James McCall

Love and miss Maisa , special interests include agriculture, finance, mental health, economics and law views are mine and relatively scenic;

[James McCall @mccallios]

It is heartbreaking to see our Maisa's beautiful face in an article about suicide loss. Our daughter was captivated by the wonders of space, loved nature, animals and reading. We’d venture into the night, chasing dark skies and hiking under the stars to witness eclipses, supermoons, and trace constellations with star charts that she had practically memorized. Tragically, she lost her life to suicide.

The USA Today article highlights the significantly heightened risk to those with autism/ADHD, to struggle with suicidal thoughts. Hopefully, we can explore how to shape a world that’s gentler, kinder, and more peaceful—a place that embraces sensitive souls, those that think different, are neurodivergent, those grappling with mental illness, or anyone searching for their purpose.

[Sam I Am @idahoos]

Thank you @CTrepany for listening to our story with genuine compassion and curiosity and for writing this.

Please read to learn more about how AuDHD kids suffer in silence and how society is failing them.

https://t.co/sxgIhfZvoX

[James McCall @mccallios]

The satoshi wallet is now just an x prize for lawyers and quantum computers. Hopefully whomever gets there first will put the balance in superposition where the balance randomly moves every block ad infinitum

[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.

[James McCall @mccallios]

@z0r0zzz @GwartyGwart That is macrostrategy

[Matthew Botvinick @mattbotvinick]

Anthropic now has a team dedicated to AI and the rule of law — and we've just opened our first role.

@AnthropicAI has studied what AI means for the economy. This team asks a different question: what will it mean for executive power, for courts and elections — and for the public deliberation that constitutional democracy ultimately rests on?

We're looking for someone with real depth in both AI and the law — a legal scholar, political scientist, or experienced government hand who can reason about frontier systems and the institutions they will affect.

If that's you, or someone you know: https://t.co/668HDz1lhf

[James McCall @mccallios]

@grok Interesting. So why didn't BSA or any other laws that Dimon is proclamating stop this obvious and known law breaking?

[James McCall @mccallios]

@grok what part did JP Morgan play in banking Epstein directly and what were the legal consequences of this, settlement, etc?

[Eleanor Terrett @EleanorTerrett]

🚨NEW: JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon took aim at the Senate's crypto market structure bill today, arguing it "doesn't do anything for AML/BSA" and provides "almost no legal protections."

When asked for comment, a spokesperson for @SenLummis told me:

"The banks can’t deal with a bipartisan compromise on stablecoin yield and are making completely false claims about BSA/AML as a last ditch attempt to poke holes in a solid piece of legislation that protects consumers. Fear of competition always brings out an interesting side of people and that’s all this is.”

[James McCall @mccallios]

@grok Who was the executive that was directly involved in banking him and was happened to him?

[James McCall @mccallios]

@pmarca That is why the ai quantum supercomputers will all some installed with the "don't panic" button

[Nick Anthony @EconWithNick]

https://t.co/x6B168zqQ1

[James McCall @mccallios]

@0xMakesy @lex_node Can't sell eth without using ethereum. Oh Captain of Capitalistic Capitulation

[James McCall @mccallios]

@willmbetts

[James McCall @mccallios]

Why does it need to capture value to have value? Oil was randomly distributed throughout the world and zero value until it was determined that it could be used to make things go. An entire economy built on this property of being able to break bonds and release energy. If a digital economy gets built on the network, it will have value as it is necessary to make things go, transactions, compute, deploy contracts etc. ETH is future go juice, always has been

[James McCall @mccallios]

@dysclinic What would make sense is that a percentage of these folks have a susceptibility to immune system overwhelm, like CVID, EBV etc. That would make it more likely to hammer their whole immune system, and even trigger autoimmune issues.

[James McCall @mccallios]

@RyanSAdams The new triple point. Flatulence, whining and capitulation while in the fetal position

[James McCall @mccallios]

@aegeantic @business Wash Hall was the initial invasion

[James McCall @mccallios]

Does this spectrum, as modeled, follow a normal distribution? It doesn't seem surprising that as divergence in brains gets x sigmas away that it comes with difficulties communicating and relating to others and even society itself is not the same as it was as social norms and trends propagate at the speed of tiktok

[James McCall @mccallios]

@CupOJoseph Time for a merger.

[James McCall @mccallios]

Rebrand to Monte Carlo fact pattern analysis and it is a winner.

[Matt Margolis @ItsMattsLaw]

somehow a lawyer is going to find this, use a fake case, and have to explain they got it from “Halucio” in response to a motion for sanctions/order to show cause

[James McCall @mccallios]

Back alley privacy. The problem, or are least a problem, is that the 4th amendment has a large exception that basically swallows the right in the third party doctrine. With this custodial back door, it could be argued that there is no expectation of privacy and therefore no 4th amendment predictions. In a world where third parties have ubiquitous cameras, financial monitoring obligations and custodial defi it is nearly impossible to reach this "reasonable expectation of privacy".

[James McCall @mccallios]

@willmbetts Looking forward to the dram half time show where students compete against bsu ai robots to kick field goals for the chance to win a few wafers

[James McCall @mccallios]

@DrRebeccaRyan @Amma_Adutwumwaa Standard of care basically becomes code for that which insurance will pay for and completely disregards that each human is n of 1, and may respond to and not respond to treatment based on some normative level of care.