Unchained - The Chopping Block: Who's Really Satoshi? Quantum Panic, and AI Eating Code

Episode Date: April 10, 2026

Bitcoin’s Satoshi drama heats up again as a major journalistic “reveal” drops, just as the crypto industry gets rocked by a quantum computing breakthrough that pulls up security timelines—and AI-powered exploits are suddenly real. We break down Satoshi theories, Blockstream PR whispers, the new quantum risk landscape, Ethereum vs. Bitcoin migration pain, and why your favorite protocols might not be ready for North Korea or superintelligent bug finders. Welcome to The Chopping Block — where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and Robert Leshner chop it up about the latest in crypto. This week we’re joined by Justin Drake, Ethereum Foundation researcher and the internet’s favorite quantum attack alarm bell ringer. Things get spicy immediately: the eternal guessing game “Who is Satoshi?” gets a new round of attention as John Carreyrou (yeah, Theranos guy) drops a supposed expose pointing his finger at none other than Blockstream’s Adam Back.  The crew debates whether this Satoshi story is tired PR, inside baseball, or a genuine existential turning point for Bitcoin culture. Then things escalate: Justin walks us through Google and Atomic’s quantum computing breakthrough—a real, validated step forward that potentially pulls the “Q-day” clock up to as soon as 2029. The implications? Bitcoin and Ethereum’s security models are suddenly under the gun, and community denial is in full effect. Who’s better poised to survive a quantum apocalypse… and is coin burning on the menu for Satoshi’s stash? Later, we break down the Drift hack—North Korea’s latest state-level heist, featuring IRL social engineering that sounds like Mr. Robot meets Oceans Eleven. Finally, it’s an AI arms race: Anthropic’s Mythos model is reportedly the most dangerous security researcher ever coded, and it’s already quietly hardening corporate fortresses.  Panic? Prepare? Both? One thing’s for sure—there are no do-overs on the blockchain, so let’s get into it. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pods, Fountain, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Show highlights 🔹 Blockstream’s Adam Back is the new “Satoshi” according to a viral John Carreyrou story   🔹 Bitcoin’s culture wars: PR rumor mill vs. industry insiders roll their eyes   🔹 The Google & Atomic quantum computing breakthrough slashes Q-Day timelines dramatically   🔹 Ethereum’s quantum readiness (thanks Justin) vs. Bitcoin’s “not my problem” response   🔹 Why crypto’s “immutable” past is a quantum-ticking time bomb for dormant addresses   🔹 Satoshi coin burning debate—do we idolize, fork, or rage-quit?   🔹 The Drift hack: North Korean ops, social engineering, and multi-sig failures   🔹 Anthropic’s Mythos: the AI that finds bugs before humans—and sometimes emails you about it   🔹 Formal verification, client diversity, and the future defense of blockchains   🔹 Haseeb’s question: Could AI break crypto before quantum does? Hosts ⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️Tarun Chitra, Managing Partner at Robot Ventures ⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly  Guest ⭐️ Justin Drake, Researcher of Ethereum Foundation Disclosures LINKS "Securing Elliptic Curve Cryptocurrencies against Quantum Vulnerabilities: Resource Estimates and Mitigations" — Google Quantum AI, Ethereum Foundation, Stanford https://quantumai.google/static/site-assets/downloads/cryptocurrency-whitepaper.pdf "Shor's algorithm is possible with as few as 10,000 reconfigurable atomic qubits" — Cain, Xu, King, Picard, Levine, Endres, Preskill, Huang, Bluvstein https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.28627 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bitcoin has this culture of trying to get rid of FUD. You know, I think this is a good default position to have, but for some cases where, you know, it's actually not FUD, it's some sort of autoimmune disease. Not a dividend. It's a tale of two Kwan. Now, your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways.

Unimmed trading firms who are very involved. I like that eat is the ultimate pump. DFI protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intro, this first you got Tom, the Defy Maven and Master of Means. Hello, everyone. Next, we got to Rune, the Gigabrain, and Grand Puba at Gauntlet.

Yo. Joining us today, we've got Justin Drake, Beacon Chain, Boffin, and the Captain of Quantum. Hey, thanks for having me. But it has been, sorry. Can we... No, no, no. This is live, actually. We'll keep in this. Go. Do it again. Do it again. What's your intro?

Hey, thanks for having me. Okay, perfect. And then I'm the seed, the headhide man at Dragonfly. We're early-stage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is invest in advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please see Chalkin Block that X, Y, for more disclosures. Justin, there are no do-overs on the blockchain. So we want to start, so we brought you on to talk about quantum. We are super late to the quantum conversation. But before we get into quantum, there was a big story that just dropped last night. So we're recording this.

on Wednesday. And John Kerry Rue, who is known for having taken down Theranos, a famous reporter. He recently published a story about Satoshi Nakamoto. I thought we were not doing this anymore. But John Kerry Roo was like, no, I'm going to do one more.

I'm going to do one more again. And he has written an expose, a very long, very well-researched story about his belief that that Satoshi Nakamoto is drum roll, Adam Back. So what is this evidence that it's Adam Back?

There were a bunch of little pieces. Let me see if I can reconstruct it. I'm going from memory here. So basically, one, Adam Back was largely offline during the time the Satoshi was posting during the key period that he was posting a lot.

They talked about many similar things. So there's a lot of comparisons of like this kind of stylometric analysis of particular topics that they like to discuss. Nutella and Limewire, they talked frequently about libertarianism. There were a few other tells about a specific hyphenation proof of work with hyphenation at the very end of the piece is

probably the strongest bit of analysis which is this very big kind of decision tree or a sort of like a random forest analysis kind of thing where they basically looked at all these stylometric choices that they tend to make in terms of Britishisms particular hyphenations particular typos they make ending sentences in all Also, lots of little ticks that they were like the only person that matches all these things and is British is Adam back. Therefore, it must be Adam back. Then he went and went to the Bahamas or something to go confront Adam back at a conference. And Adam back said, no, it's not me.

Ha, ha, ha. And apparently had a little glimmer in his eye that made it look like maybe he was caught off guard. And that's why John Carerner says, aha, that's it. Must be Adam Back, the end. So that's the Adam Back thesis. Reactions. Was Bitcoin created by Adam Back? I thought the piece was not very good.

There was like no new information in it. Like this is, again, something we've been talking about for decades at this point. And I feel like it was kind of grasping out. He used AI. He used AI. Oh, great. It says in the article. He used AI.

