this week: saylor sold 32 bitcoin and broke the market, an AI found a money printer inside zcash, defi got told it's terminal, and illia says robots will do your shopping. Ep. w/ @ilblackdragon & @mert Timestamps 00:00 Intro 01:17 Weekend Crypto Meltdown & Bitcoin Crash 02:52 Saylor, STRC & the DAT Death Spiral Fears 11:51 "No Sell Button" — Saylor's Lesson Learned 13:14 Zcash Bug: 50% Crash Explained 20:30 The Fix: Ironwood Pool & Formal Verification 23:11 AI vs Crypto Security: The Attacker Advantage 27:21 What Is Formal Verification? 30:07 Spaceship-Grade Smart Contract Security 31:36 OPSEC, Oracles & Anomaly Detection 36:08 Cypherpunk Dilemma: Stop the Hack or Not? 38:37 Will DeFi Survive? Long Math 42:49 NEAR's AI Agents & Intents Vision 48:43 Is Agentic Commerce Real? Mert's Skepticism 🔥Stay updated with all the latest hot takes by following and subscribing to @_ChoppingBlock and @unchained_pod! 🎥 YouTube: youtu.be/Y2lyeoL-vK8 🎧 Spotify: bit.ly/3wiIOyy 🍎 Apple: bit.ly/3w9HQ7J 🎙 Podcast Home: choppingblock.xyz

AI is the single player, your interface to computers. Blockchain is the multiplayer, how you coordinate, settle, and establish what's true. NEAR's @ilblackdragon spoke with @hosseeb on why agents need both and what commerce will look like when they work together.

.@mert: "Tachyon will be formally verified and use a completely different circuit arithmetic. As close to mathematically perfect as you can get a ZK protocol. In the age of AI, that's table stakes."

"There will be many battles lost, but fundamentally the war will be won. I'm just long math" Mert on why DeFi survives no matter how many hacks happen "If you look at the history of computing, computers are just math. It came from being able to do universal computation, a mathematical field from Alan Turing and John von Neumann. Humans are not very good at math, so there are always leaks in logic and abstraction" "But the trend throughout since the start of computing has been getting computing devices better and better, whether in performance or security or cryptography. AI is a testament to this. It's fundamentally a mathematical construct and it's been getting better and better" "Unless it's barred by the laws of physics that you cannot secure a system mathematically, which I don't see, there is a solution that's possible. There might be some battles lost because you need to error correct and learn from real life. But fundamentally the war will be won"

Great episode of Chopping Block this week with @mert @hosseeb @tomhschmidt -- watch for takes on: -why code vulnerabilities are easier to find with AI and we need to formally verify everything -how DeFi needs to evolve: detection systems for responding faster to exploits, offering more safety features for users, AI-augmented governance -why blockchains will take AI from single player mode to multiplayer mode and eventually underpin all commerce and interfaces

RT @zmanian: “As close to mathematically perfect as you can get a ZK protocol”

dafauq?

.@tomhschmidt says software development is moving from building boats to building spaceships – and if your code has holes "it's f*cked" "Maybe the past 30, 40 years have been almost kind of like building a boat. You expect a boat's gonna take on some water, there's like a pump, you do your best – but you know it's not gonna have zero water in it" "Versus building a spaceship. You can't build a spaceship that has some holes in it. It has to be completely sealed or it's f*cked" "We're kind of moving to a more spaceship type approach to code where it has to be completely airtight, not roughly airtight – someone out there is gonna find it"

.@ilblackdragon says he called this over a year ago, calls Mythos "a marketing ploy," and then lays out exactly how AI is dismantling DeFi protocol by protocol "I wrote a blog post actually about over a year ago effectively spelling out that this is gonna happen, and the only solution is formal verification" "The asymmetry that happens between the attack and defense is just always gonna be on the attacker's side. You're using Opus or let's say you even have Mythos – but everybody else has five different models, they have more time to spend on attacking" "You have potentially thousands of people who are trying to attack you with different models, with different ensembles" "I actually think Mythos was more... I mean, it was a marketing ploy on Anthropic's side. Let's be clear what it was. If you're a security expert with these models indeed now you can find vulnerabilities – and it doesn't matter which one" "Why DeFi started getting hacked in November, October? Well, Opus 4 came out. And we could see effectively protocol after protocol, everything that was multiple times reviewed and audited started to crumble" "A lot of open source models kind of pulled up in April, and that's why we saw a bunch of more hacks – people figured out I can probably just use DeepSeek or whatever on my own GPUs and not tell the inference provider that I'm hacking something" "You're not just running code analysis – you're actually running an agent that is able to instrument an injection and see that something came out. You can literally run reinforcement learning on top of this to figure out how to do it"

Founder of @NEARProtocol, @ilblackdragon explains what formal verification is and how it can eliminate soundness bugs once and for all.

"If Saylor was a good storyteller, I think it'd be quite different. But all he does is literally post complete AI slop." – @mert

.@Mert on the cypherpunk paradox: "If you have the means to stop crime, you have to stop it. That is actually the law as well" "The solution would be to structure the system in such a way that you don't have that influence" "Arbitrum – the emergency council, 9 of 12 had to intervene because they have that means. Tornado Cash is immutable. They didn't stop because they couldn't, and the government is still going after them" "The cypherpunk thing is that you shouldn't have that control to begin with. But if you do have it and you don't stop it, then you've kind of just virtue signaled superficially. You put up this facade while not actually taking any of the steps to do the cypherpunk thing" "If you have the means to stop it and you don't stop it because you're saying you're a cypherpunk – well first of all, you're not a cypherpunk because you didn't structure it in an immutable decentralized way to begin with. But if you do have it, then you have to stop it"

.@ilblackdragon says "code is law until the code is wrong – and then we actually want real law" "All April everybody was in the war room figuring out who got hacked on what chain" "NEAR is now running AI anomaly detection on cross-chain deposits in real time." "Not scraping Twitter. On-chain data first."

backrooms but crypto 2021

Finally got a chance to listen to this. 1. @ethereumJoseph you should do more of these types of shows. Meaning: crypto native, wide variety of topics, lots of off-the-cuff talking. Your knowledge and experience shines and there’s a ton of people in this space that certainly learn from your perspective on Ethereum and orgs and the core of the issues and the ideal state of the world. Please tell the PR team that Tay say so, thank you. 😁

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