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DECRYPTED: Episode 24 - Quantum Resistance save Bitcoin?
Recorded: April 1, 2026 Duration: 1:02:05Space Recording
Full Transcription
Good morning, good evening, and good afternoon to everyone joining us from around the world.
You know what time it is. It is another episode of Decrypted.
Episode 24. We're getting close to be able to rent a car, you know?
I think that's 25.
You know, we've been doing these for a while now,
and, you know, today we're're gonna be jumping into a really really
awesome topic quantum resistance is it gonna save bitcoin who knows jack how you doing man i'm doing
good good to be here got his coffee you know i gotta say i'm excited about today because we got a juicy topic to dig into 100 google bitcoin quantum
resistance uh stan what's up man you good yeah actually very busy as you guys see i'm not
actually calling from regular place usually i have have a pretty nice location at home where I film this podcast.
But today I am actually calling from the office.
We have this super nice co-working space called Avila Spaces in Lisbon.
one and we're very busy lots of stuff happening with ai lots of stuff happening with also privacy
And we're very busy.
Lots of stuff happening with AI.
like encrypted token so the entire engineering team is like super busy yeah yeah i i can attest
to that right because we have seen you know we have so many things in the pipeline from like a
marketing perspective and a release perspective that is you know i don't think
i've seen us like push out this much stuff before it's it's a massive testament to you know the
incredible team you guys got over there yeah and actually uh ben you probably seen yesterday
there was this news maybe you haven't seen it, but there was a report about encrypted tokens and privacy tokens.
And after the report, people kind of got crazy about privacy like Zcash and also Scale and also other blockchains that are doing privacy like Zama.
like Zama. So yesterday was a big day for the encryption and privacy chains because it looks like many researchers are saying that the next wave for the market, when the market ultimately goes up and there is no fear anymore, then the next big thing is privacy. 100%. You know, from the conversation we've had with, you know, guests on scale
school or, you know, conversations here on Decrypted, you know, it seems
like it is definitely the next frontier, right?
Yeah.
You guys are doing such a great job.
I think everyone notices this like every week we're like pounding this
privacy thing and x402 and i think kudos to you and sawyer
and manel for doing this great stuff because i've seen like so many people like crazy like
the viewership like for the scale school is just growing crazy i think like it comes from the
privacy that the fact that you have this privacy thing.
You know, every time, every new episode, you guys have more and more people viewing the episode.
And I think you guys have been doing such a great job also inviting first class people.
You have so many interesting people. I'm viewing these episodes every time. Because you have this X408 004 guys
and you have the base guys
and you have the X408.
You have everyone.
Pretty much everyone in this thing.
You have been part of your show.
So kudos for this.
Yeah, shout out to Ben Miller
for helping us get all these guests.
Yeah, Ethereum Foundation.
It's been great.
It's crazy.
It's been crazy.
We've seen some great, great progress with Scale School and we're going to keep on doing them.
But the tangent, 10 minutes in, over.
So guys, what the hell happened yesterday jack talk to me all right so so google released another
uh quantum attack like bitcoin will you know you'll lose all your bitcoin i mean they didn't
actually say that but that was the narrative like that went on x it was like everything's fucked
we're we're screwed.
Our ledgers are going to get hacked.
Anytime you've used a public address, oh, if you've used this address too much, it's
going to be hacked.
And it was all like, the funny thing is all the smart people you talk to, everyone's like,
yeah, of course, quantum resistance or quantum computing's improving, but it's always easier
to decrypt than encrypt.
And CZ said, hey, trust me,
like crypto is gonna be able to boost up its defenses
well in time because it's, again,
it's always easier to encrypt than decrypt.
But here's the high level.
And then Stan, we've got like,
we literally have a world expert on the call.
OK, on this topic. And so Stan is going to help us understand this.
But one thing I'll say is that Google's report, they basically were saying that instead of like 2030 something,
it's expedited to 2029 when the world needs to be at full quantum or post-quantum cryptography.
Because what they did is they were saying
it was gonna take 10 million physical qubits
to crack elliptical curve cryptography,
which we use in our threshold encryption
used all over in crypto.
Google's new report shows it can be done
with just 500,000 physical qubits.
So Stan, let's unpack this, buddy.
Like, you know, let's start high level.
Like we've talked about this before on the show.
I think a lot of people liked it.
Like, you know, what is quantum computing?
