Nev

probably researching a story / ai + cryptography
prev: cofounded struthless + step one
a librarian:

[Nev @nevaaron]

can cryptography save us from an AI apocalypse?

[Nev @nevaaron]

@WiredIre It's great, the bitcoin community in large parts have rejected the usecase of the tech doing good for the world in other worlds

The price of btc going down while other assets go up is very reasonable and healthy for the entire industry + tech

[Nev @nevaaron]

bitcoin looks like very very bad, I feel the low still isn't in, too. I will say it again, hope i'm wrong

[Nev @nevaaron]

@0xEvinho Price goes up and down at this point, honestly it doesn't really matter which way it goes, it will change, that is certain lol.

Fundamental structural issues in the asset though, nothing has changed, they must be resolved

[Nev @nevaaron]

The question I have if this is a governance token, who owns supply, what power does it grant? Does it grant encryption revealing itself upon consensus?

Does the protocol own all of the tokens?
Is the protocol motivated to reveal the data and sell it, or use it, for 'safety' or some other reason they can say whatever really.

Time for some OSINT, i've wanted to cover this one for a while tbh

[Nev @nevaaron]

The ethereum:0x163f8c2467924be0ae7b5347228cabf260318753 thesis playing out nicely
Still a shitcoin but at least it's green

[Nev @nevaaron]

The token itself is, a shitcoin - for what its worth, has no equity in the real world, so that means holding this for the sake of holding it thinking you're an early investor for your LinkedIn bio, will not work

That said, there are two times it does make sense to me

1) a moment like I am talking about, liquidity meets narrative, in some way, knowing that you best figure out how you want to exit at the right time and you could very well get burnt easily

2) Biometric ID partnership announcement randomly from OpenAI with WLD - if this happened the token would be a moonshot pretty much immediately. Will this happen? Who knows, makes sense though, and this tech is 100% needed by all labs, some variation of the tech. So maybe buying a small bag at the lows (lower than here ideally), just to have sitting there when a time like that comes, could be an interesting small hold. You'd want it to be in a drawdown already though.

But yes - shitcoin, no equity, which in most cases would make it completely uninvestable, but this has the spotlight of one of the most important + talked about people in tech right now and maybe long into the future.

[Nev @nevaaron]

Wait wait wait, you're telling me that a guy spinning up a multi-middleman-resale of a technology that was created to enable peer to peer payments - i.e remove middlemen - isn't working out?

shocking

[Nev @nevaaron]

@_macki I need to do recon as to what level of encryption, if it's zk the code would be audited, you assume no backdoor to toggle the encryption off.

[Nev @nevaaron]

@_macki ha damn. one of the reasons I liked the token is because of how low it was vs the highs, what was ath $12 or something, down to .20c, very beaten

I hope they do kind things with your eye data, what was the process like? I've never seen one IRL

[Nev @nevaaron]

@cobie @serpinxbt Slash him Cobie

[Nev @nevaaron]

@krugermacro Just gonna leave this here
https://t.co/nz4dzJvk3u

[Nev @nevaaron]

can cryptography save us from an AI apocalypse?

[Nev @nevaaron]

in it for the tech

[Nev @nevaaron]

@StarPlatinum_ Totally nailed it, research has been playing out v good lately

https://t.co/5OxRZ04okR

[Nev @nevaaron]

The token itself is, a shitcoin - for what its worth, has no equity in the real world, so that means holding this for the sake of holding it thinking you're an early investor for your LinkedIn bio, will not work

That said, there are two times it does make sense to me

1) a moment like I am talking about, liquidity meets narrative, in some way, knowing that you best figure out how you want to exit at the right time and you could very well get burnt easily

2) Biometric ID partnership announcement randomly from OpenAI with WLD - if this happened the token would be a moonshot pretty much immediately. Will this happen? Who knows, makes sense though, and this tech is 100% needed by all labs, some variation of the tech. So maybe buying a small bag at the lows (lower than here ideally), just to have sitting there when a time like that comes, could be an interesting small hold. You'd want it to be in a drawdown already though.

But yes - shitcoin, no equity, which in most cases would make it completely uninvestable, but this has the spotlight of one of the most important + talked about people in tech right now and maybe long into the future.

[Nev @nevaaron]

@ideacasino Haha

[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.

[Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos]

imagine if we had LLMs in the 80s...

[Nev @nevaaron]

@IoachimViju @unipegv4 @sato_hub nice bro!!

[Nev @nevaaron]

@VitalikButerin Studying an AI safety course at the moment, and your essays are some of the material referenced multiple times

Keep going man, if I can help with anything ever hmu, long live eth

[Nev @nevaaron]

@stableshaman Mogged

[Nev @nevaaron]

@mrfoxFDC Yeah i'm having fun i liked zooming in and out on the fly
I also like that you can't edit it!

A sneaky way to kill bots

[Nev @nevaaron]

I’m dumping man just HODL okay

[Michael Saylor @saylor]

HODL

[Nev @nevaaron]

@vagabond_vaga_ me either had to sell it all to buy potatoes and they're very expensive now