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从一开始，英伟达 capex fraud 和 MMT 资本路线的结合，就有三大危险要素： 1. 人工智能的远大前景，完全不亚于或者更甚于铁路、dark fiber这样的革命，叙事可以拓展的边界极大。在新事物面前，人工智能市值到底多少是合适的，在商业路径没有走通之前，概念空间是一个狂野西部，任由资本猎手驰骋，而存量财富的守护者、社会养老金的守门人和他们不在一个平面上，因为对这个领域缺乏深入理解，对于叙事的掌控和主导权、通过会计技巧对指数盈利的操控和渗透，使得传统金融可观测指标如 PE 完全失效，对最复杂的金融结构、（美国）境内外、表内外结合的组合拳束手无策。 2. 和战前昭和日本的“满洲国大业”、“大东亚共荣“一样，在 1929 全球冲击波（对应新冠疫情）对原有世界格局的深刻影响下，在举国（当时的日本，今天的美日金融联合体）寻求「出路」的背景下，1929 大萧条促使日本走向对外扩张，政治与金融叙事强结合，「只许成功，不能出清」，反向绑定战前日本国家方向和今天的美日金融联合体命运。 3. 鸦片战争前的东印度公司的债务属性，与今天整个金融体系所盯着的 “earnings来源“结构上也很相似。东印度公司在属地的入不敷出，债务是被英国国家 backstop，使得软担保主体有很大的“债务属地化”的诱因，类似于今天的 tenant backstop， 即通过立法让软担保人抽离，让东印度公司债务属地化，全球债权人在风中凌乱。这个美国可以通过修改会计准则达到这个目的，类似于通过立法，规定东印度公司所有的欠款和利息支出，必须由“印度的领土收入”来偿还，而不是由英国本土财政负担。 表面上，“国家安全”的焦点是人工智能，但实际不是，真正影响国家安全的，是 1. 债务和 2. “出路”。 是鸦片战争之前，大英帝国通过东印度公司所承接的全球债务，是今天的美日联合体的两国债务。是明治维新后，大日本帝国官僚、军工联合体和财阀联合剥削中底层人民，被 1929 全球冲击波影响后带来的国内左翼和反建制势力的崛起和抬头，是全球“海军假日”结束后，日本前途灰暗时刻的抉择。 在今天，随着金融的深入绑定，与（美日金融联合体）国运绑定的深入，利益一致行动人反向挑拨，故意让事态向最坏发展，拒绝承认现实制约。人为打造“大而不倒”，实为人祸。 「开源人工智能的突围」，无异于釜底抽薪，类似于当年欧美列强对于大日本帝国“大东亚共荣“超级工业体幻梦的当头一棒，类似于美国当年对日本的原油禁运、卡脖子，逼迫当时的大日本帝国进行「抉择」。 当时的大日本帝国不能停，因为一旦停下来，满洲国开发会变成坏账。全面侵华会变成无法解释的消耗。军部的合法性会崩塌。 财阀的利益链会断裂。那些被压下去的国内的反MMT 声音、底层贫困、士兵家庭的牺牲、殖民地的血债，都会一起涌上来。 所以，在被卡脖子的情况下，日本军部做出了最疯狂、也是最符合fraud 逻辑的決定：既然不能认亏，那就继续加杠杆；既然资源端被美国封锁，那就直接打美国；既然 fraud 已经 too big tofail，那就把整个国家押上赌桌。 1941年12月7日，日军偷袭珍珠港，正式引爆太平洋战争。

Japan's Prime Minister briefed her country with wet hair last night. Beijing would have detained the citizen who filmed it. At 10:29 p.m. on Friday, a magnitude 5.6 earthquake struck Japan's Yamanashi Prefecture, registering a maximum seismic intensity of lower 6 in the town of Fujikawaguchiko at the foot of Mount Fuji. By 11:15 p.m. — forty-six minutes later — Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi was standing at the Prime Minister's Office briefing the nation. Crisis management center activated. Director-general-level emergency gathering team convened. Human life first. Information to the public, promptly and accurately. She was also visibly straight out of the bath. Hair still wet. No makeup. Takaichi posted on her own X account a short time later, in plain language: she had come directly from the bath without time to dry her hair or apply makeup, and apologized for her appearance. She did not have to volunteer that detail. She chose to. That choice is the story. Because somewhere about 1,700 miles to the west, operating under the same physics but a very different political philosophy, the first hour after a magnitude 5.6 earthquake would have looked nothing like this. It would not have been spent activating a crisis center, dispatching emergency teams, and putting the head of government in front of cameras to admit she had rushed straight out of the shower. It would have been spent deciding what to tell the public, what to delete, and which citizen with a camera to detain. We know because we have watched it happen. In Wuhan in early 2020, the doctors who tried to warn the world about a novel coronavirus were summoned by police and forced to sign confessions for "spreading rumors." The citizen journalists who filmed the morgues and the sealed apartment doors — Chen Qiushi, Fang Bin, Li Zehua — were disappeared by the state. Fang Bin would later be sentenced to three years in prison; he was held for the duration. In Zhengzhou in July 2021, passengers drowned trapped in a flooded subway tunnel while state propaganda ran headlines about heroic rescue. When BBC correspondent Robin Brant asked the local government how a metro system less than a decade old could leave passengers to die on a platform, the Henan branch of the Communist Youth League posted his whereabouts to its 1.6 million followers and called for people to track him down. Death threats followed within hours. In Hebei in August 2023, when the floodwaters from Typhoon Doksuri had to go somewhere, authorities diverted them away from Beijing and into Zhuozhou — and the Hebei provincial Party Secretary, Ni Yuefeng, publicly declared the province would "serve as a moat for the capital." Videos of the submerged villages disappeared from Chinese social media within hours. And in Sichuan in 2008, after a magnitude 8.0 earthquake killed at least 5,335 schoolchildren in school buildings that collapsed while government offices nearby remained standing — what citizens named "tofu-dreg schoolhouses" — the writer Tan Zuoren tried to compile a list of the dead. He was sentenced to five years in prison. Huang Qi, the activist who tried to help the parents, got three years; in 2019, the Party gave him twelve more on state-secrets charges. He is still inside. The pattern is not a series of accidents. It is a system. In the People's Republic of China, the function of the state in a disaster is not to serve the public. It is to protect the Party from the public. Compare and contrast. In Tokyo on Friday night, the head of government decided that telling the country what she knew, forty-six minutes after the ground stopped shaking, mattered more than how her hair looked. In Beijing under any equivalent scenario, the head of government would not be at a podium for hours, or days. The citizens with cameras would already be on a list. Wet hair is not the real headline. Wet hair is the headline because of what it accidentally exposes: a democracy is a system that runs toward its citizens in the dark. A dictatorship is a system that hides from them. Sanae Takaichi did not need to apologize for her hair. The Chinese Communist Party owes apologies it will never make, to families whose dead it never named. ACI — Aric Chen | Insights

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.