Billions of dollars. Millions of followers. Thousands of attendees. Half a dozen governments. And one idea whose time has come.

INTERVIEW: “ZODL is to zcash:native what Coinbase was to bitcoin:native .” @jswihart joins Bankless to unpack ZEC's awakening and why @Zcash may be entering its most important chapter yet. We cover: - @zodl_app's plan for Zcash - the rise of shielded ZEC - privacy in the AI era - why Bitcoiners are paying attention - making private money too big to kill --- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 4:17 Privacy in the AI Era 6:19 Crypto’s Missing Privacy Layer 9:49 The Political Fight for Privacy 14:42 Can Crypto Retain Privacy? 16:47 From Zashi to ZODL 19:48 The Zcash Reawakening 21:41 Balaji, Funding, and the Mission 24:49 Product Market Fit for Shielded ZEC 27:51 ZODL's Role in the Zcash Stack 29:36 The Zcash Roadmap 32:56 What Is ZEC and is it Undervalued? 36:56 The Shielded Pool Explained 45:12 The $25M ZODL Raise 47:16 Compliance and Shielded ZEC 51:25 Institutions vs Cypherpunk Values 53:58 Personal Privacy in an AI World

My view is: you’re not actually mad at me, but mad at the situation. I grant that it sucks, but I didn’t cause decades of money printing and the pending sovereign debt crisis, and neither did you. But in short: if the Mayflower was American, and leaving England to build New England was American, then leaving the dysfunctional old world to build the new is the most American thing you can do. A longer response follows. (1) DID THE IRISH AMERICANS BETRAY IRELAND? First, did the Irish Americans betray Ireland by leaving for America? Why weren’t they loyal to Ireland? Why did they "cut and run"? Why didn’t they stay and fight the Irish Potato Famine? And the Puritans...did they traduce England by not returning and fighting with the Roundheads? Were the Virginians disloyal to the other side, the Cavaliers? How about the German Americans…how come they left Europe after the Revolutions of 1848? Point: virtually every single US ethnic group, other than the African Americans and Native Americans, “fled” some issue in the old world. War, civil war, communism, fascism, fundamentalism. The whole point of the New World was to leave behind dysfunctional, bankrupt states…often caught in the throes of endless left-vs-right conflicts. If almost every single American is descended from someone who left a dysfunctional state, how can it be un-American to leave a dysfunctional state? Why could your ancestors leave dysfunction, why are they free men... but others can’t move, and are locked to the land? (2) LOYAL TO BLUE OR RED AMERICANS? Second, if someone tries being loyal to “the American people”, does that mean being loyal to the 75 million Kamala voters, the Blue Americans? Because if you’re loyal to them, you are unfortunately no longer loyal to the Red Americans. And that’s the rub. Just as Democrats use “democracy” to mean rule by Democrats, and are then stunned that ~50% of democratic votes keep going to Republicans, Republicans keep using “American” to mean Red American, and are then always angry that ~50% of US citizens are Blue Americans. Today, Gallup reports only 36% of Democrats are “proud to be American”. They are, however, proud to be Democrats. They’re also not posting on X, but rather on Bluesky. The digital secession, the spiritual secession of Democrats away from a “United” States of America has already happened. That’s unfortunately what polarization means. This Blue/Red conflict is exactly the kind of left-right fight that the Puritans and Cavaliers left behind in the 1600s, and the German Americans left in the 1800s. Just like there is no Korea, only North Korea and South Korea, there is unfortunately no America any more, only Blue America and Red America. And just like the Korean situation led to a Korean diaspora, the American situation is causing an American diaspora. (3) STAY AND FIGHT, BUT WHO OR WHAT? Then, if someone was to stay and fight, who do you want them to fight? Perhaps you want them to fight other Americans (namely Blue Americans), in the name of being an American. Or you want them "fight" a ~$175T sovereign debt crisis, which is like fighting a volcanoa, as it's just the largest bill ever due in history, and something even Elon couldn’t put a dent in. TLDR: you can’t “stay and fight” a sovereign debt crisis. It’s not something you can punch in the nose. (4) SHOULD INDIAN AMERICANS STAY OR GO? Also, in case you haven't noticed, half of MAGA is yelling that Indian tech guys should leave the country, or never come, as they'll never be true Americans. Now others are suddenly mad that Indian tech guys are taking them up on it, and leaving America. Meanwhile, far leftists have begun just shooting at tech guys. This is just a schizo and unstable situation. (5) LOYALTY TO IDEALS WAS LOYALTY TO AMERICA I am loyal to capitalism, democracy, free speech, free markets, science, math, wherever they are. I am loyal to peace and trade, small-l libertarianism, privacy, nonviolence, and technological innovation. I am also loyal to a specific enumerated group of people, the many friends, coworkers, collaborators, and customers who I’ve worked with over the years, both US citizens and non-citizens, from the Stanford and Silicon Valley of a few decades ago. These were essentially the mainstream American ideals for decades. Millions of Americans still support them. Indeed, millions of Americans think that blood-and-soil nationalism of the kind you implicitly propound is un-American! (6) BLOOD AND SOIL, BUT WHAT BLOOD? Finally, and now we really get down to brass tacks: what test do you propose to determine whether someone is a true American, aside from their current paperwork? Because unlike (say) the Japanese, there is no genetic test that correlates close-to-perfectly with US passport ownership. Therefore, any definition of who’s American *has* to be civic nationalism from a purely operational standpoint, defined at the “software” level (in terms of law) rather than the hardware level (in terms of genetics). Yet if you try to get N different rightists to define the “is_american” function you’ll get N different definitions, with and without different minority groups. One that went viral recently is the “Grade A American = Mayflower” thing, which is sort of like wokeness in reverse, but for MAGA. And look: loyalty means symmetry. I am loyal to you if you are loyal to me. But the way you're talking about loyalty translates to servitude. I've been polite, and engaged you in good faith, but we are strangers. Yet you are demanding gratitude and even deference (!) from me, implicitly on racial grounds, because "you didn't build that, someone else made that happen". Moreover, you are doing so by invoking "the people" in a right-coded variation of the way the Soviets invoked "the people." I'm sorry, that doesn't fly. Why would anyone be loyal to a MAGA faction that arbitrarily designates countless millions to be Grade B, C, and D? You can't just redefine the social contract overnight, unilaterally, with some tweets, into a retconned blood-and-soil America that the WASPs themselves shut down...and then get extremely mad when others don't buy into it. We're just going have to renegotiate these kinds of relationships from scratch, with new opt-in communities, where everyone is a grade A citizen. If that means rebuilding New America outside America, just as New England was built outside England, so be it. The next Mayflower is boarding.

