Zcash has a history of presenting itself as more “scientific” compared to others. There has been a lot of agitation coming from Zcash recently and some of it has crossed the line into outright insults.

Monero technology is also based on peer reviewed research.

It is a blatant lie and direct insult towards these cryptographers to claim that this technology and research is somehow inferior.

Great harm has been done in human history when a discourse unfolded where some people claimed to be more “scientific” and therefore superior to others.

In the following, when I refer to “intellectuals”, I mean people that claim to represent the “true science” while denigrating others as unscientific or less scientific.

The root of the problem is blind worship of intellectualist aesthetics and creation of mini personality cults.

This is the kind of discourse that the Zcash community has been engaging in recently. I advocate for them to stop this behavior immediately.

“Intellectuals” will never be allies of freedom. We all saw how they acted during Covid. Intellectuals are profoundly conformist and in its absolute conclusion totalitarian. That is because they are more in love with their own thoughts, than the love they have for their fellow man.

Their thoughts are a mirror of the times and they will amplify what ever small smoldering support there is for authoritarianism. We can never live in peace around them. We should always keep our guard up against someone who is willing to put themselves above others because of their “intellectual” status.

“Intellectuals” are the most dangerous enemies of freedom because they will always find a justification for sacrificing freedom in the name of some higher ideal. They are the ones who will always find a justification for tyranny. They are the ones who will always find a justification for sacrificing the individual on the altar of some collective good. They are the ones who will always find a justification for sacrificing truth on the altar of some “higher truth”.

Here is what Hanna Arendt has to say about “intellectuals”.

There is a longer version of this speech only found without English subtitles:

“And I came from a purely academic background.”

In that respect, 1933 left a very lasting impression on me, which was first negative and second positive.

One often thinks that the shock experienced by German Jews in the 1930s can be explained by Hitler coming to power. Now, for me and people of my generation, I can say that this is a curious misunderstanding. It was, of course, very terrible politically. But it was not personal.

That the Nazis were our enemies — my God, we didn’t need Hitler’s rise to power to know that. That had been evident to anyone not retarded for at least four years. It was even quite evident that a large part of the German people welcomed it — I admit that.

We couldn’t have been surprised by the shock of 1933. The shock was that things changed from a general political issue into something personal. It was not immediate; only later did it become a personal fate.

Knowing what Gleichschaltung is — it meant that friends aligned. The problem wasn’t what the enemies did, but what the friends did.

What happened then, in the wave of Gleichschaltung, which was quite voluntary at first, not yet under the pressure of terror, especially in the sudden abandonment — it was as if an empty space formed around oneself.

I lived in an intellectual environment, and I could observe, and others confirmed, that among intellectuals this was the rule, whereas among others it was not.

I never forgot that story. When I left Germany, as I thought then — perhaps exaggerating a bit — I said I would never again be involved in any intellectual matters. I don’t want to have anything to do with this kind of “society”.

Of course, I did not believe that a German Jew or German-Jewish intellectual, if in a different situation, would be fundamentally different. I did not hold that opinion.

I believed, that it is connected to this Job. — I speak in the past tense because I know more now — do you still believe that? I no longer perceive it as sharply.

But this is the essence of it: intellectuals will always find some explanation for everything. - look, if someone aligns, because he has to care for his woman and child - nobody will morally condemn him, - The worst was that some intellectuals truly believed it, if only for a short time, some for a very short time.

That means they had all kinds of ideas about Hitler, incursions, and vagaries about Hitler — partly unbelievably interesting things, truly fantastic, complex, and far above the ordinary, lofty notions.

I found that grotesque.

That means they fell into the trap of falling in love with their own attitudes — I would say today. That is what happened. I did not want to overlook that at the time.

I am not arguing for a Pol Pot style hatred and othering of intellectuals. I am arguing for a healthy skepticism towards the aesthetic of intellectualism. Especially if it is combined with hero worship without any critical thinking. These two ingredients are a recipe for disaster and there is no limit on how bad things can get.

At the extreme we get Lysenkoism. Millions of deaths caused by the combinition of blind faith in the intellectual aesthetic and hero worship.

Lysenkoism was a pseudoscientific agricultural doctrine promoted by Trofim Lysenko in the Soviet Union, which rejected established genetics and Darwinian evolution in favor of environmentally-based inheritance and radical agricultural interventions. Backed by Stalin in the late 1920s to 1950s, Lysenko claimed that plants could be “educated” to adapt new traits that would be inherited by subsequent generations. His methods included close planting of crops, forbidding the use of fertilizers and pesticides, and applying harsh seed treatments that weakened crops. These practices led to catastrophic crop failures and prolonged famines, notably the Holodomor in Ukraine, killing millions between 1932-1933 and afterward.

Lysenkoism also spread to Communist China in the late 1950s, where it contributed to the Great Chinese Famine, causing tens of millions of deaths. Beyond agriculture, Lysenko’s influence decimated Soviet genetics, suppressing genuine scientific research, dismissing or persecuting thousands of geneticists, and setting Soviet biology back by decades. The horrors of Lysenkoism are a stark example of how political ideology and pseudoscience can cause immense human suffering and the destruction of scientific progress. source

I am not saying that Zcash today is comparable to Lysenkoism. But they create an atmosphere just like the one that sent anyone who opposed Lysenko to the gulags. The Zcash community should take a long hard look at themselves and ask if they want to be on the side of freedom or on the side of tyranny.

The Zcash loudmouths put their genius cryptographers on a pedestal and create a culture of hero worship around them. Without asking basic questions and checking if they can credibly achieve what they promise. They claim Tachyon will enable scaling to billions, while ignoring the fact that other projects have claimed the same and came up short. The Mina protocol launched in 2021 on similar claims of scaling to mass adoption with the help of aggregating proofs in front of the consensus stage.

It turns out, that in practice there are lots of caveats to this approach and to this day the Mina protocol TPS are nothing to write home about. I followed the reporting around project Tachyon closely and I have yet to see any credible benchmarks or reports on how it performs in practice. It is interesting to note that nobody bothered to ask how much TPS Tachyon can achieve before the Zcash community started to cheerlead for it. Read more here on why Monero is ahead in scaling privacy.

I hope in the future the Zcash community can apply more critical thinking and engage more respectfully with others.