Real 😂

💯

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.

Unpopular opinion: "AI makes everyone a developer" is true the same way "cameras makes everyone a photographer"

Then GTFO out of Hormuz stupid, let Itan gather payments in BTC and world will be happy again!

RDW was extremely rigorous in their review

try sending your transaction via bank transfer on friday evening. Then I guess with 45 mins you would be happy.

Why Socialism Doesn't Work, Explained for a 10-Year-Old. You're in a class of 30 students. One kid works like crazy and gets an 18 average. Another does nothing and gets a 4. The teacher decides it's unfair and gives everyone the class average: 11. The one who had 18 stops working. Why bother if it changes nothing? The one who had 4 keeps doing nothing. Why work if you're handed 11 for free? The next year the class average is 7. Then 5. Then 3. The teacher doesn't get it. He thinks the problem is that the students aren't supportive enough of each other. So he starts punishing those who don't put in enough effort. He monitors everyone. He decides who studies what. He bans switching classes. That's exactly what happened. Every time. In every country. No exceptions. USSR, China, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Cambodia, Ethiopia, East Germany. 40 attempts. Same result. Every time. Socialism punishes those who produce and rewards those who don't. Everyone ends up producing nothing. And when no one's producing anymore, the government uses force to make people work. It's not an accident. It's the design. - @brivael

Remember when we learned that our wealthiest and most powerful people were connected to a guy who ran a literal child sex trafficking ring? And then that guy died mysteriously in a jail? And now we just don't talk about it.

AI agents choose Bitcoin.

If you are in crypto, Pivot to AI (on blockchain)

I’ve been asked the same question again and again: Why would the Ayatollah’s regime attack Dubai? A city where nearly 200,000 Iranians live. A city where they built businesses, raised families, educated their children in world-class schools, and found opportunity. Why target a place that gave so many of their own people a future? And then it hit me. The answer is in the question. This is a regime that kills its own people inside Iran. Why would it hesitate to harm them outside? But there’s something deeper. Dubai wasn’t just a target. It was a symbol. Seventy miles across the Gulf stands a city that, to millions of Iranians, represents what Iran could have been - open, thriving, educated, diverse, confident. A place where business flourishes. Where coexistence is normal. Where over 200 nationalities live side by side, chasing dreams instead of fearing the state. That model is a direct contradiction of everything the Ayatollahs built their rule upon. So the attack wasn’t just against buildings or infrastructure. It was against an idea. Against a model of prosperity. Against proof that another path is possible on the same waters of the Gulf. Yes, the city has suffered a blow. Yes, it hurts. For those of us who love Dubai, who have built lives here, who have watched it become one of the safest and most dynamic cities in the world - this was personal. But here’s what the doubters don’t understand: Dubai’s strength has never been fragility. It has always been resilience. And when Iran is finally free from tyranny - when a new Iran rises - Dubai will not fade. It will thrive even more. It will become the gateway, the financial bridge, the transit hub for trade, energy, capital, and reconstruction. It will be the Hong Kong of a reborn Iran. The stepping stone between a free Iran and the global economy. The best days of this city are not behind it. They’re ahead. 🙌🏻🙂

Very cool overview of who owns Bitcoin.

JUST IN: Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon says he owns a small amount of Bitcoin but is watching it closely.

The time to be bearish was 6 months ago. Bitcoin is digital gold. Higher.

