A thermodynamic miracle ∴ Core Dev at @ETCCooperative. Everything is an experiment. Opinions are my own

rsa4096/0x1688910EC6300A60
Joined July 2016
Diego L. L. retweeted
Istora (@Istora_ETC) and Diego (@diega) spent last week at #TOKEN2049🇸🇬 Below we reflect on lessons $ETC can learn from Zcash and Ethereum, plus three takeaways from talking to custodians, stablecoin issuers, exchanges and infrastructure providers. classix.dev/reflections-on-t…
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This is a really important advice
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Diego L. L. retweeted
RISC-V is the answer. One very late puzzle piece that contributed to me walking away from EOF at great personal cost was the full-throated endorsement by V for ossifying the EVM as a RISC-V compiled program, and RISC-V guest programs becoming a valid target for smart contracts. I also think that the idea of banning precompiles and expecting people to EVMify things like PQ crypto schemes is bonkers and regressive. The EVM ISA is wrong for this. RISC-V is a real ISA for the kind of bit twiddling encryption requires, especially if they bring in the vector extensions. But I'm not holding my breath for anything other than the current schemes. This leaves open a more functional rule for "precompiles" in the zk era, in that precompiles are only considered when they have more efficient ZK circuit constructions than a simple RISC-V implementation, like the proposed FAEST encryption scheme. Otherwise you get charged based on RISC-V cycle count. This is the way.
Ethereum is about to make a decision it can never undo, and almost nobody is talking about it here. Which instruction set should post-quantum proofs run on? Sounds boring. It isn't. On Thursday, soispoke posted a breakdown on ethresear dot ch, and one number jumped out. The same hash, run through EVM code, took 78 to 163 times more cycles than plain RISC-V. So why does this even matter? EIP-8288 lets a transaction depend on post-quantum signatures and STARK proofs that are checked outside the EVM. Nodes verify them before passing the transaction along, and each block carries one recursive STARK that proves all of them at once. Take a privacy pool. Today it verifies a Groth16 proof using the BN254 precompile. A quantum computer that breaks BN254 could forge those proofs. With EIP-8288, the pool doesn't verify anything itself anymore. It just checks that the transaction depends on a valid proof for its program. Clean, right? Except EIP-8288 currently identifies proofs by a verification key hash, and that key changes whenever leanVM upgrades its proof system. Upgrade the prover, and every immutable pool pinned to the old key is dead. The proposed fix is to name the program, not the key. Each program gets an ID from a hash of the instruction set version and its bytes. Future provers then have to keep proving every old version forever, the same way clients carry every past fork. Which brings us back to the real question: which instruction set? The EVM is the obvious choice, because we already have it. But even compiled ahead of time to RISC-V, it's still 17 to 20 times slower, because everything is 256-bit words. RISC-V is fast and native to the prover. A custom Ethereum instruction set might beat both, but it doesn't exist yet. To be fair, the author says there isn't enough data to decide. And one reply pushes back hard, saying the EVM comparison is unfair and Ethereum should own its instruction set instead of handing RISC-V to users. Whatever we pick gets frozen into immutable contracts for decades.
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Diego L. L. retweeted
On Wednesday @drakefjustin asked holders to consider moving funds to addresses that have never signed. We ran the numbers on ETC: 83% of ETC sits at addresses whose public key is on-chain. 14.5M ETC is on keys that haven't signed in 3+ years. classix.dev/etc-key-exposure
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Diego L. L. retweeted
Ethereum Classic is back in Google BigQuery. Google’s public dataset stopped updating in 2020. We rebuilt it from our own archive nodes. Now anyone can query the entire ETC chain in SQL, including questions an archive node alone can’t easily answer. 🔍 classix.dev/etc-in-bigquery
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Diego L. L. 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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Diego L. L. retweeted
We're excited to be an integral part of this future for #EthereumClassic. 💚
The Future is Coming on.
