Kenneth G | 振豪｜恭一

CryptDoc, Liberation Engineer. CompSci@National University of Singapore. 🇸🇬👨🏻‍💻🗽 Liberate one problem at a time. #Cypherpunk1991 @NUSComputing

[Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 @TulsiGabbard]

We are getting ready to head to the hospital for my husband’s surgery and just wanted to say thank you so much to all of who have shared messages, prayers and well wishes for Abraham. We are humbled and so grateful to be surrounded by aloha during this really tough time. 🙏🏽

[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.

[Bruce | OP_CAT 🐱 @bruceonbitcoin]

Consensus layer should be transparent and publicly verifiable. More privacy can be added on top. Just like you can build VPN over the public Internet.

[Kenneth G | 振豪｜恭一 @KernelKennethG]

@coderkungfu Why no Anthropic lol

[The White House @WhiteHouse]

https://t.co/lZ8p3Dmusw

[The White House @WhiteHouse]

Finally, a President that prioritizes PEOPLE over big insurance corporations. The Great Healthcare Plan holds big insurance companies accountable while fighting for Americans.

[CoinMarketCap @CoinMarketCap]

Bitcoin fell 11.61% over the past week to $67,987.07, as market sentiment deteriorated sharply. The CMC Fear & Greed Index dropped to 27, firmly back in Fear territory.

Primary reason: Persistent selling pressure from U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs, with cumulative outflows reaching $3.45 billion across 11 consecutive trading sessions. The streak has erased year-to-date net inflows and weakened one of the market's key demand drivers.

Secondary reasons: Risk-off sentiment linked to suspended U.S.-Iran talks and a cascade of leveraged long liquidations exceeding $1 billion over the past 24 hours added to downside pressure.

Near-term outlook: BTC has now fallen below the $68K level and is testing fresh local lows. A recovery above $70K could support a short-term relief rally, while continued ETF outflows and sustained selling pressure may increase the risk of a move toward the $65K–66K region.

[Kenneth G | 振豪｜恭一 @KernelKennethG]

@Jeyffre 💯. They could only mentioned they architected a system prompt. They are not Ai engineers 🧑‍💻 huge difference even in pay cheques lol.

[Kenneth G | 振豪｜恭一 @KernelKennethG]

💯 LOLOL

[Jeffrey Scholz @Jeyffre]

It's really cringe when normies say "they trained an AI agent"

Buddy, you don't even know what "backpropagation" is

You wrote instructions that an idiot can understand and feel proud of it.

[Jeffrey Scholz @Jeyffre]

It's really cringe when normies say "they trained an AI agent"

Buddy, you don't even know what "backpropagation" is

You wrote instructions that an idiot can understand and feel proud of it.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

True

[Hanako @hanakoxbt]

Anthropic just proved that 95% of people building AI agents are doing it wrong

This 37-minute video shows their engineer building one that actually works. Live. On stage. From scratch.

She reveals how Anthropic actually ships agents internally:

> Brain and hands of the agent run separately
> Close your laptop, the agent keeps going
> 10-15x faster to production than building from scratch

The agent found a database bug from a specific commit in under 2 minutes. Your on-call dev does the same thing in 45.

Watch the full workshop. Then read the setup guide below.

[Giacomo Fenzi @GiacomoFenzi]

Repo link: https://t.co/3SucyOcPyr

[Giacomo Fenzi @GiacomoFenzi]

Quick update! The WHIR 🌪️ repo now has moved to @worldcoinfnd who will be maintaining going forward. Very happy to see it progress from a prototype to a production-ready implementation!
Thanks in particular to @recmo, and excited for the new developments to come!

[Lawrence Wong @LawrenceWongST]

Met US Secretary of War @PeteHegseth before tonight’s Shangri-La Dialogue. We reaffirmed 60 years of strong Singapore-US ties and exchanged views on regional & global security. Looking forward to continued partnership for peace and stability.

[NVIDIA @nvidia]

A new era of PC.

25.0528, 121.5990

[Claude @claudeai]

Also new in Claude Code: dynamic workflows (research preview).

For the hardest tasks, Claude makes a plan, runs hundreds of parallel subagents, and verifies its work before reporting back. Think a migration touching hundreds of files.

Read more: https://t.co/7gt06kGkDN

[Claude @claudeai]

Introducing Claude Opus 4.8: it builds on Opus 4.7 with sharper judgment, more honesty about its own progress, and the ability to work independently for longer than its predecessors.

Available today at the same price.

[Daniel San @dani_avila7]

Opus 4.8 is solid... but ultracode is on another level

Dynamic Workflows in Claude Code lets you orchestrate agents in parallel while your session stays free. One word: delegate

Focus on governance, security guardrails, and skills. The code is already solved

[Adam Back @adam3us]

@foolrushingin @saifedean It does! because the government re-distributors take a cut, and they give the money to cronies who spend or invest it before the inflation kicks in. The cantilion effect...