Will Shaw

Fintech Rambling Man. Tech, geopolitics, and forward thinking. Vehemently anti-communist. Sometimes serious. Often not.

[Will Shaw @willshawison]

When someone is obviously hurting and they tell you what they need, doing the opposite of that hurts the person in need further because you violated their trust in a profound way.

More people need to know and hear this.

[Will Shaw @willshawison]

@L0m3z The title sucks because @michaelmalice has a book by the same title, which is a fantastic read about the perils of communism and its allies.

[Will Shaw @willshawison]

Curious on your take of current operations in Ukraine by Russia. Rumors are that recent (key word) casualty counts for RU forces are going above 5,000 daily. It’s an insane figure if true.

Last summer 2/3 of the Russian nuclear triad were exposed/severely impacted with next gen RU SSBN plans leaked by “Ukraine” online and drones taking out a lot of Russian nuclear capable bombers. It seems at this point, the war is causing more harm to Russia with almost nothing to be gained outside of some gas fields and mineral deposits in Ukraine. It is head scratching why Russia won’t come to a ceasefire with all the recent embarrassments and exposure over the last year.

[Will Shaw @willshawison]

I think it’s time to go very bearish on Crypto.

Even Bitcoin.

There are likely many other exploits and issues yet to be uncovered from other big names.

[Marty Bent @MartyBent]

Zcash just proved every concern Bitcoiners have had.

Three actors froze billions of dollars overnight. Forced through a hard fork without telling anyone. Four-year-old infinite inflation bug. ZEC down 40%.

Meanwhile, 160 ex-spooks signed a letter to expand the Patriot Act to crypto via the CLARITY Act.

Today's Brief breaks it all down.

https://t.co/UtrrT9fpvJ

[Will Shaw @willshawison]

@mikulaja @mi_jim Ron Paul is having a moment.

[Sal the Agorist @SallyMayweather]

22 yrs ago today, after a long zoning dispute with local officials that ruined his business, welder Marvin Heemeyer had enough & created the Killdozer.

He destroyed the mayor’s house, the judge’s house, town hall, the police station, & the bank - while avoiding hurting civilians or their property.

Happy Killdozer Day to those who celebrate 🎊

[Will Shaw @willshawison]

My guy, they are already in Congress.

Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-CA): A former video game developer and owner of FarSight Studios (known for titles like The Pinball Arcade, bowling games, and family-friendly titles). He is one of the co-chairs of the Congressional Video Game and Esports Caucus and the only sitting member with direct industry experience as a developer.

[Will Shaw @willshawison]

Any comment from @MayorSullivan or @DanSullivan_AK or the teacher Dan Sullivan?

[Will Shaw @willshawison]

The greatest troll in politics is underway and no one is talking about it.

2 different Dan Sullivan’s are running for the Republican nomination for Senate in Alaska.

And a 3rd Dan Sullivan may join in the race with former Anchorage Mayor, Dan Sullivan, may enter the race.

[Will Shaw @willshawison]

@MilGrauNews Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. She possess XY sex chromosomes but the condition causes her to develop as a woman. Also known as the white elephant condition for OBGYN’s.

[Will Shaw @willshawison]

This dude is writing Guitar Riffs with Morse Code and killing it.

“Boobs”

[Will Shaw @willshawison]

Heavy, special rock is put into pool of water with machine of shiny metal to make warm blue light. Blue light advances society.

[Office of Nuclear Energy | US Department of Energy @GovNuclear]

You have one chance to explain how a nuclear reactor works. What do you say? 👇

[Will Shaw @willshawison]

The lads are mad.

[Will Shaw @willshawison]

Been trying to sound the alarm for a few years on quantum encryption and the ability existing to break 256 encryption today.

Great read into publicly available information on the topic.

[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.

[Will Shaw @willshawison]

The UK will have riots this week.

That poor kid.

[Will Shaw @willshawison]

@townhallcom @SirajAHashmi Town hall knows how to get deep, dirty coverage without going undercover.

[Will Shaw @willshawison]

Rabies is not a real thing. It’s a made up virus to prevent white women from bringing cute, wild animals into the home.

It’s my favorite conspiracy because I made it up.

[Clerpatriot @clerpatriot]

What’s one conspiracy theory that is completely nuts but you can’t help but believe?

I’ll go first….hear me out here…is this woman even the real Britney Spears?

[Will Shaw @willshawison]

Yes. After the Italian campaign and D-Day secured land, combat reporters could openly follow and report on activities moving back and forth from the line. Europe also had substantial infrastructure like undersea cables to help report information quickly It was easier.

In the pacific, reporters were limited because everything had to come from Navy ships for each invasion. A reporter would take away a spot from a Marine. Each island was basically a fortress. There was no where to go back and forth from a front line. There was no way to transmit information except through mail.

Most pacific civilian casualties came from Burma, China, and Korea. Okinawa and the Philippines were the only islands with significant populations of civilians. Mainland Japan had civilian deaths from firebombing and atom bombs that were significant in the same way Germany was bombed. Most civilian deaths came at the hands of Japan, not the US and Allies.

[Will Shaw @willshawison]

This is a dumb take.

The reason you would have troops recruited is because they easily pass Secret Service background checks to be so close to WH VIPs.

Do you know who they recruit to do car valets in DC at the VP’s house the Naval Observatory? ROTC college students for the same reasons.

[Jonathan Lemire @JonLemire]

“The Pentagon is moving to recruit hundreds of troops to appear as spectators at President Donald Trump’s UFC cage-fighting event at the White House, and requiring those who attend to pay for their travel and meet height and weight requirements” https://t.co/jjPoIIk6wj

[Will Shaw @willshawison]

By March 2023, COVID was basically over. I don’t see a problem with what they did. Repaying loans was necessary and the pause was longer than necessary.

I paid off $120k in student loans in total. They were terrible to have. I empathize with student loans borrowers.

I am trying to be fair to both lenders and students. The student loans borrowers pause went far longer than necessary, but was necessary in 2020. You are entitled to your opinion if you think I’m wrong.