gaurav

I value free-speech, decentralization, honesty, liberty, solidarity, privacy, plebeians, selflessness, the socratic and the scientific method.

[gaurav @BitcoinsSG]

👋
so long,
for now.

take care of yourselves.

[Nick Szabo @NickSzabo4]

@wef Delete your account. And cancel your conference. The earth is not our prison and you are not our wardens.

[gaurav @BitcoinsSG]

@conordeegan Thank you

[gaurav @BitcoinsSG]

@roasbeef @DesheShai That's what I meant.

I appologize for missing the earlier ref in the mailing list.

You're awesome btw, I've been a fan for a while. Especially your presentations. Dense with pertenent material orated in light speed.

[gaurav @BitcoinsSG]

Dr. @DesheShai, it's about time your work on signature lifting was referenced.

[Olaoluwa Osuntokun @roasbeef]

in the face of quantum adversary, a commonly discussed emergency soft fork for Bitcoin would be to disable the Taproot keyspend path (https://t.co/AQo96JiYQ7), effectively turning it into something that resembling BIP-360

assuming an existing precautionary soft-fork to add a pq signature scheme, this would safely allow holders to maintain unilaterally custody of their funds

a downside to this proposal is that any keyspend-only (normal schnorr sig) would be locked indefinitely

inspired by https://t.co/rBJMpJ8sR0, I set out to address the option problem in section 6, to create a variant of seed-lifting that doesn't reveal the wallet's master secret! 🤓

the end result is a zk-STARK proof that proves: "public key P was generated using a private key k, which itself was derived via BIP-32/BIP-86 with a master wallet secret S"

this generalizes beyond Taproot, and would allow the rightful owners of any BIP-32 derived wallets to move their funds in het case of a spend disabeling emergency softfork 🛡️

the final proof takes 50 seconds to run on my MacBook with Metal GPU acceleration, uses 12 GB of RAM during proving, with a final proof size of 1.7 MB

the proving code/statement is largely unoptimized, and it's possible to aggregate several proofs into a single smaller proof ⨻

an actual production deployment would likely use a smaller optimize circuit for this specific statement, this demo serves to demonstrate that such a proof is well within reach w/ today's hardware+software

to generate the proof I forked TinyGo to add a risc0 RISC-V ELF compilation target for TinyGo: https://t.co/eAMrgzh0x6

then I used some helper utilities and a C FFI wrapped risc0 library to create a generalized toolkit for TinyGo zk-STARK proofs: https://t.co/urVS6r1kA7

the final guest+host lives in the bip32-pq-zkp repo: https://t.co/7CoF0oL384

such a proof scheme is yet another tool in the post quantum toolkit for Bitcoin developers to prepare for an eventual PQ world 🤠

full details in my post to the Bitcoin dev mailing list: https://t.co/I6TlRfDoCC

[gaurav @BitcoinsSG]

@elonmusk @beffjezos we know

[gaurav @BitcoinsSG]

@hashdag enjoyed your Oxford Union talk. What are you calling it?

Threshold Cooperative Equilibrium ?

[gaurav @BitcoinsSG]

@cryptosione @DesheShai @hashdag @michaelsuttonil @hus_qy Off the top of my head?

1. Migrate to Merkle trees
2. Implement Merkle Forests (uxtree, Dryja 19)
3. Implement Blake3

.... I'm sure I'm missing something, or incorrect somewhere.

[gaurav @BitcoinsSG]

@NattyLitecoin @KaspaSilver Thank you, means a lot.

[gaurav @BitcoinsSG]

@NattyLitecoin @KaspaSilver Been out of the loop for while now for health reasons. I would contact the core team.

[gaurav @BitcoinsSG]

@elonmusk Congratulations, you've closed the circuit; the proverbial holy grail. 👏👏

[gaurav @BitcoinsSG]

@IanSmith_HSA @brown____elsa Makes sense. Thanks for the insight.

[gaurav @BitcoinsSG]

@IanSmith_HSA @brown____elsa Sphincs+ ?
Greater Lindy effect primitives?

[Brian Cohen @inthepixels]

The Cognitive Cost of Bitcoin: Andreas Antonopoulos and the Hidden Toll of Early Crypto Evangelism

In the nascent years of Bitcoin, few figures were more instrumental in bridging the gap between esoteric code and public understanding than Andreas M. Antonopoulos. Through his seminal book Mastering Bitcoin, hundreds of global lectures, and tireless explanations of cryptography, distributed systems, and revolutionary monetary theory, he became the ecosystem’s most trusted “interpreter.” He translated dense technical concepts into accessible education for millions, helping transform Bitcoin from a niche cryptographic curiosity into a global movement.

Yet behind this intellectual legacy lies a profoundly human story of obsession, endurance, and neurological cost. Antonopoulos has described his first deep encounter with Bitcoin in vivid terms: stumbling upon it initially in mid-2011 with a dismissive “Pfft! Nerd money!” reaction, he ignored it for six months. The second time, via a mailing list discussion, he read Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper and experienced an immediate epiphany—“this isn’t money, it’s a decentralized trust network.”