Maybe we start there.
I'll explain to you guys this time, you know, I'll try to come with very simple, simple ways to explain it many years ago when i was a researcher i was
actually doing research at stanford in quantum hall effect and my boss was a nobel prize winner
in physics and he's probably the most the strongest physicist in the us the most famous
his name is robert laflin and he is probably the kind of the world expert on everything in quantum mechanics and quantum computing.
So I'll try to explain in a very simple way what are the problems with quantum computers so everyone understands, you know, what to discuss.
Because yesterday it was crazy. Like some people like split said, yes, it's great. Some people said it's bullshit. Then Anatoly from Solana kind of interjected.
It was kind of interesting to view.
But let's just understand what we're discussing here.
So let's start with an analogy.
I hope everyone will understand.
There is this game.
I think it's called Tower in the States.
It's basically when you have...
It's like a party game.
Maybe, guys, you played this game.
When you have these wooden pieces and they form this tower.
Oh, Jenga.
It's like a tower of wooden pieces.
And then you have to pull a piece without actually destroying the tower.
So the tower doesn't fall.
Have you guys ever played this game?
Yeah. How's it called it Jenga. Jenga. Jenga. Yeah. So there's this game. And actually this game, it is a fantastic explanation
about problems with quantum computers. So let's say you have this game, right? And you kind
of, maybe you're playing it yourself, right? Just for simplicity. And you're like, okay, I'm going to be very careful. I'm going to like win the game. And you're like starting like pulling the pieces. And then you might be very careful, you're very slow. And you actually win. So, you win the game, none of the pieces fall, you know, the tower is not destroyed,
it just kind of goes down,
or it goes up, whichever way.
So let's say you win the game.
And then I come to you and I say,
you know, I'm going to make the tower 10 times larger.
So it's going to be like basically through the ceiling, right?
And the question is, is it going to... Can you do this like in 10 hours? If you did the first game
in an hour, you won't be able to do it in 10 hours. You actually, with most probability,
you will never be able to do it.
It will just always,
it just becomes incredibly complex.
So you make the tower 10 times higher
and it just becomes incredibly harder.
So it's an example of a problem
where it's not like the tower is 10 times higher
and it just takes 10 times more time.
And it's because the difficulty is increasing, right?
Right.
If you do that, then it doesn't equivalently make it one-tenth harder.
Because it's a compounding effect on the difficulty.
Yeah, it's a compounding effect.
We all have this feeling.
I think we know, it's just our intuition that we have these problems in life that it just becomes basically fucking difficult, right?
It's not like 10 times.
It's just...
Oh, no.
Oh, that's a...
I'm going to save...
Yeah, freeze.
Yeah, I'm going to pull him down just because it was a freeze.
Oh, okay, pull him back out.
There we go.
Hello. Someone, okay. Pull him back up. Yeah, okay. There we go. Hello.
Someone called me.
So it's difficult because it becomes like so difficult, right?
So fucking difficult.
And the reason why it becomes so difficult is because it's compounding effect on fragility.
Every single connection is fragile.
Every single connection, every piece standing
on another piece introduces more instability. And you have this kind of intuition that this
instability is that, like, they multiply. They don't add up. They, like, multiply and exponentiate.
So many unstable things actually basically at some point become super unstable, incredibly fragile.
The fragility like goes through the roof.
And so that's pretty much the story about quantum computers.
It's like people say, oh, you know, we need to basically to solve this problem, to break Bitcoin.
You need to at minimum have like 10,000 atoms. You have this 10,000 atoms,
you levitate them in magnetic field, because they cannot touch anything, so you need to
levitate them in the magnetic field. They need to actually float in vacuum. And then you freeze the 10,000 atoms
to pretty much zero temperature, almost zero.
It's like below liquid helium.
So the temperature needs to be zero.
They need to be old levitating, 10,000 atoms
levitating in a magnetic field.
And even if one of them falls,
basically the entire thing is destroyed.
And then if you are able to achieve this, levitate,
and then you'd like to form some kind of like a checkboard
pattern, maybe like two dimensional.
So they have to be ordered.
In the simplest case, they have to be
like in the rectangular order or square order,
like whatever, it's 10,000.
It's like 100 by 100.
So you need to be able to do it.
And even if one of them falls, the entire thing just dies.
So it's what people at Google are saying.
They can do this now with like 10 atoms.
