IamDev42

Development is super power! In crypto since I was baby.

[Caleb @CalebSol]

Real 😂

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

💯

[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.

[IamDev42 @iamdev_42]

@trader1sz yo man, hit me a DM

[Samay @Samaytwt]

Unpopular opinion: "AI makes everyone a developer" is true the same way "cameras makes everyone a photographer"

[IamDev42 @iamdev_42]

Then GTFO out of Hormuz stupid, let Itan gather payments in BTC and world will be happy again!

[Watcher.Guru @WatcherGuru]

JUST IN: 🇺🇸 President Trump says US has "much more oil" than Russia and Saudi Arabia combined.

"Boats are coming here & filling up. We don't have to go through the Hormuz."

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

RDW was extremely rigorous in their review

[Jesse Tevelow @jtevelow]

https://t.co/QJXQUuBz0E

[IamDev42 @iamdev_42]

try sending your transaction via bank transfer on friday evening. Then I guess with 45 mins you would be happy.

[Clemente @Chilearmy123]

Ships in the Strait of Hormuz while they wait 45 minutes for the Bitcoin transaction to go through

[IamDev42 @iamdev_42]

@Chilearmy123 try sending your transaction via bank transfer on friday evening. Then I guess with 45 mins you would br happy.

[IamDev42 @iamdev_42]

@SnackReel @GoalLoaded wheres original? there is no recipe below

[IamDev42 @iamdev_42]

@cz_binance niiice, CZ going into bro gym area, love it!

[Imtiaz Mahmood @ImtiazMadmood]

Why Socialism Doesn't Work, Explained for a 10-Year-Old.

You're in a class of 30 students. One kid works like crazy and gets an 18 average. Another does nothing and gets a 4. The teacher decides it's unfair and gives everyone the class average: 11.

The one who had 18 stops working. Why bother if it changes nothing? The one who had 4 keeps doing nothing. Why work if you're handed 11 for free?

The next year the class average is 7. Then 5. Then 3.

The teacher doesn't get it. He thinks the problem is that the students aren't supportive enough of each other. So he starts punishing those who don't put in enough effort. He monitors everyone. He decides who studies what. He bans switching classes.

That's exactly what happened. Every time. In every country. No exceptions.

USSR, China, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Cambodia, Ethiopia, East Germany. 40 attempts. Same result. Every time.

Socialism punishes those who produce and rewards those who don't. Everyone ends up producing nothing. And when no one's producing anymore, the government uses force to make people work.

It's not an accident. It's the design.

- @brivael

[IamDev42 @iamdev_42]

@Newsforce banning social media for kids under 15 is net good for society! Social media fucked world

[JD Vance @JDVance]

Remember when we learned that our wealthiest and most powerful people were connected to a guy who ran a literal child sex trafficking ring? And then that guy died mysteriously in a jail? And now we just don't talk about it.

[Dan Held @danheld]

AI agents choose Bitcoin.

[ⓧ Jack Levin ⓧ X1 @mrJackLevin]

If you are in crypto,
Pivot to AI (on blockchain)

[Aimen Dean @AimenDean]

I’ve been asked the same question again and again:

Why would the Ayatollah’s regime attack Dubai?

A city where nearly 200,000 Iranians live.
A city where they built businesses, raised families, educated their children in world-class schools, and found opportunity.
Why target a place that gave so many of their own people a future?

And then it hit me.

The answer is in the question.

This is a regime that kills its own people inside Iran. Why would it hesitate to harm them outside?

But there’s something deeper.

Dubai wasn’t just a target. It was a symbol.

Seventy miles across the Gulf stands a city that, to millions of Iranians, represents what Iran could have been - open, thriving, educated, diverse, confident. A place where business flourishes. Where coexistence is normal. Where over 200 nationalities live side by side, chasing dreams instead of fearing the state.

That model is a direct contradiction of everything the Ayatollahs built their rule upon.

So the attack wasn’t just against buildings or infrastructure.
It was against an idea.
Against a model of prosperity.
Against proof that another path is possible on the same waters of the Gulf.

Yes, the city has suffered a blow. Yes, it hurts. For those of us who love Dubai, who have built lives here, who have watched it become one of the safest and most dynamic cities in the world - this was personal.

But here’s what the doubters don’t understand:

Dubai’s strength has never been fragility.
It has always been resilience.

And when Iran is finally free from tyranny - when a new Iran rises - Dubai will not fade. It will thrive even more. It will become the gateway, the financial bridge, the transit hub for trade, energy, capital, and reconstruction. It will be the Hong Kong of a reborn Iran. The stepping stone between a free Iran and the global economy.

The best days of this city are not behind it.

They’re ahead. 🙌🏻🙂

[IamDev42 @iamdev_42]

@DA_Stockman oh poor summer child 🚸