Chief Strategy Officer @horizenlabs. Building businesses out of zero-knowledge (ZK) cryptography and AI.

Earth
Joined January 2018
Andy Bryant retweeted
the choice of secp256k1 over r1 (P-256) in bitcoin (and ethereum) was heavily influenced by the fear of an NSA backdoor. this has been very annoying for wallet developers because the secure enclave chips found in most consumer devices only support r1. passkeys use r1 as well. turns out there is no backdoor after all... amazing work by anthropic. anthropic.com/research/ecdsa…
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Andy Bryant retweeted
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.
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Andy Bryant retweeted
Lots of founders are crashing out A year ago AI felt like an incredible opportunity. Most of us were able to ship faster, remove admin, and get time back. Lots of engineering founders were even able to explore marketing for the first time: SEO, organic social, outbound. Building complex systems that felt extremely productive. But since then, a lot has happened. Here’s some of the themes I’m seeing: AI marketing isn’t working. At first it feels impressive and it looks good but for most it’s not driving results. This is made worse by the fact everyone has access to the same tools. Inboxes are flooded, buyers are fatigued, the economy is flat. Engineers are fried. Yes you can ship more but for many the flow state has gone. It’s a new way of working and it’s not for everyone. The speed leaves many of us exhausted before 11am. There’s a feeling of what’s the point? Is my product’s next feature going to be redundant in a year, or a month? Can’t AI do what my business does, better? SaaS valuations have collapsed. From 3-4x revenue to 1x. There’s a sinking realisation that a large number of SaaS companies will go to 0 in the next few years. Building to exit seems almost crazy right now. There’s far fewer buyers and far more sellers. These include vibe coders cloning products without the care or craft, contributing to the distribution challenges from people doing it the right way. Lots of people are trying to make money by selling shovels. This just adds to the frenzied energy. Build in public stopped being fun. A few makers realised that the new game is attention, and now everything feels insincere and stunt-driven. They are influencers not founders. Changes to the X timeline compounded the issues. There are exceptions and there are still moats remaining, but the challenges feel existential
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Andy Bryant retweeted
Lazy work used to mean too little output. Now, with AI, it often means too much and more work for everyone else. @tobi call it "slop grenades." A "Slop Grenade" is when you let AI produce the work and pass it on without adding any value (including checking it). Someone else has to wade through it, catch the mistakes, and clean up the mess. You save time and look productive but someone else pays for it.
My third conversation with Shopify co-founder and CEO @tobi. 0:00 How Shopify Uses AI 7:18 River: Shopify's Internal AI 8:55 How to Encourage Osmosis Learning 10:52 AI Dreaming and Self-Reflection 11:53 How to Use AI for Strategic Decision Making 14:11 The One Thing AI Cannot Do 16:04 What AI is Making Worse at Shopify 19:46 Predictions: Where AI is Headed Next 21:55 The Future of AI-Powered Software 24:40 Will CEOs Be Replaced with AI? 27:54 Can Superintelligence Be Controlled? 31:13 Critical Skills in AI Age 34:22 Why Complex Solutions are Usually Wrong 36:33 Conditions Needed for True Intuition 38:02 The Best Path Doesn't Have Instant Feedback 44:51 How Affirmations Can Shift Your Behavior 50:44 The Inobvious Thing Hurting Companies 52:37 Relationship Between Beauty and Creation 56:23 How SpaceX Moves Forward By Subtraction 1:00:24 Why Companies Need Refounding Events 1:01:50 Books as Cheat Codes 1:02:39 Three Books to Change Your Thinking Enjoy! (Includes paid promotions.)
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The Sophon is real
The X Safety team conducted an investigation into suspected Chinese inauthentic accounts involved in influence operations: We identified a bot farm of approximately 200,000 accounts. Within this farm, we found 200 accounts posting in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy. These posts contained claims that AI data centers are driving up household electricity prices and straining the grid. Others included AI-generated cartoons that depicted data-center operators enriching themselves at the public's expense. We remain committed to maintaining an open and authentic platform where people debate topics of public interest. We take seriously any attempts to undermine the integrity of the global town square and suspend accounts that violate our Authenticity policy.
