Clayton Rabenda | Litheum Founder

@litheumofficial
Blockchain Creator, Father, Cypherpunk, Sniper Circle Member, Mitochondriac, Electrical Engineer, Ex Googler, Expat, American.

[Clayton Rabenda | Litheum Founder @clayrab]

Well decentralized blockchains are intentionally limited. Figure out why and scale is possible. Litheum's Proof of Performance is the only Truly Decentralized consensus. The blockchain itself is the difficulty. No volunteers needed = pure win win consensus = decentralized scale.

[Clayton Rabenda | Litheum Founder @clayrab]

Necessary in the post-LLM era. They can't stop script kiddies from passing these tests. The superior solution is micro-transaction based access.

[zerohedge @zerohedge]

Google's New CAPTCHA Plans Will Create A Two-Tier Internet Only Accessible To Those With 'Approved' Devices https://t.co/kaRH8SNrdQ

[Clayton Rabenda | Litheum Founder @clayrab]

This is the problem with having a consensus that prices the way most blockchains do. Higher limits = lower revenue. A more holistic solution is needed.

[Shubham @shub_mahe]

@marilyn100x If fee drops so much, how does $eth token accrue value?

[Clayton Rabenda | Litheum Founder @clayrab]

@TheDesertLynx @grok why was https://t.co/xVPV0bZD3f shut down?

[Clayton Rabenda | Litheum Founder @clayrab]

@llamaonthebrink @SalmanGreen @grok No, you start with a solved cube and do the reverse 18 times first.

[Clayton Rabenda | Litheum Founder @clayrab]

It's time for Americans to all learn the law and start suing these agencies and their agents which are completely overstepping their jurisdiction. Disregard this garbage until damage is done and then put them in prison, thats how it should be done. America is not special because of "seperations of power" or "checks and balances", the experiment was that the law is derived entirely from the common law, that the people are embodying the sovereignty via the legal system, NOT via the "government". The feds have no jurisdiction over the people which is why all the laws are so inpoprehensobke and enforcement is often arbitrary or also voluntary.

[Clayton Rabenda | Litheum Founder @clayrab]

@EliBenSasson Once upon a time before Louis CK told everyone about the mullions he made, before Obama responded to two questions in his AMa, when Aaron was still alive, there was a thing called reddiquette.

[Clayton Rabenda | Litheum Founder @clayrab]

@jyn_urso It's useless. It's reached its true value. Gold that you can send on the internet but only 1m tx per day. It's just not that useful. Gold and silver can be a store of value but for all 10B people on earth. Not just 1%.

[Clayton Rabenda | Litheum Founder @clayrab]

@scottmelker TOM LEE IS RETARDED. GET OFF MY TIMELINE. MUTED.

[Clayton Rabenda | Litheum Founder @clayrab]

@_tm3k Monero sock puppet accounts lol. Sounds like projection. No one that supports Monero would bother doing this kind of crap. This behaviour showed up in 2017 with the bad actors. Monero is the only pure Blockchain left.

[Clayton Rabenda | Litheum Founder @clayrab]

@AaronRDay It will all be over soon. Learn common law, which can be the basis of the new system and is still alive and well although no one knows it, including the lawyers. We actually don't need any govt systems or laws to function if we just learned our civics. They don't teach us this.

[Clayton Rabenda | Litheum Founder @clayrab]

@AdrianoFeria Wow an honest assessment from someone on CT. What a breath of fresh air. Followed.

[AdrianoFeria.eth 🦇🔊 🛡️ @AdrianoFeria]

The problems fully decentralized crypto networks are trying to solve are too complex for the average person to appreciate, let alone understand well enough to judge which network is actually structured to solve them.

The second major problem with decentralization is that it cannot stand on its own. There are things that decentralization cannot solve, but we have been conditioned to ignore this.

This is Ethereum’s Achilles heel.

Ethereum, and crypto in general, will not win public perception and adoption through ideology or marginal improvements that don't address core problems.

Crypto needs to deliver uncompromising, tangible improvements over TradFi. The way to do that is by building unapologetically centralized L2 services on top of Ethereum.

Ethereum’s role is to audit and settle transactions, and to act as an emergency lifeboat when things go horribly wrong. Self-custody and immutability may be beneficial at an institutional level and as a niche market for consumers, but this is not the norm and never will be. The liabilities are simply too large to justify the benefits in most cases.

Ethereum is not going to be the direct consumer layer for global mass adoption because decentralization comes with real tradeoffs that normal users neither understand nor want to deal with.

There must be a layer that provides some degree of transaction reversibility, fraud protection, and customer service. The answer is centralized L2s. The alternative are opaque centralized services that cannot be easily/reliably audited and carry additional friction and risk when entering/exiting self-custodial L1.

This is not rocket science, but it feels like mostly everyone who is deep in crypto trenches just don't get it.

[Clayton Rabenda | Litheum Founder @clayrab]

@nullc0py Everything "web 2" was a mistake. My first ISP in the 90s gave you an FTP server and an email address.

[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).

[Clayton Rabenda | Litheum Founder @clayrab]

@zengjiajun_eth What if this cat turd smell less bad than this dog turd?

[Clayton Rabenda | Litheum Founder @clayrab]

The fact no one in this thread has any real answers and there are VERY REAL problems is a huge red flag for this industry a HUGE opportunity if you are will to actually look at the problems, the root cause, and find a real solution. This will be the topic of our livestream on Friday.

[Airbtc @Airbtconline]

What’s the strongest argument AGAINST Bitcoin you’ve heard?

[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.

[Clayton Rabenda | Litheum Founder @clayrab]

All the "smart people" were shouted down by bad actors in 2017. Being "smart" is not nearly enough to change the world, you must be honest, forthright, brave, hard working, and independent-minded.

[MADEX @spacebull]

if what bitcoin needs is a bunch of smart people to get together and do smart things it’s going to fail

[Clayton Rabenda | Litheum Founder @clayrab]

@SimonDixonTwitt Since 1976 it's clear that we have the natural right to freely transact with anyone on Earth. The govt tried to keep that math secret. Getting in the way is like trying to stop the motion of the planets. Blockchains are a outcrop of basic reality.

[Clayton Rabenda | Litheum Founder @clayrab]

Since 1976 it's clear that we have the natural right to freely transact with anyone on Earth. The govt tried to keep that math secret. Getting in the way is like trying to stop the motion of the planets. Blockchains are a outcrop of basic reality.

[Simon Dixon @SimonDixonTwitt]

I’m not either.

I’m sharing how the financial-industrial complex creates subordinating financial architecture designed to capture participants, whether they intend to be captured or not.

I know because I used to be an investment banker, and I understand how and why these structures are created, securitized, and distributed.

It’s not about your relationship with any individual person.

It’s about the financialization architecture and the incentives embedded within the system.

Once you understand it, you understand the rules of the game and how to progress toward greater sovereignty.

You also stop analyzing personalities and start analyzing architecture.

Celebrity worship is a disease that blinds many people.

I’ve invested in enough deals and constructed enough financial compromise architecture to spot these structures a mile away.