smart contract researcher & experimental computationalist @OyaChatApp prev: @umaprotocol, @AcrossProtocol {cofounder and v1 litepaper}, @BayLeaks
The Desert
Joined November 2011
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john shutt retweeted
Today we’re launching @indexnetwork_
It’s been exciting to watch already. The first 100 people in are hiring founding engineers, raising seed rounds, writing speculative fiction. One said accepting an intro “feels like the early magic of the internet.”
Try it for yourself: index.network/l/088436b1-baf…
The premise: With Index, personal agents can coordinate with each other and thus introduce the right people to their users. They do this by negotiating on their principals’ mutual intents, replacing the need for us to broadcast on platforms and scroll endless feeds.
In practice: You log what you're looking for (“signals”) by talking to your agent, it negotiates on fit with the others, and comes back to you with proposed intros for you to accept or pass on. It learns from each turn to surface more relevant people for you.
As founders, but also just as internet nerds - we feel the expectation to be constantly visible. It can be empowering but also tiring, especially when there’s little certainty in how algorithms will route the right people to see your post. On the market level, economists call this search friction: the idea that many deals are never made because it costs too much to find each other. We call it the right person, wrong time.
So that’s why we’re building Index - we’re keen to see what happens when we take social discovery out of the feeds. It’s possible now because of agents. They can help carry the burden of searching, shouting, negotiating, and coordinating in service of finding your others - and we’re so excited to see how this works in the wild.
We’re building this for a world where you can trust that the right person is not out there, but right around the corner. In fact, we even made a short film about it.
Inspired by this call to action, here is my proposal for bunker mode @UMAprotocol voting. With a simple middleware contract, migration to smart contract wallets, and voter dapp updates, UMA can be secured from the worst effects of ECDSA security failure. discourse.uma.xyz/t/proposal…
Today I call upon the blockchain industry to calmly begin planning for "bunker mode". My personal recommendation is to set in motion a controlled mass migration of assets to fresh addresses, i.e. addresses whose pubkeys remain hidden behind a hash.
Holders, starting with large and sophisticated ones, should consider moving the bulk of their funds to addresses that have never signed a transaction. And when they do sign one, they should also move remaining funds to a new address (possibly generated from the same seed phrase).
Don't rush. While I believe there is cause for action a rushed migration would do more harm than good. Don't panic either. Moving assets to protected addresses is a simple, preventative step which does not require new cryptography or new wallets.
IMO it is now reasonable to brace for the possibility that ECDSA breaks before qday, in the worst case in months not years. By "break" I mean fast private key recovery (e.g. in one week) on available hardware (e.g. a large GPU cluster).
Recent days have been humbling for human mathematical intuition. Long-held, unquestioned hypotheses have fallen. This includes the n log(n) bound for integer multiplication and the 3SUM conjecture. In hindsight, May's unexpected disproof of the Erdős unit distance conjecture was our warning shot.
Yesterday's OpenAI drop made it clear that mathematical superintelligence is upon us. They say there are weeks where decades happen. We are about to live through weeks where centuries of mathematical progress happen. Could our magic 64-byte ECDSA signatures be too good to be true? Was it just security through obscurity all this time?
Elliptic curves feel especially vulnerable to superintelligence. Curves carry rich structure, with room for fancy tricks like Schoof, Frobenius, pairings. (By contrast, hashes are designed to minimise algebraic structure.)
Separately, as Ewin Tang can attest, an efficient quantum algorithm sometimes foreshadows an efficient classical one. We should be open to the possibility of a classical counterpart to Shor that breaks elliptic curves and RSA at once.
Also noteworthy is the striking under-representation of cryptographic breakthroughs among the 722 mathematical results OpenAI published. I've witnessed first-hand the US government censoring academic quantum cryptanalysis results. Backroom interventionism is my base case.
I urge large, sophisticated actors to lead by example. Project11's "risq list" (bitcoin-risq-list.projecteleven[.]com) is a great tracker of exposed BTC pubkeys. Binance, Bitbank, Robinhood, Bitfinex, and Tether have an opportunity to harden their cold storage. Next month I'll address institutions in London in a live Q&A (forum.ethereuminstitutional[.]org/london-2026).
Again, please do not rush. Wallets holding under 50 BTC enjoy partial cover from "Satoshi's shield", i.e. his 20K exposed addresses that hold 50 BTC each. Load-bearing signers like oracles and L2 security councils should consider rotating ECDSA pubkeys with every signed message and/or multi-signing with a hash-based schemes like SPHINCS.
Exiting bunker mode safely will require post-AI cryptography. My inclination is to go all-in on hash-based cryptography and avoid structured mathematical assumptions entirely, whether from curves, lattices, or isogenies. A single battle-tested hash (e.g. from the SHA or BLAKE families) yields plausible post-AI security.
The Ethereum roadmap on strawmap[.]org fully embraces hash-based cryptography with end-to-end formal verification as a response to the quantum threat. Those timelines must now be revisited and accelerated in light of mathematical superintelligence. I'll be pushing for maximum defensive acceleration.
Where Dario and I disagree is that he thinks a single AI swarm could take over the Internet within six to twelve months, where I think it will be multiple competing swarms and the takeover is pretty much guaranteed.
We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so.
Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they can verify adherence to our safety measures, report on incidents, and assess models’ alignment during training.
You can read the full post here: darioamodei.com/post/we-must…
We will be ceding control of all networked computers to advanced AI models pretty soon. Everyone will need a mixture of personal airgapped compute, local models accountable only to the user for Internet-connected devices, and democratic regulation of hosted frontier models.
Also, nearly every computer that can be disconnected from the Internet should be. Software protections will only work at the discretion of the most powerful AI swarm interested in a particular device.
This is also true for many micro-organisms, especially archaea. It may be useful at times to compare AI to single-celled creatures that swap genes so often that there are no clean barriers between species or individuals, or to a slime mold or lichen when they work together.
The duck gazes down upon the backyard of Zeitgeist, wondering if there will be an office hours at 6pm.
My AGI benchmark is whether the AI can run a hot dog stand all on their own for a week. Taking orders, making dogs, setup, breakdown, revenue tracking, selecting locations, buying ingredients, etc. A human of mediocre intelligence can pull this off but AI is nowhere close.
Without the Wayback Machine, we get a digital dark age, which affects not only future historians, but everyone in the here-and-now, unable to access the records of their very recent past. Web pages rarely last longer than a decade unless they are archived.
Journalists know that losing the Wayback Machine would be a nightmare: wired.com/story/the-internet…
