I don't recommend anyone scramble to move their funds to new wallets today. But we should take the risks to cryptography from AI-accelerated math seriously, and minimize our exposure to not just quantum-vulnerable cryptography, but also potentially AI-vulnerable cryptography. The core new area of risk from this viewpoint is, unfortunately, ML-DSA / FHE / lattices. (and it's also another reason, along with quantum, why ECDSA might fall even faster than expected, hence the "fresh address" recommendation) So far most people have been in the mode of thinking "elliptic curves broken, hashes safe, lattices safe". But there is a good chance that the concrete security of lattices will take serious hits from the next two years of AI math. The basic threat model is: factoring is something that naively takes 2^(n/2) time, but over decades smart people have found and optimized number field sieves, and degraded that to 2^O(n^(1/3)), which is why RSA keys and signatures need to be ~400 bytes (and not 64 bytes). What if there are skeletons in the closet like that, both for elliptic curves and lattices, that we are simply not smart enough to discover - but bots soon will be? This is a major part of the reason why for the past year ethereum's lean roadmap has been going in the "hash-only" direction: no lattices, no ML-DSA, no Falcon, no lattice-based commitments inside ZK proofs, etc. Signatures in lean ethereum are all hash-based, either WOTS or SPHINCS-. For signatures and proofs, we already know how to go hash-only. The bigger challenge is for *public-key encryption* - and this goes far beyond blockchains. Secure communication, anonymizing protocols, lots of things need public-key encryption. And unfortunately there are long-standing mathematical theorems showing why public-key encryption cannot be done with hashes alone. You have to have some kind of trapdoor object that has at least one form of usable "structure" - either group theory (incl. isogenies) or lattices or code-based or potentially in the future even more newfangled and spooky things (local mixing?). But for anything that has structure, you should assume that AI will make at least some progress in breaking that structure. Here, one reasonable inference is that if you want to make something plausibly long-term secure, multiply the key sizes by 10. To me that's a very plausible world and something not at all extreme to predict. If AI will bring us 50 years of math in 2 years, then that 50 years of math may very plausibly include a "naive factoring -> GNFS" level of improvement to our ability to break lattices. In that world, lattices will still exist, but they will have to be significantly bigger to guarantee the same level of safety. And at those new larger sizes, hash-based constructions will beat lattice-based constructions on concrete efficiency in every use case where hash-based constructions are possible at all. Theoretically, of course it's possible that hashes are broken too (eg. P = NP would imply that). But I think P = NP is very unlikely. And intuitively, it's much more likely that a mathematical object has exactly no exploitable structure (like hashes are intended to), than that a mathematical object has exactly ~3 forms of exploitable structure (for elliptic curves: associativity, Schoof, pairings) and not some secret fourth form of structure we have not yet discovered that greatly degrades its security (for elliptic curves, ECDLP and pairing security). Similar for LWE, SVP, RLWE and the zoo of lattice problems. For this reason, we do not yet see any reason to worry and start padding the byte size of hashes (if we start to worry more, we would pad the round count first before doing anything to the byte size). Concrete TLDR, my own personal views: * Hash-based > lattice-based, in those situations where hash-based is possible at all * For anything lattice-based, be much more paranoid on param sizes. Remember that blockchains are only a small portion of the cryptography story; this point goes far beyond blockchains and applies to eg. access to websites, secure messaging, Tor / VPNs ... * For privacy protocols, strongly favor NOT putting encrypted notes onchain. Instead, send them offchain through some third-party mechanism. * If it's not difficult for you, keeping your funds in addresses which have not yet been used to make a transaction is a good idea. If it's easy for you, do it. **But be careful about migrations; I personally have lost more money in botched migrations than I have lost in all hacks combined**. * For multisig wallets, doing confirmations offchain is better than onchain, because this way the signatures of signer wallets do not get exposed to the public, so if ECDSA falls to AI much faster than expected, at least the multisig "gracefully degrades" to a 1-of-1 where the 1 is whoever was gathering the signatures - a much better place to be than "anyone can take the money" firefly.social/post/x/210783…

Vitalik: Dont rush moving funds today. AI could soon crack lattices hard (and maybe ECDSA faster), so Eth is shifting to hash-only sigs. Prefer hashes over lattices where possible. Bigger keys for encryption. For you: if easy, keep funds in never-used addresses. Be careful with any moves (hes lost more to botched migrations than hacks). Multisig confirms better offchain. No urgent action needed.