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Diego L. L. retweeted
1/ This weekend someone tried a social attack on Ethereum Classic: a rogue Core-Geth release posing as a security update. The attack failed. Be careful when upgrading, especially if asked to use a different source! Full report: classix.dev/260916-rogue-cor…
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Before Bitcoin Cash, BSV, XEC, Blakecoin & eCash ECX, there was Ethereum Classic ETC as a phenomenon deserves to be studied. Because it received financial support from some of the wealthiest people in the space & intellectual support from cypherpunks Yet it wasn’t enough: ETH had the money, the political control, the resources to attract talented developers, and the Vitalik cult that kept everyone together
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I’m really happy to be part of this. Stay Classix
The @ETCCooperative is shutting down. Classix (@classix_dev) is picking up the torch. Unsanctioned sustainable development for the Original Ethereum Vision. Learn more about who we are, and why we exist below. #Classix #EthereumClassic classix.dev/hello-classix
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I can’t stress enough how little an idea matters compared to the agency of the people executing the idea. I have had the privilege of knowing and sometimes even working with some of the most successful people (by various metrics). The difference between mediocre and excellent work and outcomes is predominantly one of agency. In practice this means: they dont wait for things to happen to them they go out and make things happen for them. They don’t wait for someone else to do something, for someone to teach them, for someone to give them the path, etc. They just go out and find a way to do it. I think the single biggest superpower these people have is the realization/belief that the world around them is completely mutable. Most everything that happens is because a person made it happen. I used to tell people to look around the room you’re sitting in. Look at everything. Every noun. It almost all exists because a person willed it into existence. Nothing is stopping you from doing the same. I see people online all the time dismissing someone else’s success because “I had that idea first” or whatever. I mean… yeah? If so then the difference is… you. So a bit of a self own whenever I hear that. Number one tip: act with agency.
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Diego L. L. retweeted
The smartest people I know have strong opinions weakly held and change them when new information arises The dumbest people I know keep their opinions the same just so they can remain consistent Time changes too fast try remain consistent, better to sail the waves to wherever they are taking you!
a good reminder that just because someone states their opinion with intense conviction, does not make it fact. they can come back a year later and state the absolute opposite view with the same conviction.
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Diego L. L. retweeted
Beware people obsessed with outcomes instead of building outcome machines. Its worse than ever with AI, but these people existed before. Short term results above all else, etc. Don't fall into the trap. Invest in building strong fundamentals, invisible supports, and outcomes flow like water. An outcome machine.
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Diego L. L. retweeted
Earlier today at @BITMAINtech 's WDMS, @nikichain sat down with @DaddyCool1991 of @LTCFoundation, @Istora_ETC and Diego López León of Classix, artist @Song11Ting from @nvidia ’s Global AI Art Gallery, and @SinoCrypto of @cypherpunk . The conversation got into where mining goes next: how Proof of Work networks stay secure, how miners navigate rising costs, and what AI’s demand for energy, hardware and compute means for the industry.
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Diego L. L. retweeted
Thank you Istora Mandiri @Istora_ETC and Diego López @diega for representing Ethereum Classic at WDMS Global 2026 in Hong Kong and speaking on the panel “PoW Beyond Bitcoin: The Evolving Role of Miners.” As a long-running Proof-of-Work smart contract platform, ETC’s security, miner incentives, and evolving role in the PoW landscape deserve a seat at the table. Grateful to both of you for showing up and speaking for the network. Appreciate Bitmain and the WDMS team for hosting the discussion. #EthereumClassic #WDMS2026 #PoW
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Diego L. L. retweeted
The hard pill to swallow is that any contract that relies on ECRECOVER for authentication will need to be abandoned before Q-Day. The project management exercise is to take your favorite Q-Day estimate, run it backwards, and figure out when you need PQ alternatives in place.
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Diego L. L. retweeted
with respect to my core dev colleagues.. this site: - is an adversarial + chaotic media environment - sustains itself on contention and controversy - produces no fixed or verifiable constituency: there is no "ethereum stakeholder" badge, no COI disclosure, no proof of legitimacy. anyone can make any claims of impact and affiliation overindexing on this context makes our existing tyranny of structureless even more difficult. stakeholders should certainly be consulted - but vague gestures to "CT sentiment" in isolation cannot be an input to decisions this venue does not bear the responsibility of the chain or its components becoming deficient longterm. core devs are tasked with making difficult but necessary decisions, and are be blamed for downtime, major issues. thank you for considering this perspective
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Diego L. L. retweeted
Un gran poder conlleva una gran responsabilidad 🕷️.
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