Aidan Mott

Interested in Bitcoin and Crypto. Previously Product and Research @ Messari

[Aidan Mott @KidKrypt0]

My advice to students thinking about dropping out to go full time crypto as someone who did 1 year ago:
-Don’t base your decision on people you’ve seen on twitter, everyone has a safety net
-For 99% of people hoping to rely on “trading” as primary income it will not end well

[Aidan Mott @KidKrypt0]

Anyone particularly knowledgeable about Zcash’s security model and or their post quantum plans? Ive put together a unified document outlining the risk surface area and their post quantum roadmap and would love a second set of eyes to see if I missed anything

[Aidan Mott @KidKrypt0]

@ebfull hi, could you DM when you have a moment? Your settings won’t let me message you. Thanks!

[Aidan Mott @KidKrypt0]

2027 deployment for post-quantum soundness seems at odds with the technical context. Last year @feministPLT said at ZconVI that if Bernstein's estimate for a public CRQC demo is even close to correct (2032) , the timing for deploying a PQ proving system in Zcash is 'very tight', specifically because it won't be a drop-in replacement due to proof size constraints, and it will have to coexist with OrchardZSA for a transition period. LatticeFold+ has shown progress since then but no PQ proving system has been selected, implemented in Zcash, or audited. @ebfull also just said in this thread that anyone claiming quantum soundness in the next year is 'lying' and 'we aren't saying that.'

[Aidan Mott @KidKrypt0]

Just to play devil's advocate and because I haven't really seen any pushback, what I think is some generous framing in the marketing around Zcash/quantum: The "recoverability" in Zcash's "Quantum Recoverability" is doing a lot of legwork. ZIP 2005 adds binding security for a recovery mechanism but not the proof system that actually executes it, if a CRQC exists before that system is deployed, funds aren't "recoverable". And it only applies to users who've already migrated funds into recoverable Orchard 0x03 notes. Less "recoverability," more "we've made recovery theoretically possible for users who proactively migrated, assuming the rest of the stack ships in time."

[Sean Bowe @ebfull]

Zcash Quantum Recoverability ZIP 2005 merged as Proposed.

Our first major buffer against quantum soundness problems is now headed toward wallet integration. As wallets update to support the ZIP, user funds will migrate.

No network upgrade necessary for this step.

[Aidan Mott @KidKrypt0]

appreciate the reply! This is what i was refering to re 2027 "fully post quantum" and where i think the marketing/messaging can add confusion to users where you have post-quantum, post-quantum privacy, post-quantum soundness, used in place of the other in public statements

"Zcash will roll out quantum-recoverable wallets within a month and reach full post-quantum status within 12 to 18 months, Zcash Open Development Lab founder and CEO Josh Swihart told a Consensus Miami audience"
https://t.co/HI17t00BuC

[Aidan Mott @KidKrypt0]

Of course, it doesn't discount the work being done, Zcash is ahead of the curve re quantum, and the dev's are very transparent about tradeoffs in the documentation. But the marketing feels like its getting out of hand with current capabilities as well as timelines around "fully post-quantum by 2027"

[Aidan Mott @KidKrypt0]

My full impartial take here : https://t.co/te3gyas5Jl

[Aidan Mott @KidKrypt0]

I spent some time trying to understand what the bet on @projecteleven entails.

$26M raised, $120M Valuation, the most visible company in the Bitcoin Quantum security space.

[Aidan Mott @KidKrypt0]

My overall take: net positive for the industry. The conversation on Bitcoin's quantum vulnerability has accelerated significantly. P11 and Nic Carter deserve credit for that.

The business model is still finding its shape. Worth watching

[Aidan Mott @KidKrypt0]

I don't think @projecteleven is a bad actor. The work they've done to raise the alarm on quantum should buy them a serious amount of goodwill.

I do, however, think they have made an unforced error with the Q-Day prize and subsequent messaging. 15-bit ECC break with QC is a big deal, but it is still a small milestone in the big picture. The methodology associated with the break needs to be bulletproof with very clear messaging.

I personally can't speak to the methodology/tech behind it, but credible voices have posed some seemingly valid skepticism that the team hasn't engaged with:

https://t.co/7iSvWQl71U

https://t.co/mLK3JmbDA4

Again, I have nowhere near the technical expertise to know if the criticism posed is correct, but I'd also guess that means a large % of people don't either. So the team needs to be as upfront and proactive in engaging with that as possible.