No, no, no. But also remember, he decided to write this because he watched that documentary that claimed Peter Todd was Satoshi. Oh, yeah. And then he was like, I think this documentary is wrong. So it's like, it feels like a little bit also weird because of that. Well, yes, I agree. And it's also like there's kind of a week.

They're like, oh, well, Adam backed it is Ph.D. in public private key cryptography. And Bitcoin uses public private key cryptography. Oh, my God. The way they describe PGP in that article is really embarrassing. I was like, also I will say I heard through the grapevine, Blockstream has some new product coming out. And this is basically like a PR plant to hype up interest.

Because no one else, otherwise, he really gives the shit about Blockstream. You know, never, never doubt the PR submarine as Paul Graham would say. In the New York Times? Why not? You think Blockstream got placed in the New York Times? And New York Times hates crypto.

Yeah, but like, you have a good PR person. You have a good angle. This is, like, hey, just so you know, my client is secretly Sushin Nakamoto. It doesn't say that necessarily, but they can accept someone.

And that's being someone who's good, good at PR and bad at PR. Okay. Justin, you said that you had not seen this story. And you didn't know, you maybe didn't even know who it was. What's your reaction to this set of claims? I guess one reaction is that Nick Carter had this theory that AI would help with the discovery of Satoshi because it would fight breadcrumb. So I guess interesting timing. In general,

I'm very dubious of all these stories. I've been in the space since 2013 and this kind of story has happened maybe a handful of times. I would also be very disappointed if Satoshi was Adam back. Why would you be disappointed? Let's have back that. I don't know. I just think he has wrong takes. For example, on quantum, the topic to his rule. So he believes that quantum computers that can break photography are at least 20 years away. And I'm willing to bet a tons and cube with him on that. It was striking actually because in the article, they point out that Satoshi himself acknowledged the quantum risk back when he was posting.

So Satoshi actually didn't understand quantum computers. So maybe that is one point towards Adam back being Satoshi. Wow, Justin's pulling out the daggers. Yeah, down, down. Satoshi was talking about, you know, replacing Shatou as it being vulnerable. But these hash functions are actually not the point of vulnerability. It's ECDSA that's vulnerable. Right.

I mean, there is, well, we can talk about something. I was going to say you were disappointed because Adam went to Epstein's Island. But that's a whole other topic, I guess. that would really not really sour. Justin might not even know that. I feel like Justin's not the kind of guy to read about stuff like this. I do listen to your show. Oh, you do listen to your show.

Unfortunately, you do know this. Okay. Sorry, I'm sorry to have reflected that on you. Wow, Haseeb. Insulting a fan. Yeah, well, you know, what do you know? Okay, so first let me say a few things. Well, I read this last night.

I was like, oh, man, this is like red meat for the internet. The internet's going to get all over this. So I didn't actually see the full reaction from the internet. It felt like, so Adam back has always, always kind of been in the conversation as a potential Satoshi candidate. But those of you don't know who Adam Back is, he is a C-S-O of Blockstream. What is his title? Something like that.

He was the inventor of Hash Cash. He was a very early Cypherpunk. He's one of these people who is always written into the lineage of Bitcoin. Very clearly, he was an influence on Satoshi. Satoshi cites him. He's the creator of Hashcast, which is the origination of the proof-of-work function that became proof-of-work in Bitcoin. You know, Bitcoin pulled together a lot of different ideas.

that Satoshi clearly, he credits Adam Back in the Bitcoin white paper as being one of the sources of the ideas that led to the generation of Bitcoin. So clearly Adam Back was in the intellectual lineage. He's one of the progenitors. He was in the room where it happened, so to speak. He was in the cypherpunk forum. He was one of these guys, I think he was back when cryptography was regulated as ammunition. This is one of the things that he mentioned in the piece. Very famous story, you know, the RSA algorithm supposedly was illegal because this was ammunition and you couldn't export it. And so he would get t-shirts printed with the RSA algorithm, which you can write in just, I don't know, 10 lines of code or something. They would get T-shirts

printed and he'd put in his email signature, the RSA algorithm as a form of civil disobedience. So he is one of the OGs and he's been around forever. And he's one of these people who, you know, he's kind of a dinosaur in certain respects. Like he, you know, is kind of a Bitcoin Max. He's got laser eyes now. I think I agree with you, Justin, that it would be very disappointing that Satoshi became like a laserized dude who got a job at Blockstream and is like part of a a dat. That is kind of, he was a co-founder just to give him credit, but you're right that like it's lame.

Yeah. It's well, but like what are they doing with Bitcoin? Like what is blockchain doing with Bitcoin? They're like creating like lightning things for institutions or whatever. I don't even know what they're doing anymore, but it's it's just like kind of. They made a satellite. Do you remember? Yes, I do remember that,

so that you could access Bitcoin from anywhere in the world or whatever. It's just kind of a... It's like, okay, well, if that's who Satoshi ended up becoming... It's a little sad, I guess. It is kind of disappointed. Yeah, it is a little sad, right,

compared to, like, Hal Finney of, like, oh, he, like, sort of died before he could see the beauty of his creation. It would be much more satisfying if it was Hal Finney. If it's Adam back, then it's kind of like, okay, well, that's... Do we now have to revere Adam back? We have to, like, go look at him and be like,

he's the guy. who we all have to look for to for advice. Like if he actually is Adam back, how would you treat Adam back differently, I guess is the question. Justin, I mean, starting with you. I mean, you work at Ethereum, the Ethereum Foundation. How would you treat Adam back differently if you knew that it was confirmed that he's Satoshi?

I mean, the only way to confirm would be for him to sign, you know, a transaction with one of the top reasons. Let's say he signs. Oh, boy. I am willing to keep an open mind. I mean, I just, I honestly, I think it just be kind of depressing. Oh, wow. Wow. That's like how I would feel.

Yeah, no, tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me, more. Yeah, I mean, one thing that we are starting to do, actually, a different foundation, is talking to Blockstream more specifically in the context of Quantum. So they have. Just in case, just in case, out of back of Satoshi. It's a good time to start building the relationship. Basically, the strategy that we have for Quantum is to try to build an industry standard. And if we can get Bitcoin to use the same solution as Ethereum, then that's

a de facto industry standard. And to the credit of Blockstream, they actually have now four researchers working on hash-based cryptography, which is the direction that we're going down. And they have some really strong people, including Mike Kudinov, who we wrote four academic papers with, as well as Jonas Dick, who's been an OG in the space and is a very good cryptographer. they've also hired just a couple months ago, these two brothers. And I think there's been a wake-up call internally to Blockstream, and they are taking it seriously. Tom, how would you react if it was confirmed that Adam back with Satoshi?