(1) Most countries do not actually have a military. Instead, most countries outsource their security to the US (most common), to Russia (like Belarus), or to China (like North Korea, partially). Iran is unusual in that they're going it largely alone. They're also unusual in that they actually appear to be winning. And if Iran does manage to drive the US out of not just Afghanistan and Iraq, but the entire Middle East, they'll have unfortunately undermined the idea that America can or will provide any security guarantees at all. (2) So, with the withdrawal of the American Empire, every country is going to need a new military. Some countries will "build their own." The ones most likely to go nuclear are Japan and Turkey. Maybe also Germany, South Korea, Australia, Brazil, and Poland. They'll do so both for defense and to guarantee an energy supply now that Hormuz isn't stable. Thus, the Iran war will unfortunately obviate non-proliferation. Most other countries will not build their own militaries. They'll simply do what's necessary to align with the new regional hegemon. That new hegemon will likely be China in East and Southeast Asia, Russia in North Asia and Eastern Europe, and Iran in West Asia. India has a tough situation in South Asia due to Pakistan. MAGA America will probably refocus on Latin America. And Newsom's Democrats will likely align with China, as Carney's Canadians have already done. (3) But what about every group in the world that's not running a country? What about every company and community? They'll need to think about a world where the US military has withdrawn, and isn't there for them. Is there any way to preserve something that looks like the rules-based order without the former guarantor of those rules? (a) In the physical world, these companies and communities will have to find a country that has either built their own security, as described above, or is aligned with one that has. And abide by whatever new rules they set. From the standpoint purely of tech, dozens of countries are now surprisingly permissive, opening up new special economic zones and digital nomad visas. (b) In the digital world, a partial answer is the code-based order, protected by encryption rather than weapons. Like the handoff from the British to the Americans, can we hand some of what America did off to the Internet? Crypto is furthest along here. The anti-government strain within American libertarianism, the Ron Paul strain that says you can't trust the government, well...crypto simply applies that to all of the US government, including the parts run by Republicans, including the dollar that backs the US military. Crypto does not trust the plan. After all, the US has >$175T in compounding debt, and it's financially going to zero, economically doomed just like the USSR, albeit from Keynesianism rather than Communism. Elon is our best guy and couldn't fix it with DOGE. As he said, he did his best. (4) The closest modern analog to the end of the US empire may be the end of the USSR's empire. Just like the Soviet Union became Russia, the USA is becoming America. Troops are being pulled back from around the world, it's becoming a "republic, not an empire", and everyone has to figure it out for themselves. Now, many wars did erupt in the aftermath of Soviet withdrawal, like Chechnya and the Tajikistani civil war. But it's not like every single place fell into war. Estonia didn't, Poland didn't. The Czechs and Slovaks had the Velvet Divorce. Countries long under the Soviets worked out local security arrangements between themselves. That's what's happening now as the American Empire withdraws from the world. Everyone is figuring it out for themselves. IN SUMMARY (a) You're correct that a country needs a military, but the world is losing the US military, so they'll build their own or align with a country that has one. (b) You're correct that the US military historically protected the rules-based order, but in many ways it's abandoning that order, while much of Eurasia is actually going further in the direction of free trade, and the Internet is exporting global rule-of-law via rule-of-code. (c) You're correct that US military withdrawal will likely result in chaos in parts of the world, like the USSR's military withdrawal did, but I don't think it results in chaos in all of the world, anymore than the USSR's withdrawal did. (d) Don't take it from me, though. The 2025 US National Security Strategy said that elites "overestimated America's ability" and that "permanent American domination of the entire world" is not in the best interests of the US. In other words, they've already announced that the world is multipolar, that the unipolar moment is over, that US will no longer pay any price and bear any burdern. So everyone will need to figure out security after the American empire leaves, just as they had to figure out local security arrangements after the British, French, and Soviet empires left. whitehouse.gov/wp-content/up…