From my perspective, the value of earned press from this announcement is nowhere near the value being burned from the perceived (accurate or not) intellectual dishonesty, especially this early in the game on mitigating the quantum threat.

[Project Eleven @projecteleven]

Project Eleven Awards 1 BTC Q-Day Prize for Largest Quantum Attack on Elliptic Curve Cryptography to Date

Researcher breaks 15-bit ECC key on publicly accessible quantum hardware in a 512x jump from the previous public demonstration.

Project Eleven today awarded the Q-Day Prize, a one Bitcoin bounty, to Giancarlo Lelli for breaking a 15-bit elliptic curve key on a publicly accessible quantum computer. The result is the largest public demonstration to date of the attack class that threatens Bitcoin, Ethereum, and over $2.5 trillion in ECC-secured digital assets.

"The resource requirements for this type of attack keep dropping, and the barrier to running it in practice is dropping with them," said @apruden08, CEO of Project Eleven. "The winning submission came from an independent researcher working on cloud-accessible hardware. No national lab, no private chip. It shows that tangible progress is possible and highlights the urgency to migrate to post-quantum cryptography sooner rather than later. Google just committed to being quantum-secure by 2029. The window to get ahead of this is closing.”

Lelli derived a private key from its public key across a search space of 32,767 using a variant of Shor’s algorithm. Shor's targets the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP), the math underlying the digital signature schemes securing Bitcoin, Ethereum, and most blockchains.

Quantum attacks on ECC have moved from theory to practice over the last seven months. Steve Tippeconnic's 6-bit demonstration in September 2025 was the first public break on quantum hardware. Lelli's 15-bit result extends it by a factor of 512.

Theoretical resource estimates for a full 256-bit attack, the scale Bitcoin operates at, have fallen sharply over the same period. Google's April 2026 whitepaper put the requirement at under 500,000 physical qubits. A subsequent paper from Caltech and Oratomic brought that figure as low as 10,000 qubits in a neutral-atom architecture.

Lelli's result is the practical counterpart to those optimizations. The distance from 15 bits to 256 bits is large, but the gap is increasingly viewed as an engineering problem and not a fundamental physics problem.

Roughly 6.9 million Bitcoin sit in wallets whose public keys are visible on-chain, exposing them to quantum attack. All blockchains using ECC share similar risks with vulnerable assets.

Project Eleven is developing its next challenge, focused on the intersection of frontier AI models and quantum cryptanalysis.

[Aidan Mott @KidKrypt0]

2017-2018 Andrew DeStantis would be putting up straight Kobe numbers in the quantum debate on the timeline if he was still tweeting

#00000000000000000021e800c1e8df51b22c1588e5a624bea17e9faa34b2dc4a

[Aidan Mott @KidKrypt0]

@benthecarman It seems like this argument largely falls apart if there is only one CRQC in existence (or at least being used for this purpose) controlled by a single actor?

[Aidan Mott @KidKrypt0]

Summary of two new quantum/Bitcoin proposals from @avihu28 & @roasbeef.

Very open to feedback if I got anything wrong.

TL;DR: Clever solutions from smart devs, but no silver bullet yet. The real challenge will be coordination & governance, not tech.

https://t.co/SFjPyXAaZH

[Aidan Mott @KidKrypt0]

Summary of two new quantum/Bitcoin proposals from @avihu28 & @roasbeef.

Very open to feedback if I got anything wrong.

TL;DR: Clever solutions from smart devs, but no silver bullet yet. The real challenge will be coordination & governance, not tech.

https://t.co/SFjPyXAaZH

[Aidan Mott @KidKrypt0]

Full primer here https://t.co/bROwqWqbQm

[Aidan Mott @KidKrypt0]

Full primer here https://t.co/bROwqWqbQm

[Aidan Mott @KidKrypt0]

Wrote a quick primer on the quantum/Bitcoin discussions. Will add additional context in a v2 based on feedback (e.g. short-range attack is less likely but still theoretically possible). Would love any feedback/counterfactuals. Link below

[Messari @MessariCrypto]

and KDA mindshare spiked.