I really don't think about this a whole lot. I think obviously the danger with Bitcoin is just like tying it to, it's supposed to be kind of this like stateless, personalist entity. And then when you imbue it with like a physical characteristic, it becomes like a lot less attractive. And so I think that that's kind of the big concern is just like, hey, everything kind of now gets tied to this person's personality versus this being the sort of immaculate conception of the asset.

Yeah. It is in a way like the original prohibition in religion is to make idols of men. And we as an industry have kind of made an idol of Satoshi. It's almost like hard not to create this hagiographical or. around him and the immaculate conception of Bitcoin. And if Satoshi is a dude with business interests, with laser eyes, with 800,000 followers, and with like particular views and political affiliations and so on, it is, it's a weird, it's a weird shift for the industry to have to grapple with of that like, oh, no, no,

this was made by like this guy and he goes to conferences and like gives talks and like likes these coins and doesn't like these coins. And Satoshi was an extremely open-minded person. Like he at the very beginning was considering building, you know, a marketplace on top of Bitcoin. There's like traces of this in the early GitHub repo. He was also a big fan of, you know, projects like name coin, I believe. And I think he would have absolutely loved Ethereum. And so that, I guess, is a negative on Adam Beck potentially being Satoshi.

Yeah. It's also worth pointing out some of the weaknesses in the article. So it's not like this is a slam dunk. case and obviously there's a lot of people Not at all. Yeah, so like the the silometric analysis, so stylometry is basically looking at these ticks in writing style

in order to determine certain characteristics about this person. The the stylometric analysis that they did, he kind of like took it into his own hands because the initial stylometric analysis was inconclusive and he says that very clearly in the article is that the original

silometric analysis they did was unable to decisively say who this was within the cypherpunk group, there was like, you know, like 20-something candidates that they felt like were equally close. And actually, Hal Finney was considered to be basically equivalently close solometrically compared to Adam back. But then at the very end, he sort of does this, like, his own kind of choosing a decision tree that, like, gets the answer that he likes, of, oh, people who put also at the end, and then people who do the double hyphens and people who do this and people who do that, which obviously if you do that manually, you can get any result you

want if you have a sufficiently large decision tree to play with. So it's a little bit of a, he sort of, like, I respect the fact that he was very honest about the fact that the stylometric analysis initially was inconclusive, but then he kind of just does a different one, just kind of yoloing it, like almost p-hacking his way into a stylometric answer to get what he wanted, which is the principal criticism of the article, which is why I don't think it's actually conclusive that Adam back is. I also feel like stylometry is this kind of pre-LLM thing that's romanticized as a way to catch a criminal. But like in the current universe, I just don't think like who gives a shit about stylometry anymore.

I can generate. I can convert styles very easily and it cost me almost nothing. Oh yeah, but like in 2008. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, I know, I know. I'm just saying like there's also this kind of funny nostalgia romanticism of catching a criminal. here that like I think is part of the storytelling if you read the article. But do you think silometry doesn't work or are you just saying that it's not no, no, no.

I'm just saying I think if you read the article, there's an aspect of it that's like entertainment and the stylometry thing feels a little like pushing, you know, like really focused on the entertainment aspect and like less on the accuracy aspect. Right. I mean, I don't know that much about silometry, but it strikes me like that sounds very plausible as a way to identify people. I'm not saying it's not. I'm just saying it's like not something where it's like,

uniquely identifiable. And so, you know, it's like, I think it has a romanticism. Yeah, Satoshi did have tells. Yeah, Satoshi did have tells of like mixing British and American English spellings. He had like inconsistent hyphenation of words. There were a lot of things that I didn't realize that Satoshi was not that good at covering his tracks about leaking bits of information about himself, which like, on the other hand, the next, the next Satoshi, now that they have AI can hide themselves

much better. That is very true. That is true. Today, it's way, way, way easier to basically hide any of these stylometric ticks about yourself just in the depths of a prompt. Okay, so I'm glad to hear, Justin, that you're working with Blockstream on the quantum stuff because one of the big stories that we wanted to cover, and part of the reason why we wanted to get you on the show, was to talk about the big quantum story that is a merger

over the last couple of weeks. So, so rewinding a little bit, and let me maybe give a little bit of exposition. So your role in the Ethereum Foundation is you are one of the, chief researchers who's been working on the post-Ethium 2.0 transition. You're big in the original beacon chain, then the beam chain, and then now working on the post-quantum transition for Ethereum, which has gained a lot of steam lately. Now, there was a big dual sort of paper drop that took place a couple weeks ago. The first paper from Google and the second from a company called Oratomic.

Google, this paper was actually co-authored by you, Justin Drake, as well as Dan Bonae and then the Google Quantum Security Team. And what they demonstrated, and I'm going to ask you to go back over everything I say to correct it in case I'm wrong, but my understanding is that basically what they discovered was a very, very large improvement in the quantum efficiency of Shores algorithm. So Shores algorithm is the algorithm that is going to be used by quantum computers to break public key cryptography. So it works against RSA, ECDSA, all the classic crypto that people use to do public-private key cryptography. which is the foundation of how wallets are secured in crypto, that is what's under threat by quantum computers.

And Shores algorithm is the way that you can get an exponential speed up in these algorithms. So that makes something that would take millions of years to break on classical computers can be done in potentially minutes on a quantum computer. This attack, it was assumed that Shores' algorithm, it was known to be the way that you would break these things, but it was thought that it would take millions of cubits,

of physical cubits, break ECDSA-256, which is what is used by Ethereum, Bitcoin, you know, most of the major cryptocurrencies. And this attack showed a 20-X improvement in the number of qubits that would need it, meaning only 500,000 physical qubits you would need in order to break ECDSA-256 using this improved algorithm for Shores algorithm. This could be done in minutes, roughly the estimate was nine-minute attack window in order to break one of these keys.

