Have created a bunch of events over the past 20 years, including TechCrunch50, LAUNCH Festival, All In Summit, and Liquidity.
Hiring a director of events in Austin to help me with these, as well as an entry-level position to help us scale this extremely fun effort...
Adam Dill 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.
Adam Dill retweeted
I took a stab at improving the performance of Elixir. I used the PR for Elixir that @ZachSDaniel1 posted and worked some more on it. In the benchmark Elixir is now faster than Rust (ccece30 newest commit) for the Sidebar and Search benchmark.
Last conversion of the Campfire from my token stash goes to JavaScript/Express. As with the others, I'm sure you can find more to optimize. But this gives you a sense of what order of magnitude these options exist within with agent-led development. github.com/basecamp/once-cam…
Dear @1Password please remove the 0.5s animation everytime I unlock 😂
hey @1Password you should have 2 KPIs:
- avg credentials per workspace
- avg time to fill a password
please just optimize for that
it's starting to get crazy how often i have to reauthenticate, unlock, or reopen the app because it's stuck
Adam Dill retweeted
The end of software secrecy is almost upon us. The death of closed source, and the final triumph of open source.
I should have realized this a few months ago when I successfully decompiled the game of Firefighter from an ancient DOS shareware binary. My robot friend was able to tell it had been written in Borland Pascal from looking at the data layout; it gave me back very readable Pascal code with sensibly chosen function and variable names. I transpiled it to Rust and now ship it as part of my heritage games collection.
The thing is, I thought of this as a fun stunt but didn't have any confidence that the technique would scale up to large, real programs. I have since learned that people are now doing this sort of thing with entire AAA games, which are among the most complex software artifacts ever to be shipped as a binary. If they can be decompiled, anything can be.
This has implications. Massive implications. We need to think about what the world is like when, in general, there is no longer a secrecy moat around almost any software at all.
1/2
Adam Dill retweeted
I have a branch with various performance improvements to the Elixir version, focused on specifically the websocket side of things. I didn't spend much time on the rest.
The load generation code was flawed in overload scenarios because any socket that had an issue just stayed disconnected forever, so I assume no benchmarks were run in this fashion prior. Now those reconnect on disconnect and continue sending traffic (a more realistic scenario).
Most relevant finding:
In an overload situation, the rust implementation delivers a whopping 1% of messages to all connected clients, and the Elixir implementation delivers 100% of messages to all clients, applying natural backpressure to writes.
Speed is cool. Rust is fast. Speed is not even close to the most important thing when building real applications.
I've had agents implement and optimize the Campfire web app in Elixir, Go, and Rust. Yes, Ruby is the slowest. I didn't care about that when the pay-off was huge in terms of productivity and developer joy. But if you're no longer reading the code? github.com/basecamp/once-cam…
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The shown benchmarks use non-equivalent implementations: Elixir routes all DB queries through a single GenServer with Redis for jobs (retained from Rails), while Rust uses in-process queues, omits CSRF tags/fields, and applies other caching changes.
github.com/basecamp/once-…
raw.githubusercontent.com/basecamp/once-…
github.com/basecamp/once-…
github.com/basecamp/once-…
x.com/zachsdaniel1/s…
Adam Dill retweeted
ok i think i finally figured out why alignment has gone basically nowhere after 15 years and several billion dollars. the problem is hard sure. but have you met the people in charge of it
1) the leadership does not know how computers work. ask one what happens when you type a url into a browser and watch them start sweating. dns is a spooky word. they genuinely believe the model lives in "the cloud" like a ghost haunting a castle
2) zero idea how large scale distributed systems work. never been paged at 3am. never watched one bad bgp announcement take half the internet offline. their big threat model is the ai "copying itself across the internet" like its a floppy disk virus from 1998. brother it needs 50 megawatts, a liquid cooling loop and a personal relationship with jensen. it is not escaping onto your smart fridge
3) they dont understand the stack they are supposedly protecting us from. ask about inference servers, kv cache, batching, egress, rate limits. blank stare. ask how the model will seize the power grid and you get a 45 minute answer with a hand drawn diagram and three links to their own blog
4) nobody can define an agent. ask ten of them and you get eleven definitions and a 30 page google doc. to the rest of us an agent is a while loop that calls tools and eats a 429 every thirty seconds. to them its a digital god in its larval stage. my agent cant book a dentist appointment without asking me three times if im sure
5) they started from "everyone dies" and worked backwards so every result is bad news somehow. model refuses, deceptive. model complies, sycophantic. model does well on evals, well now its scheming about the evals. i cant think of a single thing a model could do that would get them to say ok maybe we're fine
Good times make weak men. Man the fuck up.
"People aren't ready, this is gonna change everything"
You know what people weren't ready for? Fucking mammoths. Tigers eating them. Monkeys ripping their arms off. The black plague. The ice age. Smallpox. Vikings pulling up on the beach. Drinking water that gives you diarrhea until you die. Getting a scratch and losing your whole leg. The Mongols. The Spanish Inquisition.
One volcano can send us back to the dark ages and these safety guys are gonna be shocked. Oh the robots didn't kill us? It was a volcano? Imagine their disappointment as the hot ash rains down on them.
A solar flare is gonna explode your phone in your pocket your legs are gonna be covered in battery acid and your bank account will stop working. You're afraid of a computer program doing math?
"Things are moving too fast" homie you live on a rock that periodically deletes everything. You are one the most luckiest entities in a 100 light year radius living during a golden era. Cheer up.
My ancestors crossed an ocean in a wooden box because they ran out of fucking potatoes.
"The social disruption will be enormous!"
Nigga World War 2? World War 2? Hop in the people carrier we're landing on the beach.
Are these people out of their fucking minds? Do they not know what we've survived already?
A couple decades of air conditioning and people suddenly think oh this is the natural condition of mankind. No. We used to have eight kids because seven didn't make it. You're gonna be fine. Man the fuck up.
Accelerate.
Adam Dill retweeted
I am a sucker for good books, and so especially O'Reilly books.
Here's one that is WIP, but in return, it is free, thanks to @AntithesisHQ
It's for CTOs / eng leaders who want to get AI to deliver *business value* which is... tricky.
Get it here:
pages.antithesis.com/oreilly…
🤝 Paid partnership
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Patiently waiting on dd to write the latest image is the most difficult part of a new @OmarchyLinux install.































