BTC down ~9% in two weeks, $84k to $76.5k. a $6.3B Binance hack, the biggest BTC ETF outflow day since June, and record ETH ETF outflows all landed at once. midterms today, jobs data Friday. traders are staying defensive
BTC back at ~$84.5k, up 2% today as strong AI earnings lift risk assets. ZEC +11% leading crypto after its network upgrade date got set. still 33% off the ATH, but the tone's shifting
The people who've held XRP through 80% drawdowns, a 4-year lawsuit, and two crypto winters aren't speculators.
They understand the use case and they think the timeline is longer than most people expect.
BREAKING: If you hold Bitcoin, this is SCARY!
Google says its Willow quantum chip reduced errors in a key process by 40 times, a major breakthrough.
In an early worst-case scenario, quantum computers could crack Bitcoin wallets by 2029–2030, just 3-4 years away.
10-year yield sitting near 5.3% a 24-year high and the Treasury plans to borrow $628B in Q4 alone. long bonds are getting hit hardest, TLT down 6-11% depending on the window. stocks keep acting like none of this matters, but the bond market is where the real pressure is building
I don't recommend anyone scramble to move their funds to new wallets today. But we should take the risks to cryptography from AI-accelerated math seriously, and minimize our exposure to not just quantum-vulnerable cryptography, but also potentially AI-vulnerable cryptography.
The core new area of risk from this viewpoint is, unfortunately, ML-DSA / FHE / lattices.
(and it's also another reason, along with quantum, why ECDSA might fall even faster than expected, hence the "fresh address" recommendation)
So far most people have been in the mode of thinking "elliptic curves broken, hashes safe, lattices safe". But there is a good chance that the concrete security of lattices will take serious hits from the next two years of AI math.
The basic threat model is: factoring is something that naively takes 2^(n/2) time, but over decades smart people have found and optimized number field sieves, and degraded that to 2^O(n^(1/3)), which is why RSA keys and signatures need to be ~400 bytes (and not 64 bytes). What if there are skeletons in the closet like that, both for elliptic curves and lattices, that we are simply not smart enough to discover - but bots soon will be?
This is a major part of the reason why for the past year ethereum's lean roadmap has been going in the "hash-only" direction: no lattices, no ML-DSA, no Falcon, no lattice-based commitments inside ZK proofs, etc. Signatures in lean ethereum are all hash-based, either WOTS or SPHINCS-.
For signatures and proofs, we already know how to go hash-only. The bigger challenge is for *public-key encryption* - and this goes far beyond blockchains. Secure communication, anonymizing protocols, lots of things need public-key encryption.
And unfortunately there are long-standing mathematical theorems showing why public-key encryption cannot be done with hashes alone. You have to have some kind of trapdoor object that has at least one form of usable "structure" - either group theory (incl. isogenies) or lattices or code-based or potentially in the future even more newfangled and spooky things (local mixing?). But for anything that has structure, you should assume that AI will make at least some progress in breaking that structure. Here, one reasonable inference is that if you want to make something plausibly long-term secure, multiply the key sizes by 10.
To me that's a very plausible world and something not at all extreme to predict. If AI will bring us 50 years of math in 2 years, then that 50 years of math may very plausibly include a "naive factoring -> GNFS" level of improvement to our ability to break lattices. In that world, lattices will still exist, but they will have to be significantly bigger to guarantee the same level of safety.
And at those new larger sizes, hash-based constructions will beat lattice-based constructions on concrete efficiency in every use case where hash-based constructions are possible at all.
Theoretically, of course it's possible that hashes are broken too (eg. P = NP would imply that). But I think P = NP is very unlikely. And intuitively, it's much more likely that a mathematical object has exactly no exploitable structure (like hashes are intended to), than that a mathematical object has exactly ~3 forms of exploitable structure (for elliptic curves: associativity, Schoof, pairings) and not some secret fourth form of structure we have not yet discovered that greatly degrades its security (for elliptic curves, ECDLP and pairing security). Similar for LWE, SVP, RLWE and the zoo of lattice problems.