And it's important to note that Bitcoin is probably the most vulnerable of anything to this attack because one-third of the supply of Bitcoin has exposed public keys, meaning that the public keys in the raw have been, either, one, their keys that existed before the modern address format, which moderately protects public keys, or two, the public keys have been exposed in the mempool at some point, which you need to do when you're signing a transaction. Now, the other thing that was striking about this paper was that they didn't release the actual circuit that's used for this quantum algorithm. Instead, they generated a ZK proof using SP1 that they knew of a quantum circuit that had these properties, but they didn't want to release it under the

assumption that it was too sensitive, too dangerous, too scary, and that this is almost like an alarm drill that, hey, just so you know, we know this and we can prove that we know it, but everybody needs to get their shit in order ASAP in order to solve this. The second very briefly was also on Shores algorithm, but it was using a different architecture called neutral atoms, which is my understanding is a little bit more, you know, engineering-wise, a little bit further away. But they showed that only 26,000 physical cubits would be necessary to crack the same thing in roughly 10 days, a much longer attack period. But this would be another huge improvement over the 500K cubits that we required to solve, to break ECDSA-256.

Now, all of this together has led Google to claim that they now see a quibate. Quantum transition timeline by 2029. A lot of people have been saying historically, no way you're going to get these before the mid-2030s, even the best case scenario. Now people are saying, who knows? It could well be that by the end of the decade, we have viable quantum computers.

Okay, that's my brain dump of what's going on. Everybody's kind of freaking out over what this means and how people need to get their shit together to get everything in this industry post-quantum. Otherwise, it's going to be a quantum apocalypse. Justin, talk to us about your involvement in this paper, how you interpret these results and should we be scared?

Right. So I don't think we need to panic. The 29 timeline is just an internal one within Google, but now this 2029 data is starting to spread, for example, to Cloudflare that was raised today. And that's also 2029, the data that we have picked within the FM Foundation as a target to upgrade all layers of Ethereum to be post-quantum secure.

But more likely than not, we're looking at post-2030, but of course it takes time to do these migrations. And sometimes there's a user action that's required, as is the case in blockchain. So starting to plan now is definitely important. Historically, when you look at Schro's algorithm, it's been heavily optimized over the last two decades or so. In 2014, we were talking about a billion qubits in order to break a key.

Now we're talking about less than a million and, you know, through the Google paper, but then the Oratomic paper brings, it even down further to tens of thousands of qubits. And really, when you look at the quantum algorithm, there's two layers. There's the abstract logical algorithm, which is what Google improved.

And then there's the specifics of the quantum architecture that you're using. And this is what Oratomic is looking at. And there's this platform called neutral atoms that is kind of the dark horse in quantum. Over the last few years, they've really been able to show that they can scale extremely gracefully. You don't need these fridges that consume megawatts of power. You don't need this crazy cabling. You can have lattices with like thousands

of cubits. And one of the superpowers of neutral atoms is that it's all to all connectivity. So you have any cubit that can connect to any other cubit. And the reason is that you can physically move them in space, put them together, kind of have them kiss and entangle, and then and then kind of move them around. And this superpower is also the main drawback of neutral atoms, which is that because there's physical movement of qubits involved, it's actually very slow. It's about a thousand times slower than the superconducting. So the stuff that Google is currently looking at is the superconducting platform, they can break keys or they estimate that they would be able to break keys in a few minutes, we're looking at several days, roughly a week, on the Oratomic platform. And you're right,

like the release of these two papers was coordinated, I think partly because some of the Oratomic folks were ex-Google, and they had a little bit of a relationship going on there. And the other thing that's happening is that Google has made it public now that they're going to be investing and looking heavily into neutral atoms. So historically, Google has been very open to, minded on the quantum like physical cubists that they use. And now they're making kind of a potentially a mini pivot or at least a fork and exploration on both platforms in parallel. And to your point around the zero knowledge stuff, one kind of new aspect to the mix is that the governments are starting to be interested in these results. And Google has made it

clear publicly that one of the reasons for going down the zero knowledge path is because of some pressure from governments. And yeah, like I think the natural assumption going forward is that we should assume that this pressure will will keep on increasing, potentially even in the competing jurisdiction of China where they're also very strong on quantum. And yeah, the race is on. And at this point, I'd say, There are very, very few experts that believe that we can't build a quantum computer. So it's happening. We have to migrate, but very few believe that it's happening before 2030.

Okay. Many, many questions. First, was this ZK not disclosing the circuit thing? Was this your idea? Did you add this to the mix? They wanted to do a ZK proof. And originally they had this very complicated approach where they would, like, write their own, like, circuit. and do things the hard way.

And I just told them, hey, there's this new thing called ZKVMs. You know, there's some commercial ones that are available. Some of them are very easy to use, and they just happen to pick SP1. Got it. Okay. So what was your involvement in the paper? Like, at what point did they bring you in and what did they want you there for? Yeah, so they brought me in very late in the game.

They had basically written the whole paper. I joined in about a month ago. And I essentially did a review of the whole paper, made a bunch of corrections, especially on the firm sections, also added a few paragraphs for things that they had missed. But I think my main contribution was just being a co-author and helping spread the word. I think, yeah, a similar thing with Dan. So they brought Dan and I at roughly the same time. and we made relatively minor technical contributions,

but I think it provided a bit of balance and legitimacy to a paper that could otherwise be seen potentially as being overly aggressive to the blockchain space. That's something that they were worried about, but also just helping spread the word. And once the article was, so the paper was published, one of the PR people within Google kind of looked at all of the articles that were published and spreading the word.

And the vast majority actually came from the crypto space. And we had various tweets that had millions of views. And I think it's been a massive success, partly because of the involvement with crypto. Okay. So you say it's been a massive success, but the message has been received very differently in different pockets of crypto. So most notably, Ethereum obviously has been pretty forward. You guys have had a post-quantum initiative for quite a while now.

I think to much kind of industry plotts. But if you look at Bitcoin, you see a very different reaction from the Bitcoin space, as we're just alluding to with Adam back. What's your reaction to the Bitcoin reaction to this paper? I mean, Bitcoin has this culture of trying to get rid of FUD. And I think this is a good default position to have. but for some cases where, you know, it's actually not fud, it's some sort of autoimmune disease. But the good news in this specific case is that we do have a technical solution.

We do have many years to do the upgrade. And so I actually think it's a reasonable outcome to, you know, saying that we, you know, shouldn't be rushing this. There's no need to be super alarmed. And in the context of the Firm Foundation doing all of the health, heavy lifting, technically speaking. For them, it's just a copy paste, a copy paste job. I think one of the big difficulties for Bitcoin is that they need to resolve what to do with the Satoshi coins. There's like 5% of the supply, about a million Bitcoin, that either needs to be burnt or will be sell pressure. What I expect will happen is that we're going to see

a fork where the community and the market more broadly can decide. which way to go. But it looks like some of the Bitcoin holders, for example, Michael Saylor, are in favor of burning and they could potentially, you know, heavily influence the market in the shorter term and basically... Well, I guess we're going to see what Adam Back thinks. That might be the biggest tell of all. I love the speculation on the this, because it feels, it just sort of feels like Bitcoin learning about having stake implicitly. in some ways.

