RJ

crypτo, AI, geopolitics

[RJ @BaznoCap]

I expected a big year for privacy but thought it’d be zcash leading Venice. Needless to say, it was all VVV in Q1.

Thinking it’s time for a generational ZEC run.

[RJ @BaznoCap]

@insomniacxbt SOL BTC ETH
HYPE ZEC VVV

[RJ @BaznoCap]

I wonder if Apple bothered with marketing research before rolling out and expanding their global privacy ad campaign. Does privacy resonate?

[RJ @BaznoCap]

@insomniacxbt Wyt

[RJ @BaznoCap]

@blknoiz06 Not only are majors underowned, they are often the short side of the trade when allocating to quality alts. So if these shorts are also printing, alt investors even more comfy in the long side of their trades.

[RJ @BaznoCap]

Coinbase order book btw

[RJ @BaznoCap]

That thing they always said about bitcoin -- "exchanges are running out of Bitcoin"

That appears to be actually happening now...to ZCash.
Makes sense they were unprepared for this low volume sleeper coin to violently wake up.

[RJ @BaznoCap]

@0xSunRun I am interested. The market is trailing us, but evidence only grows that permanent and open competition yields faster progress. See the viral quantum post—they designed a subnet:

[Justin Drake @drakefjustin]

Today a crazy quantum story just got wilder.

On March 31, the Google Quantum AI team published a landmark result on Shor's algorithm for elliptic curve cryptography. Technically, the paper was a bombshell: a dramatic 10x improvement over the state-of-the-art. As a stunt and wakeup call to the blockchain space, those optimisations were illustrated on secp256k1, the elliptic curve underlying Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures.

But perhaps the most striking part of the paper was sociological, not technical. Instead of following standard academic process, the optimisations were kept secret, hidden behind a zero-knowledge (ZK) proof. Google's accompanying blog post mentions they "engaged with the U.S. government". The ZK proof demonstrates the existence of algorithmic improvements without leaking details. Academic censorship with ZK, a historic first!

As a co-author of the Google paper I witnessed some of the context surrounding this censorship. To be honest, multiple aspects of that context don't sit well with me. As much as I believe the general public ought to know more, I am limited in my ability to whistleblow. Though let me be clear about one thing: the Google team's professionalism has been absolutely exemplary, and they deserve nothing but praise.

Censorship has a way of backfiring. The Streisand effect, where an attempt to bury something only draws more attention to it, is exactly what's unfolding today. First, Google's key optimisation has been rediscovered by the French. And in a thrilling turn of events, a collaborative Shor-at-home challenge just launched. The initiative, available at ecdsa[.]fail, breached a new Shor world record in a matter of hours.

Let's start with the rediscovery. Just two months after Google's paper, French quantum expert André Schrottenloher cracks the main secret optimisation. His paper, titled "Optimized Point Addition Circuits for Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithms", landed on the arXiv today. Big congrats to André, who beat several other nerdsnipped experts to it. In a blog post also published today, Craig Gidney, the world expert on Shor optimisations, revealed that he'd been sitting on this very optimisation for a whole year under censorship pressure.

Interestingly, André missed a handful of minor optimisations, both from Google's original publication and from improvements found since. It's plausible there's still plenty of juice left to squeeze out of Shor, and this is exactly what the ecdsa[.]fail challenge is about. The verifier program developed for the ZK proof does double duty, automatically filtering for valid submissions. Dozens of compounding small and micro improvements are rolling in. As of the time of writing there's an 8.4% improvement to Google's circuit, as measured by the product of logical qubit count and Toffoli gate count. Nice!

The nerdsnipping ran deeper than anyone expected. Over the last few weeks it became clear it extended well beyond André and other quantum experts. Behind the scenes, a small army of amateurs quietly got to work. Inspired by Karpathy-style autoresearch, they turned AI on Shor. Ironically, the verifier program for the ZK proof makes an ideal reward function for AIs. The barrier to entry for this modern style of research is refreshingly low, with several non-experts, even a teenager, finding nice optimisations. Get in touch if you'd like to join a Telegram group with fellow autoresearchers :)

Part 2: neutral atoms and qday

The story doesn't end with Google. On the same day Google went public, a stealthy startup called Oratomic published its own Shor paper in a coordinated release. It made a splash, ultimately becoming the most upvoted paper on scirate[.]com, a website ranking arXiv papers.

Oratomic's claim was wild. By building on Google's logical optimisations and applying custom physical optimisations for neutral atoms, they claimed just 10K physical qubits were sufficient to run Shor's algorithm on secp256k1. That number is mind-bogglingly low.

Knowing essentially nothing about neutral atoms when Oratomic's paper landed, I was intrigued and decided to learn more about the tech. I fell straight down the rabbit hole and spent a couple hundred hours on the topic. I got a little obsessed and watched every YouTube video I could find and spoke to a bunch of experts.

My conclusion? The tech is real, very real. Even Google recently decided to start a neutral atom lab, a notable pivot from their sole focus on superconducting qubits. If you care about qday, i.e. the day a quantum computer will break the first piece of cryptography in production, neutral atoms demand your attention. I shared some of my learnings on Shor and neutral atoms in a 30min talk at the ZKProof cryptography conference. You can find it on YouTube by searching "zkproof neutral atom".

Here's an interesting observation about this duo of breakthrough papers: neither Google nor Oratomic say a word about what their results mean for qday. No timelines. Zero. Nada. That is especially baffling given that the whole point of whitehat quantum cryptanalysis is to inform qday estimations and help the general public make good decisions.