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Writing is not just spewing pre-chewed thoughts onto a page. It’s a difficult process of getting clear about what you think by struggling to synthesize various ideas in language. It’s hard, and most time “writing” is actually spent deleting and rephrasing and confronting the chasm of your own ignorance and coming back for more. It’s vulnerable. But if you stay with the difficulty and do so honestly, you will end up crafting a durable and unfuckwithable analysis that you can defend from every angle. Outsource writing (and with it thinking) at your peril! (I first posted this as a QT and then realized I was a bit overzealous in making a point that, while very dear to me, wasn’t exactly responding to the OP’s more nuanced observation so, anyway, I’m reposting my beloved point without dragging OP into it)
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YOU 👏 ARE 👏 ONLY 👏 AS 👏 SECURE 👏 AS 👏 YOUR 👏 SHITTIEST 👏VENDOR 👏 This is something that deeply worries us when we talk to companies about their post-quantum exposure. And it's why smart initiatives like the US EO 14412 obligates government software and cloud vendors to transition to PQC
We have some difficult news to share. Unfortunately, one of our shipping providers has experienced a data breach that exposed sensitive order data. This affects new customers in the US, UK, Sweden, Colombia, Brazil, Italy, and Portugal who received an order within the 90 days prior to August 8th, 2026. The data exposed: - Full names - Shipping addresses - Phone numbers - Email addresses The incident affects 11,742 customers with full exposure (name, email, phone number, shipping address) and 1,947 customers with partial exposure (name, city, email). The breach is limited due to Trezor’s strict 90-day data storage policy (we were also able to negotiate the same terms with fulfillment partners, who follow the same policy). All affected customers have been contacted separately by email. Our systems and devices remain secure, but affected customers could experience an increase in phishing attempts. NEVER enter your wallet backup on a website or share it with anyone, and only check for updates on official Trezor channels. We are deeply sorry to the community and those affected. We are investigating this situation and will post updates on our blog: trezor.io/blog/news/recent-c…
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This is your occasional reminder that if your whole digital life is in the cloud (decades of photos?) then you might consider occasionally making a home backup. With wild AI escapes happening today, and quantum threats coming tomorrow, we can't ignore a scenario of cataclysmic widespread cloud data loss. Sure the probability is still low, but I'm betting it's probably more than 2.5% You'd risk all of your precious files and memories for the numbered spin of a roulette wheel?
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Mathematicians RN
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Andy Bryant retweeted
🦔Ray Dalio compared the US position after the Iran war to Britain's Suez crisis in 1956, when a military victory exposed financial weakness and started a long decline in the pound's reserve currency status. The US national debt crossed $39 trillion in March. The dollar's share of global foreign exchange reserves fell to 56.9%, its lowest since 1995 and down from 72% in 2001. All three major ratings agencies have downgraded US credit. The Strait of Hormuz, where the petrodollar system is physically most exposed, became a negotiating table rather than a resolved conflict. My Take Dalio changes his mind often enough that it's fair to take any single call with some skepticism. But the numbers underneath this one don't need Dalio to be right. $39 trillion in debt, a 30-year low in dollar reserves, three credit downgrades, and a military operation that cost more than it resolved. Those numbers existed before Dalio drew the comparison and they'll exist after people forget he made it. Britain's pound didn't collapse at Suez. It bled for 30 years until Soros broke the Bank of England and finished what Suez started. The dollar is still the cleanest dirty shirt in the room and I don't see that changing soon. But the financial position that supports it has gotten weaker every year for two decades, and the people who run the system keep adding debt as if the reserve status is permanent. It might be. But the British thought the same thing, and they were wrong by about one phone call. Hedgie🤗
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ngl it’s kinda wild that China is the land of hypercapitalist competition fueled by open-weight models anyone can use, and America is the land where the executive branch of government must personally approve you to have the privilege of giving a private company your money
The US Government has requested a slow staggered rollout of GPT-5.6, and OpenAI has agreed. During this phase the government will approve each user individually. This will probably be the norm for all frontier models from all labs from now on.