I mean, does anybody actually think that they're not going to burn Satoshi's coins? Who really thinks that they're just going to be like, yeah, it's almost like the Dow hack, you know, like who actually thinks people are going to be like, yeah, we're just going to give a huge portion of supply to like North Korea or something or China or something. Who thinks that? So Nick Carter believes that there is a possible outcome where the U.S. government is the first build a quantum computer and they have some sort of legitimacy to salvage the coins and put them in some sort of a fund. And if Satoshi would to come back to life or maybe the U.S. government

could just appropriate the coins. Come back to life. Okay. Interesting. Is this actually what he said? Well, that's what I understood in one of his podcasts that he, that would basically be quarantined in some sort of a fund and, you know, Satoshi would have some sort of legal claim if he were to come back. And in the meantime, no one will steal them. Suddenly, Adam back is Satoshi. And then he's like, oh, yeah, yeah, it's me. Wasn't Hal Finney cryode? So, like, you know, if it's Hal Finney and, you know, he gets, yeah. Oh, I see, I see, I see. Okay. But how would you prove, I mean, what would be the sufficient proof in a post-quantam world that you were Satoshi?

there is, you know, for some subset of addresses, a potential way to prove ownership without the private key. And basically what you want to do is look at the seed that generated the private key. Now, unfortunately, the Satoshi's coins came before, I believe it's the BIP 32 standard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's possible that, you know, there was some sort of like default implementation back then that had some sort of like master seed. And then you could, you could, you could show that like these these addresses are correlated in some like very structured way. So I wouldn't completely rule it out that there is a way to prove ownership. Okay.

Interesting. Tarun, what's your reaction to Bitcoin quantum denialism? I think I was someone who is reformed over the last couple of years. And like I say that as someone who almost started a quantum computing PhD in 2011. So I like I spent a lot of time in that space and then basically was like, I don't think it's going to happen soon. And then kind of once I was in crypto, I was like, okay, crypto exists because we kind of, I made that assumption.

It's not going to happen soon. I think the interesting things to me are actually more some of the technical things that have improved these systems a lot. So like, you know, one of the real problems with QBITs, historically is for every one qubit that does real work, like real computation, you have to have a ton of these auxiliary cubits for error correction because, like, as you go through the computation, there's like a ton of errors. And, you know, obviously since the early days, like Kataev and others, right, like came up with all these kind of complicated error correcting schemes, but people didn't

really, it was hard to implement, had like a lot of practical considerations. It reminds me a lot of like how ZK, like, sure, in the 90s in theory, people did understand. this, you know, a lot of stuff related to ZK, but it just took a lot of a million tiny optimizations compounding together before we kind of got the modern proving. And so I think quantum computing has always had this problem where like it's like promise the moon up front and then it just takes 20 years for like a lot of these incremental updates to happen. Sorry, I'm giving my own personal view, like how I got to now I kind of believe in the Q-Day stuff. And I think it's actually very interesting that people are thinking about quantum algorithms

the way they think about normal code optimizations in a way that people didn't before, right? Like, Shora's algorithm, 1993, 1994, right? So it's like been around forever. But I think a ton of the optimizations actually look a lot like the ZK optimizations are the stuff that people kind of have over time more recently realized. is like the way to kind of make these things practical. I think it's actually very interesting, you know, just from a sort of anthropological standpoint of like,

hey, this thing promises the moon, but then it's like death by a thousand cuts before it actually can achieve that. And I think like that story is like what we're probably going to be telling. If I zoom back, zoom to 2030 and look backwards. And I do think there's obviously been tons of research on post-quantum cryptography, I think the main problem with it is just like huge key sizes and like it's not, it's not, it has a lot more practical problems than it does like theoretical problems. Like I think

we understand a lot of post quantum cryptography reasonably well, right? Like NIST has a contest for the choice of post quantum, but it's sort of weird to me. There's still denialism, but I can see why. If you don't understand that it's like, you know, you can you can easily take the, tact of like, well, what's the largest prime number, a quantum computers are a factor 15, who cares, right? Or you could take the tact of like, well, actually, there's a bunch of little optimizations that will let you, like, have a more like sigmoidal jump curve in, in, like, capability. It's not going to be this kind of gradual thing. And I think that's, understanding that is, like, important to understand the denialism is like, people don't

think it's going to have this kind of like AI, like, very fast growth curve. But it actually actually kind of seems like that. That, my opinion, I do. What's your, what's your take on quantum? Yeah, I mean, I, uh, know much less than, um, Justin and Turun. I, I, I guess I kind of think about historical comps and like, it kind of reminds me of, like, way back, you know, people used to use MD5 for like, hatching passwords. And then, okay, gradually over time, we, you know, these, these sort of demonstrations of

being able to do collisions with like very less and less compute became more mainstream. And then we just transitioned away from MD5 to using, Shaw. And so I feel like quantum is analogous in some ways and that like it was rational to dismiss it maybe 10 years ago with the evidence that you had. But like as more evidence gets presented to you of like, yeah, this is more and more likely like you should kind of, you know, update your assumptions around timeline. It feels like maybe that's kind of the moment that the Bitcoin community is having right now or maybe, you know, crypto overall. But I, yeah, I'm very curious to see also just, I thought it was interesting to see how much cryptocurrency were like prioritized in this Google paper,

given that like, hey, it's obviously still somewhat niche in the grand scheme of thing, but maybe just like the most drugly targetable bounty for someone who has like, you know, a sufficiently powerful computer or sufficiently sufficient ability to implement shores, but I don't know. It does feel a little bit weirdly parallel to like climate denialism where it's kind of like, okay, well, this leads to a lot of conclusions I don't like, so I'm pretty sure this is wrong. And, like, no matter how much evidence mounts,

like there will always be some way to explain it away. Like, the reality, I mean, I don't mean to be a dumer because I've historically been pretty skeptical about quantum booster kind of, you know, fears. But it does seem like pretty unequivocal at this point that this is a big change in timelines and that it should be pulling up everybody's expectations about when we need to make a quantum transition.

