𝔈mnlts

Seeker of truths and a digital scavenger of sorts.

[𝔈mnlts @emnlts]

@DeFifrog1 Everything is a ponzi with varying degrees of speed and complexity. Its a natural design to select winners and losers in the simulation we currently live in. Kek

[Anabel Schunke @ainyrockstar]

Stell dir vor, du lebst in Europa und ein Somali versucht dir mitten auf der Straße den Kopf abzuschneiden.

Sie haben uns einfach wilde Low-IQ-Psychopathen vor die Nase gesetzt. Und wer das nicht mehr will, wird als Nazi beschimpft.

#belfast

[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.

[𝔈mnlts @emnlts]

TRON dumps, BNB pumps. The Trump's asian duplet. Crypto must die. Good riddance.

[brett goldstein @thatguybg]

travel is the ultimate low status brain rot pastime

I traveled around the world for a year and realized the world is all the same minus a few places.

you will find more meaning building a business, a body of artistic works, or a family than gorging yourself on travel

[🇹🇷𝗘𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗻𝘽𝙚𝙮🦅 @Ermanbey35]

Evlilik sektörü bitti. Artık Kimse kimseye güvenmiyor. Kimsenin kimseye tahammülü kalmamış. Herkes günü birlik ilişkide . 30 lu yaşlarındaki insanlar hâlâ bekâr. Bundan 20 yıl sonra emin olun evlilik diye bir şey kalmayacak Herkes yalnız yaşayacak.💁

[Olivier (Emerging Value) @ReturnsJourney]

Spain is the country where people are poor and the state is rich.
Everyone will be cramped in small apartments and sharing, while you go down the road and there is a giant modern, perfectly maintained state owned building that is some museum of arts or something with 10 pictures on the wall by some photographer.
The entry is Free and there are 100 staff.

That building would house 1000 people if it was an apartment block.

And most people blame "speculators" on lack of housing and want more state.

Stockholm syndrome

[Kangmin Lee | 이강민 @kangminlee]

Women will do this then vote to import infinity third world child rapists into our country

[Abdul @0x_Abdul]

april 2026 was the worst month ever in terms of defi exploits

~$635M lost in total, 28 incidents in 30 days:

1) apr 1 - drift - $285m
2) apr 3 - silo v2 - $392k
3) apr 4 - tmm - $1.67m
4) apr 5 - denaria finance - $165k
5) apr 9 - aethir - $423k
6) apr 12 - hyperbridge - $2.5m
7) apr 12 - subquery - $60k
8) apr 13 - dango - $410k
9) apr 13 - mona - $61k
10) apr 14 - zerion - $100k
11) apr 16 - rhea finance - $18.4m
12) apr 16 - grinex - $15m
13) apr 18 - kelp dao - $293m
14) apr 20 - juicebox v3 - $52k
15) apr 20 - thetanuts finance - $50k
16) apr 21 - volo protocol - $3.5m
17) apr 22 - kipseli - $80k
18) apr 23 - giddy finance - $1.3m
19) apr 25 - purrlend - $1.5m
20) apr 26 - scallop - $150k
21) apr 27 - singularity finance - $413k
22) apr 27 - zetachain - $300k
23) apr 28 - judao - $228k
24) apr 28 - quant - $138k
25) apr 29 - aftermath perps - $1.14m
26) apr 29 - sweat foundation - $3.5m
27) apr 29 - syndicate - $330k
28) apr 30 - wasabi protocol - $5m+

[cyberprince @cyberprince_rwo]

no one respectable is left in crypto

i dont think im ever going back

the money made was not worth it

in 2016 there was nothing to compete with for fomo and speculation, it has nothing to offer now.

crypto has no moat

i hope you make your next 100x in the trenches and leave

[Michael Antonelli @BullandBaird]

Its just remarkable to me how fast crypto became irrelevant.

No one built a single thing on it that gained widespread adoption (I guess other than just a payment platform)

Remember when it was going to replace the dollar?

Laughable.

[Wholesome Side of 𝕏 @itsme_urstruly]

High intelligence often comes with heightened pattern recognition. You start noticing social masks, forced conversations, performative friendships, hidden motives, emotional immaturity, and energy that feels draining instead of nourishing. Many highly intelligent people also have more active nervous systems, deeper inner worlds, and lower tolerance for superficial stimulation, so solitude can feel safer than constantly shrinking themselves to fit environments that don’t feel aligned.

[B e a r m a x x e r @centristpeater]

Lord grant me the confidence of a mediocre Asian woman in the Bay Area

[Wall Street Mav @WallStreetMav]

Foreign aid to the 3rd world ... tax high IQ people to breed billions of low IQ people.

This is the worst policy strategy in human history.

[Sqalef @sqalef]

imagine donating to this lmao

stani just bought a mansion for 30m btw

[𝔈mnlts @emnlts]

@jonwu_ You're thinking too much. Civs rely on long-established trusted entities. Crypto and anons destroys the trust factor with 1 hack/rug. We accepted this for the potential outcome of making it, but it doesn't work long-term as our genes evolved for civ building and kick bad actors.

[𝔈mnlts @emnlts]

@jonwu_ You're thinking too much. Civs rely on long-established trusted entities. Crypto and anons destroys the trust factor with 1 hack/rug. We accepted this for the potential outcome of making it, but it doesn't work long-term as our genes evolved for civ building and kick bad actors.

[bu/ac @buperac]

Damn this one slaps!

[Toni Estévez @Toniestevezg]

Española haciendo papeleo a africano para regularizarse.

Tenemos al enemigo en casa.

[🇯🇵砂川 泉🎌 @Izumi_Sunagawa]

黒人少女。
こんな子供ですら、
自転車が欲しければ無理矢理にでも盗む。 https://t.co/uHpAK9PVIr

[Pirat_Nation 🔴 @Pirat_Nation]

Starting in 2027, smartphones sold in the European Union will be required to have user-replaceable batteries designed for greater durability and more charging cycles.

Manufacturers must also provide spare parts and repair manuals for at least 10 years after a model is released.

This is real pressure against planned obsolescence. It should mean phones that actually last longer, cheaper fixes, and a lot less electronic waste piling up. About time.