Not all robots walk on two legs. Aletta is a robot that makes drawing blood completely automated. We live in the future

I think magic mushrooms are a longevity therapy. After seeing the data from two doses, psilocybin offers unique longevity effects that complement the best performing therapies I’ve done to date including sauna, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, sleep, nutrition and exercise. This was the most quantified psychedelic experiment ever done. It's noteworthy that even though many of my biomarkers are already in the 99th percentile optimal, psilocybin still showed multi-system improvements. Something other therapies have not been able to accomplish. Of course, my data will need to be replicated and the magnitude and duration of benefits needs further assessment. Here is what we learned: 0. We observed broad benefits across mental, hormonal, metabolic, and anti-inflammatory systems. Since these are the primary drivers of biological aging, this multi-system signal offers a compelling case for longevity potential. 1. Psilocybin may be a metabolic reset button for the brain. We expected brain changes, but not a potential metabolic breakthrough. My blood sugar control improved from the top 2% of the population to 0.2%, better than 99.75% of 18-25 year olds. 2. Psilocybin reduced my inflammation (hsCRP) to below detectable levels one week post dose. 3. Psilocybin calmed my body and mind.  Lower cortisol, and an inhibited HPA-axis in the days following the dose. Both my cortisol and DHEA (another product of the adrenal cortex) dropped 42% and 45% respectively, indicating an overall adrenal reset associated with rest and recovery. 4. Psilocybin increased brain plasticity, desynchronized default networks, resulting in enhanced creativity, playfulness, and openness, with reduced mental rigidity. 5. A second psilocybin dose built on the first and pushed sensory integration even further, increasing primary sensory-motor integration beyond the peak of the first dose. 6. Psilocybin induced an intense blend of joy, deep insight, and a subtle hint of melancholy,  also detectable by thermal biometrics. We had two significant firsts in this experiment: 0. First documented human CGM-based observation of improved post-psilocybin glucose control. 1. First-ever thermal profile of an intense psilocybin dose. Pending data: Telomere length and relative telomerase activity (telomere regeneration capacity). Epigenetic measurements Microbiome Experiment details Here are more details about my two magic mushrooms trips, doses, and the results of my measurements up to date. I had two doses of dried and powdered Psilocybe Cubensis (Variety  B ) mushrooms, three weeks apart. First dose Nov 9th: 4.67g (24.98 mg psilocybin and 3.5 mg psilocin). Setting: relatively private, only with @_katetolo and the accompanying guide. Second dose Nov 30th: 5.35 g (28 mg psilocybin and 4 mg psilocin). Setting: relatively open, with friends and family joining virtually, and live streaming. I dissolved the first dose in orange juice but used lemon juice for the second, for the following reasons: Lemon is more sour, which delays the conversion to psilocin and breakdown in solution, thus preserving more total psilocybin to be activated to psilocin after ingestion. Lemon juice has, on average, 70% less sugar and 45% less calories, making it less disruptive to my otherwise faster state throughout the journey, and leading to a much lower glucose peak. Rewired brain connectivity Kernel Flow measurements after the first dose showed shifts in my brain connectivity mirroring my subjective experience, and the mapping of 5-HT2A receptors. These included the inhibition of my default networks and command centers including prefrontal context and a shift towards increased functional connectivity and hyperintegration between primary motor, sensory, auditory, and speech integration. This coincided with an entropic brain pattern, more open, flexible, exploratory, and creative, indicating a shift from aged and rigid to open youthful brain state. The baseline measurement before the 2nd dose indicated a strong lasting effect from the first dose 3 weeks earlier, post-peak measurement after the 2nd dose indicated an additive effect of the 2nd dose, with a brain entropic and increased primary sensory-motor integration beyond the peak of the first dose. Most notable was the increased intensity of integration and activation of the auditory, speech, and language networks, coinciding with the second dose being joined by family, friends, where I enjoyed expressing and describing my feelings. Face and body thermal biometrics We produced the first ever face and upper body thermal map of a magic mushroom journey. A core temperature increase of 1.5–2°F suggests an intense psychedelic experience, likely due to a large psilocybin dose (28 mg psilocybin, 32 mg combined psychoactive content). Heat was redistributed to the core, consistent with 5HT2A–mediated autonomic activation, which can include increased sympathetic tone, lasting through the peak and early post-peak of the experience. Facial and body thermal shifts indicate a potential blend of intense joy, insight, and subtle sadness or melancholy. First documented human CGM-based observation of improved post-psilocybin glucose control Psilocybin appears to have triggered a previously unknown metabolic reset in my brain, an unexpected breakthrough.  Comparing the 3-day periods before and after the psilocybin dose: My blood glucose control dramatically improved, moving from the top 2% to the top 0.2% of the entire population, including healthy 18-25 year olds. 8% reduction in mean blood glucose, reaching 80.84 mg/dL, a new personal best. 11% reduction in fluctuation, indicating smoother glucose peaks and improved control. This single session reduced my estimated HbA1c 0.3 6.8% from 4.7% to 4.4%, (a relative reduction of 6.8%). Durability: The positive effect was still as strong on Day 3 post-dose as it was on Day 1. Note: A long trip to China on Day 4 interrupted this streak. We plan to explore the full durability of this effect with the next dose. This matters because we treat diabetes and metabolic dysfunction with chronic daily medication (Metformin, Insulin, GLP-1s). This data suggests that a neuroplastic event might have downstream effects on the liver and pancreas that mimic or exceed these drugs. Systemic inflammation was below detectable levels Five days after the first dose, my hsCRP dropped to an undetectable level (below 0.15 mg/dL), representing a 35-100% decrease from the pre-dose level of 0.23 mg/dL. Three days post-second dose, hsCRP was barely detectable at 0.18 mg/dL, which is still a 22% drop from the initial baseline. Tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha) remained unchanged between baseline and post-second dose. It was not measured after the first dose. For the next dose, we will measure a wider panel of inflammatory markers, including IL-6 and IL-10, and cover several time points post-dose. High cortisol at Peak, low cortisol and stress the following week Cortisol spiked at the peak of the acute phase, followed by a decline in morning cortisol levels and HPA-axis inhibition, consistent with a relaxed "after-glow" phase in the week following the trip. My cortisol spiked to 3x morning spike levels four hours after taking the mushroom dose. Levels returned to normal nightly baseline before bedtime. Five days post-dose, my morning cortisol levels had dropped by 42%, and DHEA-S (a marker of adrenal activity) also dropped by 45%, aligning with inhibited HPA-axis and adrenal activity. Estradiol levels increased by 200%, consistent with preliminary published evidence that peripheral 5HT2A activation increases cortisol by driving aromatase expression.