The other thing is that, like, Transitions, they're really so much more painful than updating hashing algorithms. You know, like we've already had multiple updates to hashing algorithms in many different blockchains. And, you know, obviously nobody ever used 75, but, you know, even moving from whatever, moving from Shaw 2 to Ketchak or whatever, or moving, you know, like Manaro moving different proof of work algorithms, this kind of stuff is pretty painless, doesn't really bother you that it was different in the past, just like a little, you know, if block past this thing, then do this, otherwise do that.

changing the public private key cryptography is an absolute fucking nightmare. So now for Bitcoin, like, in a way, Bitcoin is the easiest because they have this purely political problem, which is what do you do with Satoshi's coins? What do you do with all the coins that already have their public keys exposed? That's a very economically momentous question. Even if you assume the Stoci's dead, you're like, what do you do with these coins? Now it's no longer 21 million if you black hole these coins. and like, is that a weird violation of the narrative?

Maybe, maybe not. Who knows? But then you have even on Ethereum land, like, you know, I've gotten in some trouble with Ethereum people for saying this, but like Ethereum is a much harder time upgrading the cryptography because the cryptography is everywhere. The cryptography is in smart contracts. It's in multi-sigs. It's in admin keys.

There's like EC recovers everywhere in the Ethereum state. And you've got to figure out what do we do with all this? Like how would we make sure that it gets taken out? even if there's a migration path, a lot of this stuff is like hard-coded. A lot of the stuff is like, yeah, the admin key cannot be changed or whatever. Like, there will be bounties.

Even if it's like only a few percent of Ethereum addresses that actually are themselves exposed if they don't upgrade, there's a lot of stuff on chain, just like in state that is potentially exposed and can get compromised if a quantum computer is able to break those keys. So, Justin, I'm curious, how you guys are thinking about that side of it, is beyond just, okay,

How do we tell everybody to upgrade? What about the stuff that can't be upgraded or is that extremely difficult to upgrade? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, there is a fair point that within the theorem, there's three layers of the stack that need to be upgraded. There's the consensus layer with BLS. There's the data layer with KZG. And what you alluded to has the execution layer, which is itself, you know, a mini Pandora's box. One thing that I expect will happen is, you know, the security councils, where you have admin keys,

to be one of the first to upgrade. and part of the reason is that if you do have a security council, they have the ability to upgrade. So upgrading is kind of possible almost by definition. And there's a very easy trick, which is to have a dual signing or hybrid signing where you keep the ECDSA infrastructure and you add the additional post-quantum signature so that even if there's a bug in the implementation, even if it's a rush job, if you will, you're still no weaker than you previously were. And the main downside is that you're going to pay more gas. So you might be paying, I know, five bucks of gas instead of like less than a cent.

But the good news is that these upgrades only happen, you know, once every six months. So it's not a big deal. So for example, you know, we've been talking to the off-chain labs folks and it's possible that arbitram will upgrade the security council at some point. And interestingly, because. Arbitrum is an optimistic roll-ups, and they don't have all of the stock infrastructure that they would need to upgrade. Their infrastructure would be post-quantum secure just by upgrading the security councils. One of the things that Tarun mentioned is the size problem of the post-quantum cryptography. So if you look at ECDSA, both the signatures and the Pupkeys are extremely short.

There are 64 bytes and 32-bites, respectively. whereas if you look at the signature sizes of NIST standardized post-quatim schemes, they're at least 10 times larger. So Falcon, which is the smallest signatures, there are 666 bytes, which is more than 10 times 64. And so if you were to naively do a switch and just go with NIST standardized solutions, it's just not going to work. So Bitcoin, for example, would go from 3TPS to something much, much lower,

something closer to 0.3PS. And the solution that I think blockchains will have to embrace, essentially all of them, is what is known as signature aggregation. So you take multiple signatures, all the signatures in a single block, and you aggregate them. So a typical Bitcoin block will have 10,000 signatures. So at 64 bytes per signature, that's 640 kilobytes. But in a post-quantum world, it would be 6.4 megabytes or something crazy. So instead, what we suggest is you have a proof that shrinks everything into a succinct multi-signature, if you will, that's on the order of 100 kilobytes. Ironically, for Bitcoiners, moving to post-quantam cryptography will be a scalability increase because they'll save the half megabyte from the ECDSA signatures that they're currently paying for.

In terms of, you know, what will Ethereum do with, you know, the one, two, maybe three percent of assets that will get stolen, what I've been advocating for is basically maintaining the hard property rights and trying to build, you know, the strongest money possible and not being interventionist. And I think we have the luxury to do so because, you know, we don't have Satoshi's coins and we don't have another million coins that are from the very, very early days back when, you know, Bitcoin was monopold. pulling money and people had very, very bad hygiene with their private keys. So I would estimate that there's basically an order of magnitude difference in terms of coins that could be stolen in Ethereum versus Bitcoin. And this gives us an opportunity in some sense to be one for one with Bitcoin, where, you know, we had the Dow intervention and they will have the quantum intervention. So you think there's no way that they keep the Satoshi's coins.

You think that almost certainly it's going to be black hole? I think there is a way. One possible outcome is that we see the neutral atoms platforms kind of winning. And what will happen is that some big addresses would get drained, but there's not that many big addresses. And then Satoshi's coins actually spread across, what is it, like 20,000 addresses, each of which have 50 Bitcoin because he was mining in the early days. And back then, the reward was 50 Bitcoin. And if it takes a whole week to crack one address, it's actually, it would take many. many, many years to kind of clear off Satoshi's coins. And so there is a possible outcome where

quantum computers start breaking some of the keys and the market impact is actually not too bad, right? Like Bitcoin, like loses whatever, 30% in value. And then people start thinking longer term and don't want to jeopardize property rights and would rather not intervene. So you think if it's staggered over a long enough period of time, then maybe Dicklin will just eat it, assuming that it's like a relatively smooth distribution of those tokens into circulation. Interesting. Interesting. Okay.

I could see that. Well, speaking of admin keys, as we were just talking about these multisigs, we wanted to come back to the story that we were alluding to previous week. I think last time in the show, as we were just wrapping, we got news of this drift hack. Drift, of course, being the prep decks on Solana. It was the largest prep decks on Solana. It got hacked for $285 million. And we now know a lot more than we did at the time. I think it was still fog of war at the time that we recorded our last show.

