Last month, we demonstrated high-rate alchemy: turning mercury into real, stable gold, beating CERN’s record by a factor of 10. Last week, we enriched isotopes in the world’s most powerful plasma centrifuge, beating the Soviet record that stood for 40 years. Now, we’re building a fusion reactor in San Francisco to achieve record power density.

Everyone worried about AI hacking crypto, but the internet and banking systems rely on weaker encryption. That said, AI doesn’t need to break Bitcoin’s cryptography to cause damage, leaked data already enables more phishing, social engineering, etc, Stay SAFU!

We are still here

The core step of a quantum attack on Bitcoin and Ethereum now fits in under 900 logical qubits within Google's gate budget. In three published attack designs, the machine would shrink by zero to about 28%. On October 13, Jieyi Long of Theta Labs posted an 893-qubit circuit to ECDSA Fail, an open benchmark for the point addition that Shor's algorithm repeats to recover a private key. A day later he posted an 874-qubit version. Both stay below the 1,175 qubits and 2.7 million Toffoli gates Google proved for its own circuit in March. Narrower circuits exist, down to 676 qubits, but all of them exceed Google's gate count. The 676-qubit one needs about 150 times as many. Pierre-Luc Dallaire-Demers, a co-author of the ECDSA Fail paper, put the physical saving at 25% for the IonQ, Oratomic and Google attack designs. I checked each one. - Google: about a quarter, if every part of the machine shrank with the qubit count. - Oratomic: nothing with its published codes, and at most 16% with a code sized for 893 qubits. - IonQ: about 28% fewer ions, but longer attempts, because the circuit needs about 1.6 times IonQ's Toffoli gates per addition. Nobody has compiled a full attack around either circuit yet. postquantum.com/security-pqc… #QuantumComputing #PostQuantumCryptography #PQC #QuantumSecurity #Cryptography #Bitcoin #Ethereum #Cybersecurity

1/9 "USDC is coming to Bitcoin." That is the title of Alpen's post of 24 September on its deal with Circle. The dollars will not live on Bitcoin, and they are not live yet. What changes is where your BTC sits while you borrow against it. #Bitcoin #Stablecoins

Bitcoin has its own little programming language. It can't loop. That's on purpose. Every coin is locked with a short script. To spend it you hand over what it asks for, usually a signature, and every node runs it to check. No loops means every script ends. Nobody can jam the network with one that runs forever. In August 2010 Satoshi pulled 16 commands out in one shot, OP_CAT among them, over bug worries. There's a proposal now to bring OP_CAT back. Folks still argue it. Block 972,122 came in from Foundry USA at 3:28 Central this morning with 1,987 transactions. Almost every one had to pass a script check to get in. Bitcoin sits near $82,724. Education only. Not advice.

BIG: Nine crypto firms form Quantum Alliance to set post-quantum standards, warning 6.04M BTC — about 30% of supply — is exposed if quantum computers catch up

The BTC ecosystem really exploded because the narrative and product market fit were genuinely excellent. Onchain art on the worlds most secure network just makes sense It was such a strong narrative that it attracted massive cross chain attention. It had so much motion it fueled a fungible meta with much weaker pmf To see a move to that extent, I only see three routes 1) we get a massive uptick in retail participants. Ords will be totally novel to anyone who wasn’t an onchain degen last cycle. I don’t love this path because it requires a lot of macro to align and we have zero control over any of it 2) we find a new use case specifically well suited for bitcoin This is a bit of a tough one. Bitcoin excels at permanence and security, which is great for art. What else? I’m not sure. Maybe defi? USDT? How much do defi participants care about permanence and security stronger than ethereum? Can bitcoin even offer stronger security for defi, considering onchain smart contracts require some workarounds? Would defi even attract the sort of participants that would buy our art and collectibles? Would it be silo’d off into a meta protocol making it hard for liquidity to flow to ordinals anyways? I find all of that to be very uncertain 3) we find a way to very substantially improve on what bitcoin is already good at, art and collectibles This sounds most plausible to me. The question is, what can actually be done? Marketplaces have already solved some of the worst problems like sniping. Heres a few things I can think of -find a way to reward active, long term focused founders. This is a big one and nobody is doing it well in nft land imo. It’s a massive fucking problem that our top Ord collections rn have no way to continue incentivizing founders without them just diluting their supply with new mints. -find novel and fun ways to show off our collections. Making collecting fun and social would be huge. Rn all my Ords just sit in a wallet nobody looks at. Same issue on ethereum. -remove buying friction. It’s still kind of a pain in the ass to load a BTC wallet and buy Ords. I know udi experimented with using sol for ordinals mints, and I think that’s good outside the box thinking. What matters is that the Ords live on bitcoin, not the payment method for acquiring them -find a way to reward long term holders and participants. I see this as adjacent to my point about founders. Platform incentives or some other sort of incentives, done properly and at scale, would be game changing -find a way to make airdrops cheap. Sparks actually did a good job at this (probably their only W). It’s a huge problem that it takes massive amounts of capital to do an airdrop in our ecosystem. Solve this and we have another tool to create value and momentum That’s all my thoughts for now