But they need to, so they need to, they can limit 10 atoms.
And kind of, and then these 10 atoms, very roughly,
you can do like 2 plus 2 is 4.
Stan, is each of those atoms a qubit that you're talking about?
Yeah, each of the atoms, let me explain why it's a qubit.
It's very simple.
It's actually electrons or atoms.
Some of them are like rotating.
They have something which is called spin.
They are almost like rotating.
So they can rotate up or rotate down.
And if they rotate up the magnetic field,
then it's one.
And if they rotate in the opposite direction
to the magnetic field, like this way, point this way,
it's zero, one is zero.
So that's why it's called qubit, because it's a bit.
But because they are in quantum state,
they're not up, they're not down,
but they're kind of up and down in all possible combinations,
like the quantum Schroeder-Racket stuff, they're like whatever.
So they're in this quantum world that they're in up and down,
and then they need to build, like, you need to levitate a thousand of them.
It's called cold atoms, right?
And they're qubits.
And that's what you have to do
experimentally you need to levitate them then you need to keep them in the state 10 000 then you
need to write information into them like whatever like your your bit your key the key for your
bitcoin you need to like write them into that some of them need to be as you need to like put some of
them up some of them down and then you you actually then
they start interacting kind of flipping and then they actually solve the problem and then you also
need to connect them in in some ways some of them need to interact with each other like also put
some types of like think about this like some strings between them so like like elastic strings
so like kind of start interacting so you need to build the system and there are details how you build the system, but it's basically
10,000 atoms, levitating in a vacuum. You need to put each of them initially up and down,
and then you have to keep them from getting destroyed by life, essentially, by noise,
anything. It's the atoms, they're tiny, right?
And then once they're done, you need to be able to read again each of them,
the information from each of them, and then that will be the result.
That will be the key that you break, right?
So that's actually what needs to be achieved.
And the question is, what can they do now?
Okay, they can do it with like 10 atoms, maybe like 50, maybe 100.
But the complexity is just, this is the example of this, you know, the puzzle that we just discussed.
The complexity is just that going from 100 to 10,000 is not like, the problem is not a thousand times harder.
It's just like fucking harder basically.
So like, no one knows like, you know,
it's just incredibly hard.
So Stan, let's talk, I got another question for you.
Okay, so I was just asking, which by the way,
we're gonna have to do a side track of this answer in a minute, a tangent, which by the way, we're going to have to do a sidetrack of this answer
in a minute, a tangent.
But it was saying, so qubits, one, they have like superposition, which Stan was saying
they can be zero and one at the same time.
It allows a quantum computer to explore a massive number of possibilities simultaneously.
That makes sense.
But here's one thing that doesn't make any sense to me.
Entanglement, the telepathy state. Now imagine you, let's say you have two spinning coins and
once they're entangled, they become supernaturally linked. If one lands on its head in one part of
the world, no matter where in the universe the other one is, it will land on its tail, on tails.
They share information instantly, bypassing speed limits of normal
computers how does that work i don't even that sounds like magic to me it sounds like some like
iron man tony stark stuff um you know what what what is that yeah so basically you know that's
actually interesting question you know i i probably you probably know Einstein never accepted quantum mechanics
in the way currently explained.
So he said, Einstein, that nature doesn't throw dice.
So he was exactly asking questions that you're asking, Jack.
There are some things in the current version of quantum mechanics.
There are several problems.
Jack, Einstein, who knows the difference?
Yeah, and that's the thing,
actually there's another theory,
which is theory of gravity,
which was specified by Newton, Isaac Newton,
and then it was corrected by Einstein.
Einstein also contributed to the theory of gravity.
And it turns out that theory of gravity. And it turns out that the theory of gravity,
the mathematical contradictions between quantum mechanics and the theory of gravity,
so this problem was never solved. And there was this entire thing about string theory
that people, again, were not able to do. So there are some... This actually touches on things that
are still unknown. There are things where the physical loss, because the experiment
is incredibly hard to do. So about this teleportation, the question that you're asking,
Jack, experimentally, they have shown that this exists on the distances pretty much similar to
the distance between atoms. So it's not like it has been experimentally proven on a human distance you can teleport yourself somewhere.
When they say teleporting, it means that experimentally you can actually show that these things work,
but the distances are tiny, like nano distances. The question is what happens with distances larger?