Far left: we need to tear down the system Center left: we need a system Center right: we need positive-sum games Far right: we need to win zero-sum games

We don’t see it, but we see it every day. The aesthetic of the era is code.

China is opening up internally. For generations, the hukou system meant the average Chinese national couldn’t freely emigrate within China. Like being geolocked to New York and being unable to relocate to Texas. China did this in part for social control, and in part to prevent huge floods of people from moving to big Chinese cities for jobs before the infrastructure was available. But now development in China is so broad-based, and the infrastructure so reliable, that they are gradually opening the borders *within* China by letting everyone move around. The Soviets also had a system of internal passports. But the new Chinese system is less similar to traditional communism, and more similar to the Schengen region for the EU, or the free migration between the fifty states within the US. In many ways China is moving in the opposite direction from the West, by opening up visa-free travel to China for 50 countries, introducing the K visa for skilled migrants, and gradually shelving the hukou system. The overall trend is towards more free (albeit still controlled) flows of capital and talent within China.

Future books will be written monk-mode, by hand, completely offline, in digital monasteries purpose-built for focus.

I’m very sympathetic to Prof Tabarrok’s point of view. And of course he’s right that AI hyperdeflates costs in many areas, from code to math to biomedicine to robotics. However…AI is also breaking as many markets as it creates. It’s flooding sales, marketing, recruiting, email, social media, identity verification, education, and countless other verticals with an onslaught of increasingly convincing scams, spam, and slop. Essentially, just like cryptocurrency and social media, AI accelerates digital tribalism. Within the trusted tribe, you can indeed share code and context to accelerate progress. But outside the trusted tribe, every message will soon be presumed untrusted slop till proven innocent. (Just look at social media these days for a preview!) That means the result of AI is not universally positive. There is a first order offsetting term where some markets have their verification costs radically increased by AI (eg email). And there is a second order cost in terms of boosting digital tribalism, and consequent distrust between groups. These are largely separate from the third question of whether AI actually takes jobs or not. China currently has an advantage in the AI era because it’s the largest scaled digital tribe on the planet. With its centrally controlled network, it’ll have an easier time dampening the bad aspects of AI (like digital fraud) while amplifying the good parts (like physical robotics). For the free Internet, however, we’ll need to evolve different tools to deal with the AI environment. Likely a web3 of trust, to deter fraud while promoting commerce. But anyway…I just wanted to sound a note of caution. AI, like every technology, has both costs and benefits. It’s going to create a lot of wealth (already has), but it’s also going to create a lot of costs. And we should enumerate those costs in order to mitigate them.

Look, if you don’t like the ending of any movie, you can soon just export the file, put it into one of the increasingly high quality open weights video models, and do whatever remix you like. We aren’t all the way there, but we’ll be there soon. Prompts will promptly disrupt Hollywood.