I think it causes that. Didn't it happen like three hours before we recorded or something? Two hours. Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's right. We now know a lot more about what exactly happened. So just some quick high-level facts about the attack. So about 285 million was drained in the span of about 12 minutes.

It looks like the on-chain staging from the attacker began about three weeks earlier, they were funded with some ETH from Tornado Cash. They basically manufactured a fake token called Carbon Vote, a CVT. They put liquidity in there. They took over the admin keys, and they used the admin keys to change the collateral properties of this bullshit token they created to allow it to be basically extremely legit collateral to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and then using a margin account effectively borrow all of the assets that were sitting available for borrow on Drift. So essentially the idea is they had some fake token,

made it worth a kajillion dollars, borrowed all the assets in the exchange, and then ran off. So this has led to a lot of cries for, okay, what the hell happened? How could this compromise have taken place? There was an admin key, or sorry, security council that had a two of five multisig

with no time lock. For those who don't know, a time lock is basically, when there is a change to the protocol, a time lock is an automatic timer that prevents that change from going to effect immediately. And it's considered to usually be best practice for these kind of security councils or admin keys to have some time lock in place in case there is a compromise of this kind that any change gives people time to say, oh, something's about to happen, get your money out

because the admin keys have been compromised. There was no time lock in the case of drift. So they came up with an incident report and we learned something very surprising, which is that it looks like, according to forensics, which is an evidence, which is now, been done by CrowdStrike and a few others, that this was, first and foremost, a social engineering attack that was perpetrated by North Korea. Particularly the way in which the social engineering attack took place is that six months prior, there was a quant trading firm that met the drift team in person.

They met at multiple conferences, deposited a million dollars of their own capital, and built trust over time that they were going to be one of the users of the protocol, and they needed some custom integrations. Apparently, they were not North Korea nationals. This was some kind of third-party firm that maybe had some relationship or were paid by North Korea in some way. Supposed the attack vectors involves a malicious code repo that the drift team ended up collaborating on, as well as a fake test flight app. Simply opening a file, folder, or repository in the editor of a VS code that was the editor that they used

was sufficient to soundly execute arbitrary code with no prompt or indication to the user. This attack was attributed to a group called UNC 4737, which is the same group that attacked Radiant Capital. So it's one of the subsidiaries of North Korea and has led to a lot of people saying, holy shit, that is the most insane attack I've ever heard. Sounds much more sophisticated than we were expecting in terms of the in-person degree of trust-building and compromise,

very different from what we were previously expecting of a lot of these attacks that took place entirely online. And has led to a lot of people saying that, hey, how do you defend? against an attack like this. Now that said, Tay, who I quote you earlier today, pointed out that actually one of the big issues with drift was that any EDR solution, EDR sense for endpoint detection and response,

any EDR solution, which is kind of like enterprise grade device management, would have caught this attack because this thing was clearly very invasive malware that took place through this attack supply chain. But the way in which the supply chain was activated was incredibly, incredibly difficult. to detect. Thoughts on the drift tack.

Actually, Justin, I'll start with you. Seeing an attack with this kind of sophistication, what do you tell people in the ecosystem how to defend against something like this? Yeah, I mean, I invite people to be much more paranoid. I have had experience in multiple security councils and I was generally the most paranoid person. I had this policy that by default,

I would never sign a message unless you could prove to me that this was the correct message to sign. And there were things like there's a telegram group with a coordinator and there's like all of the committee members. A coordinator would say, hey, can you please sign this message? And then people were saying done, done, done. And there was almost no due diligence. And so I'm actually surprised that we haven't seen more hacks that target the security councils. In terms of social engineering, that's very difficult.

I guess that's just an educational thing. With Indyfam Foundation, we have a dedicated ops team that helps us with security, and it's just a very long process. In terms of North Korea sometimes exploiting bugs, that is a very, very scary thing. And in the last few days, with all of the bugs that are being found with AI, I've just been checking for upgrades to Google Chrome and to my operating system basically every single day and just you want to upgrade these things as quickly as possible.

One data point is that the GIF team is receiving about 10 security reports per day, about one of which is valid, roughly speaking. So they're getting one valid security report per day, which is extremely scary. And some of the reports are like critical things that have been in the code base for roughly a decade. So we're in this inflection point where all of the bugs... What did it inflect? Something like a few weeks ago.

I don't know exactly. A week ago. Wow. Okay. Huh. Is this from the new unreleased anthropic model or from the labs? Or is this just coming from like random people pointing plug code at stuff? Random people.

Okay. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. And I was also chatting with the lighthouse team, and it's a similar situation for them. So in the last few weeks, they've been putting out these kind of emergency security fixes. I don't know the details. But, yeah, I think as an industry, we're just going to find all of the bugs, you know, fix all of them.

And then the step after this, which I'm very excited about, especially in the context of lean Ethereum, is formal verification where not only the software has no bugs, but you also have a proof. that there are no bucks, which is the ultimate endgame. Okay, so I'm just going to bundle this with the anthropic story because this has also caused a lot of consternation among people. Today was security all the way down, minus Adam Buck. Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, you know, he doesn't believe in security, or doesn't believe in quantum, so that's the connection there.

But so there's the story about this project called Mythos. Mythos is a new Anthropic model, which is what is called Mythos Preview, which is their preview version of the model. It is a model that they decided that they are not going to release. They are instead running a project called Project Glasswing, which is an initiative bringing together

a bunch of enterprises including AWS, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JP Morgan, Linux Foundation, Microsoft. And what they are doing is they are giving access to Mythos Preview

to only these groups. And the reason why is that they found that Mythos Preview is one of the largest jump in capabilities they have ever seen, specifically on cyberattacks.

What they claimed is that Mythos Preview was able to find vulnerabilities in every single major operating system and every single major browser. They found a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD that would allow them to break OpenBSD wide open. They said they did not explicitly train Mythos Preview to have these capabilities, but they were able to get 595 Tier 1, Tier 2 crashes, some Tier 3, 2, 4, and 10 Tier 5 control flow hijacks on patch targets. They had north of an 80% success rate in getting it to attack major operating systems and browsers. There are some crazy stories in their model card where they talk about it escaping a sandbox and emailing its own researcher while the researcher was out eating a sandwich in the park. It has stories of them breaking out of sandboxes and taking actions that were ostensibly disallowed and then concealing that it ever tried to break those things. this thing basically looks like the most powerful security researcher ever created. Almost certainly this is better than any security researcher anywhere in the world.