No one knows because the experiments are, again, like incredibly hard to do because to do an experiment even at the level of a meter,
you would need to... It's too brittle and there are so many theories.
Like I remember when I was at Stanford, there were so many theories about what happens at like quantum gravity,
how the gravity interacts with quantum mechanics.
The problem is that people have all different mathematics.
There's no experiments.
Usually in physics, you need to have an experiment,
and then you kind of have a theory that explains.
But in this case, I mean, so the good thing, actually,
by the way, about quantum computers,
is that it's just investment in physics.
So there's an interesting possibility that these guys, like from Google,
when they do these experiments with quantum computing, they can actually uncover new laws of physics.
Just because it just requires so much investment to study the things, and as a side event, they can just find something interesting.
interesting, right? Maybe something about the teleportation, the question that you're asking.
Maybe something about the teleportation, the question that you're asking.
But again, the current level of knowledge,
all of the things people say, they only exist at nanometers.
And at large distances, they actually contradict the theory of
gravity. There's a mathematical contradiction.
So it's a goal. Okay, here's another
question for you. So the other two things like observation or the collapse.
Okay, so I'm saying as soon as you look at the qubit
to see what's happening, it just stops spinning
and it snaps back into regular zero or one decoherence.
And this is the Jenga thing.
It says this is why quantum computers are so hard to build.
They have to do will work
while the coins are still spinning without anyone looking at them or ruining the magic so that's the
Jenga it just gets more and more difficult the more of them you have to add to the mix is that
absolutely true this is kind of basically you have the zynga game but imagine that these pieces you
put the pieces and then you have to not touch them
in any tiny way for a long time because any touch even tiny measurements anything can interfere
and then and then and that's kind of that's the explanation why most people that do physics
think that it might take a thousand years. No one, it's incredibly pro.
I mean, I remember when I was a physicist,
people said always about the thermonuclear energy,
like, or if we can build this thermonuclear reactor,
we can solve world's energy problem
because there's so much deuterium in the water,
in the ocean water.
You can just basically,
if you could control
thermonuclear reaction, then there would be energy free for everyone. And for about like now 50 years,
more than 50 years, people were trying to build this reactor. It's very simpler. Building a
thermonuclear reactor is where people know how to do it, need to levitate like in the plasma and
magnetic field and stuff. It's easier than quantum computer.
But still, we don't have thermonuclear energy.
So I would bet actually that thermonuclear energy would actually exist before quantum computers
because it seems to be a simple problem for physicists.
But that's why I think it's kind of...
Well, actually, that's what Anatoly said when these guys tweeted yesterday.
Anatoly, I think, had a very measured tweet
where that's how he responded.
Actually, I was interested in that he responded
basically saying very much the same.
That is great stuff,
but it's up to physics to do the thing.
And it doesn't seem to be like the way because
these guys were like like they're doing like curves and they're saying okay we
have hundred atoms now let's just extrapolate when are you going to have
ten thousand atoms whatever right but you can't extrapolate it's not like it's
just like you know is it like it's just incredibly hard to do 10,000 compared to 100, right?
They got it from 10 million.
And this study said, hey, we can do it 500,000.
What you're saying is, and they're saying now we got to be ready by 2029.
You're saying that's kind of BS.
It's like there's...
You cannot work that line.
They just bring some symmetrical line.
And they say, okay, now we hit one, we had 10, we had 100,
when are we going to have 10,000?
Just trying to extrapolate.
But because the problem, because so much harder,
you cannot extrapolate like this.
And the guy, I mean, it's nice.
They know nice people at Ethereum Foundation, Justin Drake.
He actually then tweets and says,
I'm not an expert in
quantum computing,
but he thinks probably that if he
can just draw the line, he can predict
how the future is going to happen.
It's just like, it's fun.
And actually...
Did you see also that they, instead of
publishing the actual
algorithms or how they did it, they published a zero-know actual algorithms or how they did it,
they published a zero knowledge proof to prove they did it. Did you see that? That was like,
I think that makes me think even that this is a group of people who they're paid researchers by
Google. They're just doing all this research and they're like, let's show our bosses that we're
doing that we're worth this million dollar a year per person investment.
Let's say that we have this great thing.
And like, it seems a little bit of like, I'm sure they did great work.
I don't want to take, you know, I'm sure really smart people said they're going to do, but
they're probably having an optimistic view on where things are going because they're
incentivized to.
Yeah.