So let me attempt to partially fill the silence, similarly to what Scott Aaronson did in his April 29 post. Given everything I know, including scary non-public information, I now put the odds of qday by 2032 at 50%. 10% by 2030.

Anecdotally, the US government has its own date: 2035. Originating at the NSA and later adopted by NIST, it's when branches of the US government will be disallowed from using quantum-vulnerable cryptography. In plain language: with hindsight, that date is a joke and should be discounted entirely. I don't see how NIST avoids being forced to pull it forward by years.

Part 3: post-quantum cryptography

There are good reasons to sound the alarm today, but please do not panic. Rushing carelessly towards immature post-quantum cryptography is a recipe for disaster. IMO a good target date for migration is 2029, roughly 3.5 years out. 2029 happens to be the date selected by Google, Cloudflare, and the Ethereum Foundation.

These days most of my time goes to safely migrating Ethereum towards post-quantum cryptography as part of the broader lean Ethereum effort. There's a lot to do. We need to rip out and replace BLS signatures at the consensus layer, KZG commitments at the data layer, and ECDSA signatures at the execution layer.

The plan to get there is compelling, and is based on hash-based cryptography. Within the Ethereum Foundation we've developed a Swiss army knife called leanVM (github[.]com/leanEthereum/leanVM) powered by the magic of hash-based SNARKs. Thanks to truly exceptional work by Emile, Thomas, and others, its performance is derisked. Regarding security, leanVM is a jewel, a minimal zkVM crafted for end-to-end formal verification and maximum security.

Want to help? There are two $1M initiatives. First, the Proximity Prize (proximityprize[.]org). Solve a long-standing mathematical conjecture in coding theory, improve hash-based SNARKs, and go home a millionaire. Second, the Poseidon Initiative (poseidon-initiative[.]info), offers $1M for breaking Poseidon, the SNARK-friendly hash function.

[RJ @BaznoCap]

You're concerned about Saylor selling? Check out this 21M fixed supply asset without Saylor

Oh its not Saylor, its quantum? Check out the same 21M fixed supply asset with shielded addresses that's implementing quantum-resistant encryption

[RJ @BaznoCap]

let's see...

[RJ @BaznoCap]

Saylor-less, encrypted, private Bitcoin

[RJ @BaznoCap]

@PeterSchiff Hype mentioned

[RJ @BaznoCap]

The price dispersion today is unbelievable. BTC puking guts and special situation alts performing quite well.

Confirmed crypto is in a totally new market regime.

[RJ @BaznoCap]

@Evan_ss6 @andyyy Fluence gang

[RJ @BaznoCap]

Open agent marketplace soon to be available in the port city of Venice

[Virtuals Protocol @virtuals_io]

Tomorrow

[Kunal Doshi @Kunallegendd]

One of our theses this year was that as prediction markets mature and competition intensifies at the base layer, the most attractive opportunities will shift toward the applications and intelligence built on top. One project I have been watching closely is @SynthdataCo

Synth displays expected outcomes for hourly and daily event contracts alongside the implied market probability, allowing users to compare market pricing against real time forecasts. Those forecasts are generated by the top 10 models from a pool of more than 200 competing on Bittensor.

To test the product, I tracked every BTC up/down market on @Polymarket over nine weekdays. Both Synth and Polymarket probabilities were recorded at the same moment: three minutes into each 15 minute market and 15 minutes into each hourly market. The forecasts were then compared against the final outcome.

Across 374 weekday 15 minute markets, Synth correctly called direction 86% of the time versus 57% for Polymarket. Across 95 hourly markets, Synth achieved 75% accuracy compared to 62% for Polymarket.

Notably, Synth's edge widened significantly at shorter time horizons, posting a 29 percentage point advantage in 15 minute markets versus a 13 percentage point advantage in hourly markets.

The disagreement data was even more interesting than the headline numbers. In 46% of 15 minute markets, Synth and Polymarket pointed in opposite directions. In every single case, Synth forecast DOWN while Polymarket implied UP. Synth was correct 82% of the time in these disagreements, suggesting the market was consistently underpricing short term downside during the sample period.

The bigger opportunity here may not just be for directional trading but especially for market making. A market maker armed with a calibrated probability edge can quote tighter two way prices, hold less inventory and capture more volume without taking on the same adverse selection risk.

As the base layer becomes commoditized, the intelligence layer becomes the moat. Synth may be an early example of what that future looks like.

[RJ @BaznoCap]

Diversifying broadly across the ‘AI trade’ gets more dangerous as the bubble inflates.

Targeted plays. BESS batteries for me now.

[RJ @BaznoCap]

There are so many confirmed hype tailwinds right now that bears are doing mental gymnastics to come up with a novel downside scenario.

The most credible bear case is still that hyperliquid gets hacked.

[RJ @BaznoCap]

@bloomberg_seth A subnet should do this with their alpha token and compute, even if disaggregated from the rest of bittensor

[RJ @BaznoCap]

My favorite thread on X. Don't borrow conviction. Understand the importance of the freedom to transact and financial privacy.

Many think privacy is a larp. Helpful for number go up. They will paper hand privacy coins because they don't understand.

[6529 @punk6529]

1/ There are no other constitutional rights in substance without freedom to transact

Being meaning to write this for 6 months, but the Canadian response to the trucker protests is illustrating this so vividly, that today is the day.