What followed was a four-month fugue state of total immersion. He read, wrote, and coded for 12 or more hours a day, forgetting to eat or sleep. He lost 26 pounds in the process, later jokingly calling it “the Bitcoin diet” while cautioning others not to follow his example. This all-consuming obsession marked the beginning of his role as educator and advocate—and planted the seeds for the cognitive and physical toll that would later manifest.

In recent years, Antonopoulos has spoken candidly about suffering from debilitating migraines that have severely curtailed his ability to produce new content, update his books, or continue livestreams. He recently announced he would stop producing new material to focus on his health, having tried nearly every available treatment without full resolution. His experience illuminates a rarely discussed reality of technological revolutions: the extreme neurological pressures placed upon the pioneers who carry the vision forward.

A Perfect Storm: From Obsession to Central Sensitization

The early Bitcoin environment was an unusually potent incubator for migraine triggers. For a polymath like Antonopoulos, the risks were multiplicative. Deep mastery demanded simultaneous engagement with cryptography, economics, security, and game theory—an intensity of cognitive load that can overstimulate the trigeminal nerve system, a key pathway in migraine pathogenesis.

This mental marathon was compounded by relentless physical triggers. Early advocates lived in digital “garrisons,” auditing code and engaging in 24/7 global forums. Blue light disrupted circadian rhythms; computer vision syndrome bred neck tension; LED flicker sensitivity acted like a strobe on a vulnerable brain. Bitcoin never sleeps, and in those formative years, neither could many of its human interpreters. The result was chronic circadian destabilization—perpetual jet lag without travel—which destabilizes the hypothalamus, the brain’s command center for both sleep-wake cycles and migraine initiation.

Antonopoulos’s initial four-month obsession exemplified this pattern: total immersion at the expense of basic self-care. Over years of sustained high-stress “arousal” states, the brain can undergo central sensitization. Episodic migraines evolve into a chronic condition where the nervous system becomes hyper-reactive. Pain signals become a learned default response, such that even minor stimuli provoke debilitating attacks.

The Irony of the Human Layer

There is a poignant irony at the heart of the story. Bitcoin was designed as a decentralized system promising individual sovereignty and freedom from centralized points of failure. Yet birthing and explaining this vision relied heavily on a small number of centralized human figures who served as the vital “human layer.”

[gaurav @BitcoinsSG]

End of an era.

I hope you get well and the much deserved break from inspiring billions.

Some people may forget you or perish in a few decades, but A.I. won't.

🧡 @aantonop

https://t.co/tCclEiyqqy

[gaurav @BitcoinsSG]

@elonmusk You should increase the center and the accretion disk of the logo every year ever so slightly ;-)

[gaurav @BitcoinsSG]

@cryptoquick 🤨

[gaurav @BitcoinsSG]

congratulations, always learn something new from your posts.
You mentioned scalable; a major accomplishment.
However, the scalability described here seems proximal. Do you see any innovations in the horizon where geographical proximity is minimized such that scalability, and thus decentralization of quantum calculations and coordination can occur across larger distances ?

[gaurav @BitcoinsSG]

@elonmusk What do you think is the real blocker to practical nuclear fusion today?

Physics, engineering, or economics?

Solving energy the way the Sun does(stable, sustainable) may even top your incogitable list of accomplishments.

[Nick Szabo @NickSzabo4]

It seems Jane Street may have had a long-standing culture that essentially trained crypto scammers, and perhaps also concocted and ran some of the scams themselves.

Terra/Luna was a jenga tower waiting for somebody to topple it, and it may have been Jane Street that figured out how to do it. If crypto is not strong and secure against such things, it provides little or no benefit over traditional finance, so I'm not going to cry about this, and perhaps it should even be applauded.

The alleged Bitcoin ETF market making + "10 am" selling with that liquidity sounds like a considerably more problematic conflict of interest. "Negligent" might be a good way to describe the ETFs who naively trusted Jane Street with this function. Now the once-hot crypto ETFs are draining because of an understandable reduction in trust, not in the coins themselves, but in the way Wall Street "makes markets" for buying and selling them.

In finance "everyone is a scammer" -- and you should stop blindly trusting scammers.

That is why Bitcoin OGs have long said, "Not your keys, not your coins," "don't trust, verify", and even "trusted third parties are security holes."

And when "the market" is so dependent on trusting strangers, especially strangers who still don't actually understand or like Bitcoin all that much, it's also not your "market price."

https://t.co/KhOX16gKZ3

[gaurav @BitcoinsSG]

@elonmusk Maximally optimizing for symbiosis with Homo Sapiens Sapiens might be worth considering.

Microbiomes are useful evolutionary, historic, and contemporary examples.