Carsten Munk

wannabe manfred macx || co-founder @directionallyai || exocortex maximalist

[Lefteris Karapetsas @LefterisJP]

It finally arrived!

Will dig into @tjayrush essays tonight.

I love seeing the thoughts of people I like and admire put to print.

The user owns the data or the whole thing was pointless.

[Georgios Konstantopoulos @gakonst]

Global stablecoin payouts with Deel on @tempo. GG. It's happening.

[Simon Taylor @sytaylor]

Payroll platform @deel just launched its stablecoin DLUSD, on @tempo, for contractors across its 40,000+ businesses in 150 countries.

Users can:

- Hold. A USD-denominated balance, DLUSD, that tracks USD value 1:1 and is always redeemable.
- Earn. A single-tap opt-in to accrue rewards.
- Spend. A waitlist is available for the Deel Card

What caught my eye is that the same account that pays them holds a balance that tracks the dollar 1:1. (Which is a major answer to the question, why issue your own stablecoin?)

The app works by signing in with Face ID, and there's no additional wallet, keys, or token to buy. The worker never sees a blockchain, and that's the point.

Whoever owns the paycheck increasingly owns the relationship.

Deel owns the inflow across 150 countries, and it's pointing that inflow at something workers in devaluing economies have wanted for decades: a salary that stays worth what you earned, wherever your passport says you live.

Stablecoins got famous as trading collateral. The job that matters most is this one.

Tempo is Deel's exclusive chain partner for the contractor wallet stack with DLUSD issued on Tempo. The wallet and Morpho vault for earn, all run on Tempo.

Why?

Well according to @deel

1. Passkey authentication is built into the protocol. That's why FaceID works so well and so seamlessly
2. Predictable fees paid in stablecoins. Without volatility, Deel can be sure of their economics
3. Privacy. Deel will use Tempo Zones to keep contractor privacy assured while their accounts are running directly onchain.

I think these features will become increasingly compelling as businesses look to provide new services to, and monetize their existing user base, in a way that's seamless and private.

[jordi @jordienr]

the reality

[Mokaya @ekmokaya]

I have PayPal accounts in Kenya and the EU, and the difference is ridiculous.

The Kenyan one gets blocked, restricted, and frozen so often that it is basically useless. Even after sending the documents they ask for and answering their endless questions, the account still gets treated like a crime scene. They keep escalating the documents needed to keep the Kenyan account operational and to send and receive basic money.

Surprisingly, I have never had this problem with my EU account, yet I am the same person operating both accounts.

The experience is similar for many fellow Africans I have spoken to. Bottom line is that PayPal just gives African users the worst of its experience.

I hope the new @PayPal CEO @EnriqueJLores

[Luke Childs ☂️ @lukechilds]

Nimdolf: Non-interactive Mint Delegation on Liveness Failure

Currently if a mint is honest, but goes offline, users can lose all funds. This proposal offers a solution to move users to a delegate mint in the event their original mint goes offline.

https://t.co/fZD2KLsi1j

[v @vql3n]

Me aburrí e hice un mini emulador x86 + PE + NT + WinAPI (Kernel32, MSVCRT, NTDLL, User32) en Rust, para compilarlo en WASM por lo cual puedo "correr" un .exe en el navegador:

[Daria @DariaStrategy]

🔥 @perspektywy_s Women in Tech Summit is happening in Warsaw on June 10-11, and I'm thrilled to contribute as a mentor.

Along with 23 mentors from Visa, Bolt, Netflix, and other companies, I will be available for 30-minute sessions.

I look forward to sharing my advice on:
- Product building
- GTM and growth
- Public speaking and personal branding
- Narrative and content creation

Click the link below to book your slot ⤵️

[Alberta Tech @albertadevs]

BREAKING: CEO discovers tokens cost money

[Daniel Jeffries @Dan_Jeffries1]

AI will become our interface to the world.

It will sit higher in the stack than the OS. It will collapse current SaaS layers, chat, communications, apps, app creation, into a single new kind of interface that doesn't exist yet.

It's got to be open. It's got to be a cypherpunk solution that makes privacy and security the number one priority.

If a closed source solution wins this layer, it's a disaster for the world. Especially if it's built by a single company with a single closed source model.

Why?

Because what we share with AI will be more intimate than anything we've ever shared with a machine.

It will be our friend, our sounding board, our advisor. It will know our business ideas before we've told anyone. Our medical issues. Our financial picture. We'll talk about the fight we had with our partner. About feeling lost or depressed. Our kids will talk to it about problems at school, about bullying, about heartbreak, things they won't tell us.

It will know us more intimately than we know ourselves.

Right now the world runs on a surveillance economy. We traded free stuff for apps that peer deeply into our lives.

If we replicate that model in the AI era, it's not just surveillance economy 2.0. It's surveillance economy squared. Social scoring. Legal conversations you thought were privileged showing up in court. Random people making $2 bucks an hour on the backend from God knows where reading the most intimate details of your life. Every insecurity, every fear, every half-formed thought you whispered to your AI buddy at 2 AM, sitting in a database somewhere, searchable.

This interface might eventually become an OS, like the OS in Her. But it will take a long time to reach down to that layer and it will require a fundamentally new kind of operating system design. You can't retrofit this onto Linux or Windows or Android or iOS. It's a new layer of the stack entirely.

And whoever controls that layer controls our lives.

We've got to make sure it's us. Not them.

[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.

[janusz @januszg_]

please note: we consider this private mainnet a research prototype and will roll out access over the next few weeks. we are launching this as an experiment // live example of bitcoin-denominated payments using zkps.

[janusz @januszg_]

hi - we launched a bitcoin-denominated payments network that uses zero-knowledge proofs for improved privacy

[Daniel San @dani_avila7]

Claude Code 2.1.160 retires "workflow" as the dynamic workflow trigger

Made sense to change it

workflow is such a common word that it kept firing runs in regular prompts, so the new keyword “ultracode” is a cleaner fit

Small change, but a nice one for daily use

[Carsten Munk @stskeeps]

can i run wasm latency-nearby deepseek flash apis

[Carsten Munk @stskeeps]

agent coding is becoming a stream of decisions

[Josef (atris) @atris_eth]

@peter_szilagyi hate when it does this. hilariously, claude is responsive to pdfs of written approvals: https://t.co/61HOKrxjlC

[Carsten Munk @stskeeps]

@AstrayaNthemoon love it

[Carsten Munk @stskeeps]

mood while Severance soundtrack plays in the background

[Carsten Munk @stskeeps]

adding things with agent to sprint plan

codex goes 'oh i might as well just do that task right away'