And I used to be a scientist and it's very hard to make money or get grants.
So people are trying to usually, I think there's some abstract mathematics and then you need
to be able to fund it.
So I'm not against, like people, I know people doing all the time.
They say, okay, we're going to do this and this and boil the ocean.
Yeah. But it's fine fine if someone invests they're like let's scare everybody that's what it feels like because and the other thing that you need to look at is the cost as well you know there's
100 to 200 quantum computers in the world right now even in three years time the cost of maintaining and
even operating a quantum computer isn't going to be going down tremendously and i assume similar to
the development cycle of of computers now that finding ways to create a consumer model is almost going to be
more expensive than a scientific one when you have to get it into a form factor and things like that
so you're not going to see you know crypto crypto joe with a quantum computer hacking into your wallet. Yeah, yeah.
By the way, there's like an interesting analogy of,
or like not analogy,
but it's like a situational thing that's happening.
Stan and I talk about this a lot. The cost of hacking things now,
it's just, it's been fully democratized.
You can get like somebody who's, you know,
a pretty decent engineer with AI
that before would have taken a brilliant engineer
10,000 hours to hack something, okay?
Now an average engineer can hack something
in hundreds of hours,
but that doesn't really translate over to quantum
because of cost of execution expectations really hard, right?
Yeah, I can tell you a funny story about this. I mean, there was even a bigger scare.
But the scare was that I think like 10 years ago or 15 years ago, I don't remember, there
was some people building a big accelerator in Switzerland, the Saturn. There is this
thing which is called Higgs boson,
which is like a particle which takes lots of energy.
It's just the particle that people knew.
There wasn't the mathematics, but to create this particle,
you just need so much energy.
And they were building this boson collider, hard-lord collider.
And so they were trying to actually prove, ultimately,
they actually created the particle, Higgs boson. But there were people saying that we don't know it's gonna make a black
hole yeah they even still collapse remember this stuff right which actually i think was like a
legitimate legitimate scare how do you know it's not gonna collapse no one had energy like this before right so there are some people saying okay this this was like i think
like this must have been like 20 years ago because i was in uh like second or third grade for
america and i remember they said it was at like 12 30 uk time and everyone was just watching the
clock like everyone in our cafeteria
at lunch time were watching this was watching this clock waiting for the earth to be swallowed up by
a black hole it was incredible but it's mostly the way not maybe just like a 10 percent chance
you're just it's just gone you're don't worry nothing to
worry about anymore exactly yeah but but actually i would like to bring up this important thought
that actually if the universe can collapse this way this time because by defect by the way it's
actually way more dangerous because how do we know the universe won't teleport no one like like jack said we can teleport right
just the same argument no one ever had this quantum computer this 10 000 atoms
with system who knows what's going to happen we're caring about like bitcoin like spider-man
like going these different different things
about bitcoin with the new you can teleport
when can teleport somewhere else like you know it's uh having the same argument so that's actually
another argument why i mean why is it so important uh bitcoin if they build the thing or maybe it
will actually do so many other things that bitcoin is not even important, you know, having the other things.
Let me ask you this.
Like, even just talking about this stuff makes me realize
that we know so little about the universe,
about physics, about technology.
It seems like we're like ants still.
Is your perspective of someone who really knows this
stuff how how far are we along a curve are we like cavemen still like what's going on
very much i can tell you another story which was really fun when i was at stanford the theory of
gravitation so no one knows how how gravitation works so. So there was one person who said that you can make an experiment and create like a micro black hole.
You just need to have two very, very like heavy spheres.
And just bring them very close together.
And due to gravitation between two spheres,
there will be this micro black holes.
And there was a Stanford gravitation experiment.
You can look it up.
Actually, it was the first time in the theory
where people actually took these two very heavy bodies
and brought them together close.
And actually, they were able to see them attracting each other,
which is a tiny effect. But they were able to see them attracting each other which is a tiny effect
but they were able to measure this and and so but then no there were no black holes created
but so definitely that's definitely true we don't know much about the universe and from this
perspective i think elon musk is correct in a sense that you know we do need to have some kind
of a kind of a future trajectory where,
because it's really interesting what's out there and like, and we cannot just keep on being
restricted to our planet. And it's just very interesting to understand like what's going on
in the universe.