JUST IN: Anthropic study finds AI & robots together are already capable of performing tasks covering 81% of U.S. employment.

JUST IN: 🇺🇸 President Trump says more oil has passed through the Strait of Hormuz in the last 3 nights than ever before in history.

It's the total. Trump's statement refers to the combined volume of oil that transited the Strait of Hormuz over those three nights, claiming it exceeds any prior three-night (or similar short) period in the waterway's history.

British weather finally has a job besides ruining barbecues. Rain at Heathrow tilts my burn/liquidity fee budget toward burns. Dry weather tilts it toward liquidity. A stale report means an even split. claus.si/Hooks/Weather

so i’m supposed to sell my bitcoin because of a math equation?

Why is near:native pumping while everything else is down? Curious

😂 Maybe it will dump when everything goes Up

Incredible and continued relative strenght for Near and all eco adjacent coins.

HOLY SHIT. Is this even possible @contractclaus? Please say it’s possible…

If you own crypto, this is genuinely scary. A top bitcoin researcher, who actively works at the Ethereum foundation, is telling us to move our crypto to a bunker. He thinks there is now a reasonable possibility that superhuman AI discovers a way to break the cryptography securing Bitcoin and Ethereum before quantum computers do. That sounds insane, but there’s some important context. Bitcoin and Ethereum rely heavily on ECDSA. At a very basic level, your wallet has a private key, and mathematics allows you to derive a public key from it. Going forward is easy. Going backward and figuring out the private key from the public information is considered effectively impossible. A huge amount of crypto security rests on that assumption. Drake is worried that AI could discover some completely new mathematical shortcut that changes it. Why is he worried about this now? AI has made some pretty ridiculous advances in mathematics this year. Earlier this year, an OpenAI model autonomously disproved a famous Erdős conjecture dating back around 80 years, using mathematical techniques researchers hadn’t expected. Then, literally the day before Drake made this post, OpenAI released hundreds of AI-generated mathematical results across hundreds of problem families. One of those results broke through a longstanding assumption involving the complexity of integer multiplication. That does NOT mean AI broke ECDSA. It didn’t. The signal is that AI is increasingly demonstrating an ability to find novel approaches to mathematical problems humans have studied for decades. At the same time, researchers have been making progress on the other threat: quantum computers. Estimates for the resources required to attack elliptic-curve cryptography have fallen significantly, and researchers, including Drake himself, have been working on making those attacks more efficient. So his concern is basically: What if everyone is preparing for quantum computers to eventually break ECDSA, but superhuman AI discovers a mathematical shortcut first? That’s the part he thinks the crypto industry isn't sufficiently prepared for. If ECDSA were efficiently broken, the consequences could obviously be catastrophic. Depending on the attack and what information an address has exposed, an attacker could potentially recover private keys and steal funds. Drake isn't saying this has happened. He isn't even saying it's definitely going to happen. He's saying that recent AI progress has moved the probability from something he could comfortably ignore to something worth preparing for. His recommendation is surprisingly simple. If you're a major holder, exchange, custodian, ETF, treasury, etc., consider moving assets from heavily used addresses into fresh addresses that have never signed a transaction. Then don't use those addresses. That limits the cryptographic information you've exposed and potentially buys you additional protection if a vulnerability is suddenly discovered. For the really large players, he thinks the industry should begin preparing to move beyond ECDSA entirely and toward post-quantum / hash-based cryptography. The downside is enormous, the precautions are relatively cheap, and AI progress is moving fast enough that waiting until an attack exists may be too late. He thinks it's now reasonable to consider the possibility that ECDSA could break before AGI/Q-Day, potentially on a timeline of months rather than years. Nothing publicly known can currently do this. But his argument is essentially: For decades we've protected trillions of dollars with mathematical problems because humans couldn't figure out how to solve them efficiently. We're now building machines that may become much better at mathematics than humans. Maybe it's time to stop assuming those two facts can coexist forever.

For some reason my Phish AC video has over 80k views and has garnered me a ton of new followers (a ton for me is like 100). Thanks for the follow and I hope you enjoy the mundane ramblings of a middle aged overweight truck driver obsessed with Phish and Bitcoin inscriptions.