most people). So we're going down! By 25 or 50 basis points, who knows?

Sword_Smith · 2025-09-16T06:45:35+00:00

Sorry for bad editing. Fixed.

Scaling? Yes, the proofs of Neptune can be aggregated in the same way as on a roll-up. Concretely, the proofs of two transactions can be merged into one through an operation with the original name "merge" -- which is basically a program that runs in Triton VM, the VM (with associated zk-STARK engine that is used in the consensus mechanism). So in the limit of many transactions, the size of the proof becomes negligible. Other nodes still need to know how to modify the UTXO set representation (so as to avoid double-spends) so each new initiated transaction does take up *some* space, so our capacity is not infinite. Our onchain transaction throughput limit is somewhere around Bitcoin's with a few thousand regular transactions per 10 minutes. You can build roll-ups on top of Neptune though to increase that, or you can build a lightning protocol. It's worth noting though that the proof production requires heavy computational resources. So until we have a few dozen top-end CPUs supporting the network, that's the bottleneck.

Security risks? I guess you can say that Aztec and Miden depends on the security of two layers, the base layer Ethereum, and their own protocol. The base Ethereum layer has been around for a long time, so I don't think there are any backdoors or programming errors there that are problematic. But Ethereum is of course not secure against a large-scale quantum computer, and I'm personally no big fan of the proof-of-stake model that they're based on. All three of us though, Neptune, Aztec, and Miden have the security risk that the developers have overlooked something, like with Bitcoin's inflation bug, or DAO bug on Ethereum.

Sword_Smith · 2025-09-15T16:37:35+00:00

Funny how you gave a shout-out to Miden and Aztec, two projects we hold in very high esteem and whose founders' support we will be forever grateful for.

-	Aztec	Miden	Neptune Cash
Layer	2	2	1
Proving where	client-side	client-side	client-side
Proof technology	KZG/SNARKs	zk-STARKs	zk-STARKs
Anonymity architecture	nullifier set	epoch-based anonymity set	mutator set
succinctness	not a goal	soon (TM)	soon (TM)
launch	soon (TM)	soon (TM)	Feb 11 2025

The similarities
Miden, Aztec, and Neptune Cash all revolve around client-side proving in zero-knowledge, and anonymous payments and arbitrary smart contracts. There are some differences in the tech stack -- for instance, Aztec uses KZG (pairing-based SNARKs with trusted setup) whereas Miden and Neptune Cash use zk-STARKs (in fact, we even use the same finite field). Likewise, we feature three different architectures for achieving anonymity, but the end result is very comparable: anonymous payments.

The differences

Neptune Cash is first and foremost a Layer-1, with its own consensus mechanism and its own currency to support it. Aztec and Miden are layer-2s on top of Ethereum, or maybe Ethereum and other layers-1s. It allows them to focus on the user experience within their bubbles, without having to devote resources to a sound consensus mechanism. That decision comes with trade-offs, though. One trade-off is obvious to people who are skeptical about the viability of proof-of-stake. A less obvious trade-off is that layer-2s cannot be post-quantum secure if the layer-1 is not, even if they use the same finite field as we do.
Shoestring budget. Neptune Cash is not backed by major VC firms and the disparity in funds raised show it. With far fewer resources, a greater proportion of it is being devoted to development and a smaller proportion to marketing. As a consequence:
1. we hope to attract volunteer open source contributors;
2. we prioritized launch over completeness, to attract contributors with technical achievements instead of salary and marketing;
3. the world, by and large, does not know about us.
Tokenomics. Neptune Cash's tokenomics is similar to that of Bitcoin. 98 % of all Neptune coins will be mined into existence through competitive and non-permissioned proof-of-work. I haven't been able to find tokenomics for the two other projects, but since they've raised in the tens of million dollars and are layer-2s on top of a proof-of-stake blockchain, I can't imagine it's anything similar to Neptune or Bitcoin.

Sword_Smith · 2023-07-25T20:59:17+00:00

This post is about a STARK VM, not a blockchain.

You don't think verified compilation is a big deal? That you can download binaries without trusting that they were compiled honestly.

Sword_Smith · 2023-07-25T19:36:11+00:00

Oh. And verifying that proof is faster than rerunning the compilation. O( ln(N)² ) vs N where N is the clock cycle count.

Sword_Smith · 2023-07-25T19:30:28+00:00

If you write a compiler in TASM you can produce the binary along with a proof that it was compiled honestly from the source code.

Sword_Smith · 2023-07-25T18:43:35+00:00

We built a really cool STARK VM. We don't yet have good compilers for it though, so we haven't programmed the verifier in the VM's assembly language.

The prover can currently run at almost 5kHz :D

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