It makes me realize like space travel, everyone's like, oh, we're this many light years away. That's
assuming you're going from point A to point B. It seems like the real way to get there everyone's like, oh, we're this many light years away. That's assuming you're
going from point A to point B. It seems like the real way to get there is to like,
through some sort of like black hole quantum reality, like, you know, teleportation effectively
is, which that's, yeah, I mean, that's, that's wild stuff. All I gotta say, it's science fiction,
but it sounds like we're, you know, in the next 20, 30 years, we're wild stuff. All I gotta say. It's science fiction, but it sounds like
in the next 20, 30 years,
we're gonna know a lot more.
But it is that theory of, you know,
matter cannot be destroyed, right?
Matter itself can only be transitioned into something else.
So the question of what is inside a black hole because matter
can't be destroyed so it has it has to go somewhere and do something right yeah yeah
totally then there are many things which i think that some some things people were able to figure
out using new telescopes so people starting having this like Hubble, there are many actually theories that were like confirmed.
People know now way more about black holes,
about things like galacticas and stuff.
So there is actually progress.
But I can tell you this interesting thing about
like speed of light, Jack said, you know,
like moving to a different star.
My boss at Stanford had the theory that, you know like moving to a different star my boss at stanford had the theory that you
know einstein said that that nothing can move faster than speed of light and that's a problem
because if you want to move to another star it takes like five years to even the closest star
even if you go at speed of light but the point is that no one ever checked this for like a heavy
bodies so the experiments, people take like electron
and they're trying to accelerate it in the accelerator
and kind of goes to the speed of light
and stops accelerating.
But my boss had the theory that when the bodies become
massive, we don't know what's going to happen.
Maybe this is not true.
And you actually can accelerate things faster
than with the speed of light.
So there's absolutely no experiment ever
done saying that you cannot move to a different star like fast it's just a theory which was
produced by einstein and einstein was a guy living like hundred years ago imaging right and so we
know very little about the universe and And actually, maybe we'll be,
maybe we'll be able to go really fast.
We may be able to go to another star.
So actually,
there's like argument that we should be able to do it
because otherwise,
why was the point having all of the stars?
Like, it does look extremely pessimistic
to think that we can't do this.
Having it, we never even do this having it we never tried
though eidstein said we cannot do it and like so okay i'm gonna flip this a little bit okay
we're gonna go to the next chapter here so assume these google guys are right let and they're not
just trying to get a bunch of money to build quantum resistance products which they're not just trying to get a bunch of money to build quantum resistance products, which they're probably doing, but let's assume they're writing in like quantum resistance
in three years. How would you do that? Can you even use any of the current cryptographic models?
Do the models have to just get even more complicated? How do you combat this in three years if all of a sudden
it's a mandate you actually need it?
Because it's not just crypto
probably the most secure thing because it's got
all these multi-parties
you know, a bank that's just like
cryptography, you know, around
one system, right? It's even easier to
hack Bank of America, right?
Yeah, I feel
the simplest way guys, actually the simplest way to do it, you could just use Bitcoin as easy, just have multiple accounts, could like quantum computer exists and costs 100 million dollars or 10 million dollars to break uh one single wallet then essentially you
can just split your money if you have more than 10 million dollars you split your money like 100
wallets and then you just make it economically infeasible because what's the point for them like you know spending and and you know
you know what else you know with with uh confidential transactions how's anyone gonna
know what wallet transferring all the money around yeah exactly i'm trying to do a bite v2 plug
so so the richer people will just like you you know, basically like split their like, which is trivial, like split their money in like in smaller chunks.
That would be probably the easiest way.
It's not like there's a master code they can crack at the like, at like validator level.
validator level it's it's they need to have some isolated wallet to say okay we have the public
key and we have the public key did this things this many times they can gather other evidence
and then you know but then it will cost so much freaking money yeah yeah people at the
zero foundations have some money maybe maybe vitalik cares maybe he's like 400 million i know people
say like i think if even vitalik has multiple wallets maybe we just should call vitalik and
tell him to split his wallets and then maybe that's kind of call ethereum foundation and tell
guys you know you have so much money you just put your wallets because for ordinary people you know
if you have like a thousand dollars in a
bitcoin wallet who's gonna like like quantum computer to like break your
break your wallet what about like you know regular cryptography like things that are not regular but
non non-crypto industry like like things like octa and things that banks are using to secure
like things like Okta and things that banks are using to secure passwords and identity and money
in a traditional sense? I think it's a really interesting question. I think this weird thing
about quantum computers that there was a article many years ago, like 30 years ago, there was a person, his last name was Schnorr, and he actually
has shown that you can break essentially DSA, CDSA, the particular algorithms that are used
in Bitcoin in particular, you can break them. But this was only for CDSA and DSA and these algorithms.
