TechSavvy

IT Product Manager - Building important things
TechSavvy

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Re-posting the idea from the second half of this post a few months ago https://t.co/5yHyRCsvVV:

(This is very relevant to the options ideas from yesterday)

Question: if we're making a synthetic stable, what should it really be stable WITH RESPECT TO? USD is actually far from the best choice.

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What do people who want stablecoins ultimately want? They want price stability. They have some future expenses in mind, and they want a guarantee that will be able to pay those expenses. But if crypto grows on top of USD-backed stablecoins, crypto is ultimately not truly decentralized. Furthermore, different people have different types of expenses. There has been lots of thinking about making an "ideal stablecoin" that is based on some decentralized global price index, but what if the real solution is to go a step further, and get rid of the concept of currency altogether?

Here's the idea. You have price indices on all major categories of goods and services that people buy (treating physical goods/services in different regions as different categories), and prediction markets on each category. Each user (individual or business) has a local LLM that understands that user's expenses, and offers the user a personalized basket of prediction market shares, representing "N days of that user's expected future expenses".

Now, we do not need fiat currency at all! People can hold stocks, ETH, or whatever else to grow wealth, and personalized prediction market shares when they want stability.

[Greg Brockman @gdb]

codex for computer work is growing very fast

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

JUST IN: ChatGPT officially becomes the fastest app to reach 1 billion global monthly active users.

[OpenClaw🦞 @openclaw]

"You can run OpenClaw inside your company now." Annoucing our work with @Microsoft to bring OpenClaw to the Microsoft and Windows ecosystems. Claws now work securly in the enterprise.

[The Humanoid Hub @TheHumanoidHub]

Robotics hardware is the new premium talent market, and OpenAI is paying top dollar.

Actuator Design Engineer
Compensation: $342K – $445K + Offers Equity

Electrical Engineer, Robotics
Compensation: $295K – $380K + Offers Equity

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

Building apps has never been easier.

With Sites, Codex can turn your work, ideas, and plans into an interactive website or app your team can explore, use, and share with a URL.

Rolling out to Business and Enterprise plans, before expanding more broadly.

[Coinvo @Coinvo]

JUST IN: 🇬🇧 U.K. now allows websites to opt out of Google AI search.

[CIA @CIA]

Join CIA to analyze foreign threats – from cyber warfare to emerging technology – as a Science, Technology, and Weapons Analyst.

Visit https://t.co/havFrmiaj9 to learn more about how you can apply your technical expertise to U.S. national security challenges.

[Bull Theory @BullTheoryio]

In 1976, Apple’s third co-founder Ronald Wayne sold his 10% stake in Apple for $800 out of fear the business would fail.

Today it would be worth $455 billion, worth more than Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest, Spotify, Snapchat, Roblox and Reddit combined.

He is now 92 years old and lives in a mobile home off Social Security checks.

[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.

[Ash Crypto @AshCrypto]

BREAKING: Visa, Mastercard and Stripe will launch a stablecoin platform together.

The companies that move trillions in payments are going all in on stablecoins.

[Crypto Rover @cryptorover]

BINANCE FOUNDER CZ ABOUT AI AGENTS:

CZ says AI agents are going to transact 1,000 times more transactions than humans can do.

"AI is going to use crypto."

I totally agree.

AI will be a huge play next bull market.

[OurFaveOnlineDoc 🇬🇧 🇳🇬 @OurFavOnlineDoc]

This is a new world-class hospital completed and built in El Salvador by their president with the equivalent of 85billion naira.

An audit by the nigerian senate uncovered 210 TRILLION naira was “missing” from NNPC in 2017-2023.

Nigerian politicians need to be tied and killed.

[TechCrunch @TechCrunch]

Founders, you have one more shot! This year’s Startup Battlefield deadline is now June 8. Our 1,700-strong alumni network has raised $32B, with 250+ exits. And your startup could be next: https://t.co/nrwU632Df4

[Kalshi @Kalshi]

JUST IN: Uber to cut 20% of jobs in HR

[Jide Lambo @JideLambo]

Suno: we’re currently in the courts.
American VCs: whatever. Take the money and continue building.
EU VCs: we’ll book a meeting for after summer to let you know we pass.

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

Building index-tracking assets on top of options instead of debt

https://t.co/gFNEvCbHct

What if the use options as the base of defi, instead of CDPs and liquidations? So instead of extreme price movements creating a sharp and global "you get liquidated" effect, instead your exposure to the index diverges quadratically from your preferred exposure in a smoother way?

A key benefit is getting rid of the need for instant oracles, and instead making everything work on top of "slow oracles" (ie. the type that prediction markets use)

This design has a significant downside - the need to do regular rebalancing - and an open question of whether and how this rebalancing can be made slippage-resistant enough. But it's worth considering and trying IMO. I would feel much safer holding algostables inside something like this, than in something that depends on an oracle that has to give real-time answers (and therefore could be tricked into giving wrong real-time answers with no time for human recourse).

[TechSavvy @Codedsammy001]

This is the end

[TechSavvy @Codedsammy001]

@_DeejustDee Make I go price kala

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

NEW: $2.9 million San Francisco home listing says Anthropic or OpenAI stock will be considered as payment.