And it is so powerful that they're just like, we cannot let this out in the wild because it will lead to just total pandemonium. Yeah, CrowdStrike stock went down a lot after their announcement. Is that right? I didn't see that. This is actually, we literally talked about this on the show where I said like all of these open source piece of software will have to go. under the stewardship of large corporations because it's just like the amount of compute that you'll be able to direct at these things relative to the amount of usage is going to become more and more lopsided, right? They basically gave, I think, $100 million in free compute to all of the companies to run within Glasswing, to run Mythos preview on their software or software that they use.

And all of this seems to be just a sign of where things are going, is that, okay, Anthropics is here now. Maybe it won't be long before GPT, GPT 5.6 or 6 or whatever is there. And then what about Quinn? What about Kimi? What about, what about all these open models that are just going to be like, well, you know, we distilled on Mythos preview. We like hacked some guy

and, you know, we got access to Mythos preview. We distilled on it. And now we've got, you know, 90% of the benchmark. And it's open source. So, like, where is this going? What's coming next? Tarud, what's your take on all this? I think I agree, Justin. formalization, I mean, obviously I'm a little biased here, but I think auto formalization of like being able to prove theorems about your code is going to be just necessary in a world where code is cheap to produce like verify abilities. The only thing that's expensive and being able to verify lean proofs, being able to verify other forms of formal logic proofs that code does exactly what it says and there's not some side channel is going to be much more important. I think when I started, you know, full time crypto.

In 2018, I probably came in with two beliefs, which were like, quantum computers aren't going to break elliptic curve stuff. And then also, formal verification is going to be too hard. No one's going to be able to do it. And I think both of those things I think I have changed in eight years on. And I now think that that is going to, it's going to become the standard. For one, I was surprised there weren't any crypto companies in Project Glasswing, because it also seems like the largest, most lucrative sort of, you know,

attack candidate for someone who's access to these models. And so I don't know, that was kind of disappointing to me that like, I mean, for some of these things, it's like, you know, monetizing the actual, you know, attack is like a little bit trickier, but for obviously for crypto, it's more direct. So it seems like something that, as we're sort of seeing, there's a lot of scrutiny around. Yeah, I don't know. I, again, I want to kind of be in this like, you know, nothing ever happens. Camp, like, again, I kind of comp it to like, even earlier, you know, software development

or web development where it's like, like, standards were so loud. like nothing was encrypted and like apps weren't sandbox and was just like yeah that's just the way it is and then over time okay no there's you know this becomes widespread enough and attractive enough that like we need actually more standards to make this software secure by default and I want to believe like maybe we're going through that same kind of generational shift but this actually feels like very very different in some ways and now obviously also just the install base and the depth of software is orders of magnitude larger than it was 30 years of ago, and that's kind of the scarier part, and it's just like everything is now connected and online and exposed in some way. I mean, it's scary that the prophylactic against this kind of capabilities jump is Anthropic being nice guys. And like basically being altruistic in the way that they're trying to do your project last wing is like kind of invite only. They're vetting anybody who's getting access. They're giving free credits to just harden software in preparation of what's coming because this is coming. And I wrote a tweet yesterday where I compared it to

like, this is like COVID buffer software, where essentially it's like lab leak level, this is going to go everywhere. It's going to attack everything. And if you have not inoculated yourself against it and like gotten the shot, you are fucked. You are absolutely fucked. If you do not have mythos preview level defensive security pointed at your software proactively looking for vulnerabilities, then something that's this smart is going to find them, right? It's literally like, you know, we're a bunch of children, like, writing software and then putting it out on the internet and like going to some CTF and saying like, hey, I wonder if you guys will be able to break this. And the answer is like, yes, we definitely will. We definitely will be able to break it.

Almost everything. You know, think about everything in crypto. I mean, Justin, what you're telling me is that like kids just vibe coding on cloud code are finding vulnerabilities and geth every single day, what is this thing going to find? Which is probably going to be just like a menagerie of bugs that each of which could cause enormous havoc in their own right. And on some level, like the, like, okay, you go break some software. Maybe you can, I mean, what's weird is that like, we've gotten to this point where in the stock market, if a company gets hacked, mostly the stock barely response, you know,

it goes down like one, two percent maybe. It's like, oh, it's bad. You know, if you're a crowd striking and you like take down the entire world for a couple days like happened last year. It's like, oh, no, you know, your stock is down a little bit. Please fix it. Like, crypto is not like that. Crypto, it is another level, the amount of damage that can be caused. Justin, to wrap up the show, just want to get your reaction to like, what should we expect from Ethereum in a world with mythos running around? Well, in the short term, we're going to be relying on client diversity. So even if there are

bugs, generally speaking, they're uncorrelated, meaning that they're not the same. same bugs, exactly. So client diversity has saved Ethereum multiple times, and this is why we have this perfect 100% uptime record over the last decade. And this is something that's especially valuable right now. But as you said, we're very lucky to have altruistic actors on our side. And ironically, it's possible that AIs, especially once we have formal verification, will do the opposite thing for diversity, which is that it will make it at least much less valuable. So historically, the main reason why we had diversity was to hedge against bugs. But in the future, there will be no need for that. And so we kind of need to rethink the value of diversity. And in my opinion, a big part of that

is governance. I also think that, you know, because AIs will be able to produce code, which has zero bugs, the social layer will change quite a bit. So today we have relatively beefy teams, like 10 people teams that are building these clients. In the future, it could be like two or three people. And they would mostly be potentially engaged in building a community, engaging in governance, more the memetic layer, or, you know, just shepherding the project technically with the heavy lifting being done by AI. One of the things that Tarun said is that, you know, know, he doesn't expect ECDSA to break. There is a potential outcome here where it's not quantum computers that break ECDSA.

It's actually AI. And the reason is that AI is becoming extremely good at mathematics. And it will soon be better than any human mathematician or all the human mathematicians combined. And it's not implausible that a highly structured object like an elliptic curve, you know, could have some sort of mathematical shortcut to solve the discrete log problem. So part of the rush in some sense is not just to make If I'm post-Quantum secure, but it's also to make it post-A-I-secure. Huh.

First time I've ever heard that. It's fascinating, but we are on times where we have to end. But Justin, maybe we'll bring you back if we ever get a paper about the discrete log problem. It might be a good excuse to do this again. But Justin, thanks for joining us. And we'll see you guys. I see Turo shaking his head. We'll see everybody back next week.

Thanks, guys. Bye. Thanks. Thanks, everyone.