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I think many investors are underestimating the sentiment that 'good enough' model capabilities will dominate over 'the very best' easily when the price is 10% or less. I'd love to use Claude for everything but even Deepseek v4 flash does most of what I need, at a tiny fraction of the price. Hence this shift to open-weight models will only continue.
"the share of tokens used for US models on OpenRouter has collapsed": Bloomberg
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/goal invent computronium
🦔Sam Altman says OpenAI's top internal user burns 100 billion tokens per month. Six years ago that number was 100,000. An external customer uses even more. Cost complaints are now the second most frequent issue he hears from clients. And his next move is "always on" AI that runs autonomously in the background, which would multiply consumption far beyond current levels. Altman shared this during a livestream on enterprise AI adoption covered by Axios. My Take Altman just described a future where consumption goes up by orders of magnitude while his customers are already asking how to bring the bill down. Those two things can't coexist for long. GitHub Copilot switched to token billing two days ago and users burned through a month of credits in hours. Ramp data already shows Anthropic passing OpenAI in enterprise spend, which means the competition for these customers is heating up at the exact moment the customers are pushing back on cost. IBM's CEO said this week the industry needs $6 to $8 trillion in capex and the revenue to justify it probably doesn't exist. Altman is previewing autonomous agents that would multiply current token consumption without anyone requesting it. Either the cost per token drops fast enough to make that affordable, or enterprises start capping their AI spend. One customer already exceeds 100 billion tokens a month. Scale that across autonomous agents at every enterprise and nobody has budgeted for what comes next. Altman is selling a vision of infinite demand while admitting the customers paying for current demand are already flinching at the price. Hedgie🤗
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Andy Bryant retweeted
🦔GitHub Copilot switched to token-based billing this morning and users are already out of credits. Pro+ subscribers paying $39 a month are reporting 60% of their credits gone in two hours of normal use. One user lost 20% of their allowance from a single file review with no code changes. Another hit their monthly cap before the calendar even flipped to June. Orgs with shared token pools have no way to see individual usage, so entire teams get cut off when one person runs a heavy prompt. Users are canceling and moving to Claude Code and Codex. GitHub community forums are on fire. My Take Flat-rate AI subscriptions were always subsidized. Everyone in the industry knew it. Today the subsidy ran out for a few million developers at once. The problem is a lot of companies already restructured around these tools. They cut headcount and told remaining engineers to lean on Copilot instead of building skills internally. Those companies now depend on a tool whose cost just became unpredictable and whose usefulness completely changes when you have to ration prompts to stay under budget. The developers moving to Claude Code and Codex will hit the same wall eventually. Every AI provider faces the same unit economics. Anthropic filed its S-1 this morning, and the durability of its revenue depends on whether customers stick around once real pricing kicks in everywhere. If a $39 subscriber cancels after one day because the tool became unusable, multiply that across millions of seats and the churn risk becomes very real. Today showed what happens when AI pricing meets reality. The companies that built their workflows around cheap tokens just discovered the tokens aren't cheap anymore and the people who knew how to do the work without them are already gone. Hedgie🤗
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Andy Bryant retweeted
Today's post- The 21 Stages of a Potato Price Cap. polemicpaine.substack.com/p/… Rachel Reeves has announced that she wants to cap the prices supermarkets can charge for basics. Using the humble potato as an example, I present the 21 stages of a potato price cap. The first 7 here, the full 21 in the post
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Andy Bryant retweeted
Second-time Founders is my favourite gender : 1) no deck until someone asks three times 2) first hire is a lawyer 3) distribution for the product before the product exists 4) "we don't need a big round" and means it this time 5) replies to every customer email personally because they know what ignoring customers cost them last time 6) sleeps 8 hours and ships faster than everyone else 7) the only person in the room who isn't impressed by the term sheet Second-time founders are the best breed of founders
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