steiger

Ethereum enthusiast | shadowy super coder | @memberrxyz | @moontotemsnft

[steiger @ssteigerr]

“We wanted to pick a platform where the majority of developers are.”
-> @builtoneth

https://t.co/M36TAqUz3u

[Erik Voorhees @ErikVoorhees]

Well deserved. Hero class. The world needs more such men.

https://t.co/6aRBVEjLQF

[Crypto Tea @Cryptotea]

Why do you think they banned Monero off every exchange and not the other “privacy” coin

[steiger @ssteigerr]

@josephdelong How is it always an on or off switch. Never gradually???

[Udi Wertheimer @udiWertheimer]

btw this isn’t the first time a bug like this was discovered in zcash. last time it was disclosed after being a year+ in the wild and everyone lost faith and zcash went to zero for 7 years, until they found a new generation of buyers who doesn’t know the history (that’s you)

[prestonvanloon.eth @preston_vanloon]

@0xcyp Brother, the lettuce I bought last week outperformed ETH. I'm still buying more because I believe in somETHing

[steiger @ssteigerr]

@MichaelAArouet This is completely fake. Self-employment in Germany is at an all time high.

[steiger @ssteigerr]

@EU_Commission This is kind of funny, but at the same time it is also so fucking sad and embarrassing

[[email protected] @igorhansachat]

Let us start with a simple thing: click on the link you post and ensure it does not lead to 404.

The private sector will do the rest 👌

[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.

[Daniel @growing_daniel]

I've been a software engineer for years but I've never had to interview for a job before. I tried leetcode once out of curiosity and couldn't do it. Seemed really disconnected from what software engineers do.

[Etc. @ec265]

It’s amazing how far we’ve transgressed from basic fundamentals

The influx of so-called ‘business development’ guys have cut corners and done their best to erode long term value in pursuit of short term gains

Crypto BD is now synonymous with grift

Whilst blockchains ultimately need users, it’s a classic ‘not like this’ meme

Ethereum remains the only credible L1 and the best chance to showcase to the world what blockchain is about

And ETH the asset is inherently valuable as a result of this

Return to fundamentals ™️

[scoopy trooples @scupytrooples]

CT hating on Ethereum is a tale as old as Ethereum itself

fuck em

[steiger @ssteigerr]

@SinkingStarGame Most hyped I‘ve been since POE2 🫶🙌

[steiger @ssteigerr]

@SinkingStarGame This is so awesome! Man

[materkel.eth 🦇🔊 @materkel]

The reason Ethereum is so hated on CT is that, if it succeeds, there’s little reason for any other L1 construction to exist.

However, a world where Ethereum loses is basically a free-for-all. Everyone and their shitcoins will be happy, but the world will have lost "everything" in the process.

Ethereum is our last hope for a truly decentralized and credibly neutral internet of value.

That’s why it’s so important that we win. There is simply no alternative.

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

The new AI web design giveaway is tasteless use of serif fonts plus italics. I mean, there's about 1000 other giveaways cause its all so very ugly, but that's the initial slap in your face giveaway.

[ionprime.eth @ProofOf_ion]

Listening to David’s explanation of why he sold was pretty mind numbing lol…

I recently shared that I was a toxic Bitcoin maximalist for roughly 8 years, from 2017 to late 2024.

Stablecoins are what initially made me revisit my thesis on Ethereum, and on ether as Ethereum’s native asset. That, combined with the rapid approach of the agentic economy - a world with an infinite number of autonomous economic actors sending value through stablecoins across a small handful of networks that society has deemed valuable - made me reevaluate further.

So I went back and revisited my priors on Ethereum. Were my early concerns around centralization, monetary policy, and network effects still valid after all these years? Surely, yes. I set out to prove myself right.

I found out I was wrong.

The centralization concerns I had entirely faded. While I was 100% encapsulated in my Bitcoin bubble, Ethereum had slowly, quietly, and relentlessly built the only other WWIII-proof, global, credibly neutral, decentralized protocol. And in some areas, Ethereum had actually become more decentralized than Bitcoin: client diversity, validator distribution, and a secure long-term scaling/security model through proof of stake.

Ethereum had matured. It had grown out of its early “shitcoin” association. It had become the only truly permissionless, censorship resistant, credibly neutral, and valuable protocol outside of Bitcoin.

It grew up.

That matters because the only reason I was ever Bitcoin-only was that, at the time, there were no other networks with the protocol traits that could plausibly make all of global finance, and eventually much of humanity, value them at the deepest level.

Back then, it was only Bitcoin.

So the irony here is incredible.

Just as Ethereum and ether have finally matured, just as Ethereum has distanced itself from the decentralized-in-name-only, venture-backed, fake startup, “we’re hiding behind a blockchain” mentality, now a small group of influencers have decided to become negative on Ethereum.

When Bitcoiners use the term “shitcoiner,” this is what they are usually talking about.

Bag chasers.

People who want their chain to act like a company. Permissioned. Hyper-structured. Marketing team. CEO. Quarterly reports. Revenue. Earnings. Some polished growth narrative for VCs.

Basically, a bunch of stupid shit that already exists in the fiat world. The same world Bitcoin, and now Ethereum, were created to help us escape from.

To suddenly be disappointed that Ethereum has a broader mandate than “pump my bag,” and is instead focused on hardening the traits that make the network valuable over decades, tells you a lot about how these people misunderstand it.

CROPS is the value proposition.

Censorship resistance.
Resilience.
Openness.
Permissionlessness.
Security.

That is why society values Bitcoin. That is why society now values Ethereum.

And that is why the Laura Shins, Ansems, and David Hoffmans of the world jumping ship now is so revealing. They are not leaving because the thesis broke. They are leaving because they never had the thesis in the first place. They do not and never have seen the value in decentralized, global, open systems - sanctuary technologies or neutral rails that can materially improve people’s lives.

What they have always chased is a high-growth stock equivalent with a smaller market cap. A shiny new object that appears once or twice per cycle; violent upward momentum, narrative, and upside without the patience required to actually understand what is being built. They need to chase because they do not have the time horizon to hold a thesis and let conviction compound over time.

CROPS is the entire value proposition. Do not let startup-brain influencers, who never understood why this ecosystem was created in the first place, gaslight you out of conviction.

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

The Count of Monte Cristo (2002) is the kind of movie people randomly catch on TV once, then spend years recommending to everyone afterwards. The prison escape, the payoff, Guy Pearce’s performance … it’s just ridiculously satisfying.

[JD Flynn @jdflynn]

buddy, I was writing 10 page papers without having read the book.

[Andy Masley @AndyMasley]

Everyone complains about minimalist design until the company tries something fun and everyone reveals why all the companies have been forced into minimalist design