For this reason, we do not yet see any reason to worry and start padding the byte size of hashes (if we start to worry more, we would pad the round count first before doing anything to the byte size).
Concrete TLDR, my own personal views:
* Hash-based > lattice-based, in those situations where hash-based is possible at all
* For anything lattice-based, be much more paranoid on param sizes. Remember that blockchains are only a small portion of the cryptography story; this point goes far beyond blockchains and applies to eg. access to websites, secure messaging, Tor / VPNs ...
* For privacy protocols, strongly favor NOT putting encrypted notes onchain. Instead, send them offchain through some third-party mechanism.
* If it's not difficult for you, keeping your funds in addresses which have not yet been used to make a transaction is a good idea. If it's easy for you, do it. **But be careful about migrations; I personally have lost more money in botched migrations than I have lost in all hacks combined**.
* For multisig wallets, doing confirmations offchain is better than onchain, because this way the signatures of signer wallets do not get exposed to the public, so if ECDSA falls to AI much faster than expected, at least the multisig "gracefully degrades" to a 1-of-1 where the 1 is whoever was gathering the signatures - a much better place to be than "anyone can take the money"
https://t.co/oVjwZog2lL
Nasdaq at a record high, 10-year yield at a 24-year high of 5.3%. AI stocks are doing all the work, the Dow lost 4.3% in September. both of these can't be true for long
BTC at $85k heading into Q4, up 51% off its cycle low, 9 days of ETF inflows. predictions range wildly, $50k bearish to $145k bullish, most clustering $85-110k. some watching November for a possible cycle bottom per the 4-year pattern
QNT went from sub-$70 to briefly topping $350 in 3 weeks after landing a deal with The Clearing House (25 major US banks) on Sept 24. now cooling to $240-270. massive real catalyst, but some of the volume driving it looks inflated by wash trading
markets closing the week strong. Dow +0.8%, S&P +0.4%, Nasdaq +0.5%, +2% on the week. oil pulling back on Hormuz reopening hopes is easing the yield pressure that's been hammering stocks all week
BTC pulled back from $87,283 to ~$84,155 today, giving back some of this week's gains. altcoins losing roughly in line with BTC, not worse, so this reads as profit-taking, not panic. still up on the week overall
#crypto#bitcoin
BTC back above $80k after eating a Fed hike, a failed CLARITY vote, AND a surprise BOJ hike, all at once. dominance dropped from 64% to 59%, alts are catching the rotation too. XRP +6.9%. resilient doesn't begin to cover it
CLARITY Act failed, 49-50, not even a majority. Lummis said "it's over" if this vote failed, and it did. BTC down to $75.75k, Coinbase and Circle both getting hit hard. hard to not feel let down after how close this got
ETH down to ~$2,450 today after tagging a 7-month high near $2,600 this week. BitMine now holds 5.93M ETH, close to 5% of total supply, mostly staked. one company owning that much of Ethereum is wild
ZEC hit $1,200 today, up 14%+, best price in a decade. shorts got wrecked again, $44.3M liquidated. Grayscale’s ZEC ETF now sitting on $463M+ in assets. this thing will not slow down
Trump says CFTC is working to bring Hyperliquid into the US legally, HYPE popped 11% on it. but experts estimate the actual process could take 10-12 months. headline bullish, timeline slow
ZEC broke $1,000, up 20% today. Grayscale’s spot ZEC ETF just went live on NYSE Arca, no accreditation needed anymore. shorts got wrecked, $34.5M liquidated in the squeeze
HYPE hit an ATH of $86.71 right as a $1.2B token unlock landed. holding strong anyway, protocol’s burning 99% of trading fees too, $1.3B eliminated since Dec 2024. $87 resistance is the line, break it or risk a pullback to $60
#hyperliquid