The Trahan-Obernolte discussion draft text has dropped.
I'm going to publish a longer and more carefully considered piece on this in the near future, but quick takes for twitter:
I think the substance of the catastrophic risk provisions (IVO-style auditing and SB 53-style transparency, both with fairly robust rulemaking authority; incident reporting; whistleblower protections) is quite good, for the most part. Not absolutely perfect, but better than any other federal cat-risk bill that's been introduced so far.
Unfortunately, I also think that the preemption (all state laws regulating development) is far too broad, and that this makes the bill as drafted a bad deal overall. Currently, you're preempting (for example) a broad range of state child safety laws, in exchange for a federal framework that (from what I've seen so far; I have not yet read all 270 pages) doesn't include substantial federal child safety protections. And it's not just child safety, it's every possible current or future state law that regulates development.
If you narrowed the preemption to avoid that kind of asymmetry between the policies you're implementing federally and the policies you're eliminating at the state level, I think I would strongly support a bill like this. It doesn't have to be completely 1:1, necessarily; something like
@deanwball's proposal, which preempted five specific categories of state law in exchange for federal transparency, might be good enough (depending on the details).
Tl;dr. -- the draft is quite good on substance, but quite bad on preemption, and therefore (IMO) a bad deal overall. My hope is that it's a step in the right direction, and that as discussion continues the preemption section can evolve into something that makes more sense in terms of both politics and policy.
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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.
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A lot of cool product development happening @ Reptides right now, but this might be one of the best ones yet…
(up there with research lab imo)
"ask reptides.”
Here’s how it works:
1. Ask it any peptide question.
2. Get a real, research-driven answer. No BS, no fluff, no AI slop.
Powered by AI, BUT every answer pulls from thoroughly vetted, verified sources housed in the Reptides backend infrastructure.
Think of it as an intelligent internal search engine built to simplify peptide research, embedded in the platform itself.
And it’s only going to get better as more data is compiled internally.
More coming soon. iOS app in development as we speak.
And if you read this far, here's a little bonus:
Running a two-week promo for the 9th Life community. Use code “9LIFE” at checkout for 10% off a lifetime subscription.
Link in bio.
(Please note this feature is still in beta testing - User feedback is welcomed)
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Good math, but not all quite there:
First, SpaceX pays fairly average, but for more than a decade they have offered regular (~bi-annual) liquidity to employees. To live comfortably (especially to have a family) in LA County, most employees would have sold a little bit here and there, if not a lot (e.g., if they were the sole earner in a household).
Second, critically, because there is no double trigger (in order to facilitate the liquidity), most people default to "sell-to-cover" — i.e., ~40-50% of their holdings are immediately sold to cover the taxes on vest. Remember these vests are W-2 events. In order to not do this, the employee would need to come up with significant cash (because the taxes are paid against the price at vest, not the price at grant) — especially later on.
However, two things make SpaceX particularly awesome IMO:
1. They gave employees the option to choose stock or options along the way. Someone who took options and paid the taxes with cash would have done very well.
2. They gave stock to everyone. There are a bunch of highly skilled workers that we on X never think of, like Tube Benders, Orbital Tube Welders, Cleanroom Technicians, etc. that are going to make significant fortunes.
Maybe it's overly quixotic, but this last point is underrated part of
@elonmusk attacking physical problems, not just software ones, with 100x thinking: a bunch of people in the types of jobs America needs and romanticizes (for good reason) will be rewarded with the kind of wealth that really would not be possible at any other company they would have chosen.
An incredibly positive story that, if you can't see it in that light, you should look inward.
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SpaceX millionaires 4,000 x $1mil , 400 x $100 mil
Every employee who joined before the first succesful launch made (unless they sold early) more than $100 million.
SpaceX lists June 12 at ~$1.75T.
Work backward from the cap table. At $1.75T, clearing $100M takes ~0.0057% of the company.
- 2002–2008, first ~500 in: joined at a ~$50M company. Held to $1.75T = a 17,000x. The core of the club — maybe 150–250 left holding
- September 2008, SpaceX has first successful launch
- 2010–2016: joined at $1B–$10B. Needs a senior grant — directors, principal engineers, early Starlink. ~100–200
- C-suite + board: Shotwell, Johnsen past $1B. A layer of SVPs below them clears $100M on equity, not salary. ~20–40
- Post-2016: joined at $20B–$350B. To hit $100M you'd have needed ~0.4% of the company. Impossible for an employee. This is the millionaire tier — almost none reach $100M
The tally:
~400–500 at $100M+
A few dozen above $500M
A handful of billionaires past Musk
Same building. Same mission. Two orders of magnitude apart — set entirely by what year you walked in.
Early isn't a strategy. It's a date stamp.
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Updates since then:
* Deepseek v4 is out. There *is* a 2-bit quant that can run within 90 GB ( ), and it works, however it's only fast on Apple hardware (I've head ~35 tok/s). On AMD, it's ~7 tok/s. IMO actually taking the effort to properly support more than one hardware manufacturer is a great example of the difference between mere "decentralized AI" and genuine "CROPS AI". I hope we can become better at this.
* also has alpha telegram support now. However, the path to adding your account is quite janky
* looks promising as a way to run "dense" models (eg. Qwen 27B) more efficiently. It's janky, but on my 5090 laptop it seems to be ~2x more tok/s than llama.cpp
* VoxTerm (local AI recording, no third-party servers) continues to be developed
And there's a lot more projects coming on the horizon.
One other thing that has been on my mind is that there's actually a lot of intersection between "CROPS ethereum access layer" and "CROPS AI". For example, we want a ZK way to make (paid) calls to remote LLMs. But if we have this, then it's just as useful for solving another problem: private RPC reads in Ethereum.
Another example: application-specific finetuned LLMs. Leanstral ( ; I get ~38 tok/s on AMD) fits into < 70 GB, but can hold its own against 1T models on writing Lean code. Things like this are a huge boon for writing more secure code ( ). We should have models finetuned for Ethereum-related use cases as well.
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