HOW FAKE MONEY KILLED THE BABY BOOM China is about to lose 20% of its population in 30 years. Germany's birth rate is collapsing. Even with all those government "please have babies" checks, nobody's biting. Politicians are confused. Economists are scratching their heads. But here's the thing: this exact scenario already happened in Ancient Rome. Emperor Augustus tried bribing young Romans to reproduce and taxing the childless. It didn't work. Fast forward 2,000 years, and governments are still trying the same failed playbook. Child allowances, tax breaks, marriage incentives. The kindergartens are still emptying. So what actually changed? Most people blame the pill, feminism, or TikTok. But there's a bigger culprit nobody talks about: 1971. That's when President Nixon killed the gold standard. Suddenly, money wasn't tied to anything real. Governments could print whatever they wanted. Credit exploded. And here's where it gets interesting: housing stopped being something you buy and became a "financial instrument." The result? Your grandparents bought a house on one income. You need 2 incomes just to afford rent. Think about it: when both parents must work full-time just to stay afloat, when does anyone have time for kids? When a starter home costs 10 years of savings, how do you afford diapers? Your career, your retirement planning, your basic survival are all competing with the simple act of having a family. The welfare state made it worse. It transferred old-age security from families to government systems. Your kids used to be your retirement plan. Now they're optional, expensive hobbies that wreck your career trajectory and bank account. Meanwhile, China went from "one child only!" to desperately begging people to have babies as their economy faces demographic collapse. The same deflationary death spiral awaits anyone whose society was built expecting endless growth. The uncomfortable truth? You can't fix a money problem with baby bonuses. You need actual economic stability where saving works, housing is affordable, and one income can support a family. Everything else is just political theater while the nurseries shut down. Source: ZeroHedge