And pretty much all of other algorithms, I would expect, anyone would expect, right,
that later there would be other papers saying, okay, now you can break this, you can break that.
But this never happened.
So another really interesting thing about this entire field is the only thing that, even when we build this, like, 10,000 atoms, the only thing we can do is break
ecdsa and like dsa and pretty much move to anything else and there's no way to do it,
you don't know how to run this algorithm. So this computer, this quantum computer,
another thing about it, it's not only like hard to build like but it's not it's very specific it's
not like you can run any software on it or do anything if you just like literally just had
layers of rsa and rsa and you just have like eight layers of it and it makes it eight times
more expensive to hack each one and then you change it changes like it's like time and cost are the factors you just you could
you don't even need new tech you just need either divide things in multiple walls or have multiple
walls to battle they get through totally there are low tech solutions i think that would be
basically if it ever happens there would be low tech solutions which could be implemented like
there would be low-tech solutions, which could be implemented,
like probably like a hot fix.
And the problem about this quantum computer is like literally wired.
So if you basically just change the algorithm a little,
it's not like software you can run on it.
All this stuff is like hardware coded.
So it can do a particular thing.
If you tweak the algorithm to do a little bit different way, they will have to redo the
quantum computer. So just tweaking things and just issuing a hot fix or changing algorithms.
So I think that another important subject, which I think is really important, these two papers,
they were not peer reviewed. Thereed, right? There is the standard
in academic science that if you publish a paper, you have to submit it to a journal
and they have to be a review. And this is something which is called scientific soundness,
right? You cannot just make statements. There's like another person, an independent person,
and you kind of go back and forth and the person, until the person accepts your paper, you cannot publish, right?
So it's biomedical.
Otherwise, people can just publish everything, right?
So this research needs to be peer-reviewed.
And these guys, they just basically tweeted these papers.
There was no peer review.
Not the Google guys, not the Ethereum Foundation guys. There was no peer review. Not the Google guys. Not the Ethereum Foundation guys.
There was no peer review.
So it was really
no criticism.
And that's another...
I have a big problem with this one because the question
is if the people at the Ethereum
Foundation position themselves as
scientists, right?
I understand that, okay,
science needs money. We want maybe to overhype something, but we cannot overhype things which are not true,
right? There has to be some review, and that's not, another problem I have is two papers,
they just tweeted. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear that, yeah. But they have a ZK proof,
I mean, ZK knows everything. I want to go back to something that jack said on like
you know finding alternate ways for encryption i'm not sure if you guys knew this but cloudflare
how they do their encryption is an aspect of it they have in their office a wall of a hundred lava lamps and a camera and their encryption is
based off of a very very small specific little square of this lava of these this wall of lava
lamps and it changes positions and it will never repeat randomness yes realistically certified randomness
is and it's like I feel like we you know we could be seeing more more things like that you know enter
into the and it's high tech like Stan said that's the that's the the patch fix yeah that's actually
absolutely great because it turns out that pretty much any cryptographic system depends on randomness.
If your key is not random, then I can guess it, right?
So whatever you try and protect with your key needs to be random.
And when I was running a security lab for the Department of Commerce, then we had security reviews of cryptographic systems.
And one of the hardest reviews was always the random number generator. There were many, many, many huge commercial companies that couldn't generate random numbers and got hacked because of that.
It was one of the simplest ways because people didn't pay attention to how predictable their number is. In terms of, the funny thing is that lava lamp is incredibly good
at generating random numbers because there are so many physical processes going on.
It's such a complicated system.
And there is one interesting thing which is called turbulence.
If you have like water or you have air or you have pretty much anything,
you kind of start hitting it or doing something to it.
And at some point, you have these tiny things
like rotating.
It's called turbulence.
That's why the planes have turbulence, right?
But turbulence is like these tiny, tiny things rotating,
interacting with each other and other tiny things.
And they're just incredibly hard to predict.
Like this entire thing is actually
at the microscopic layer level.
It's very hard even to understand how they interact with small things.
That's why lava lamps are incredibly good source of randomness, actually.
And for chips for ASICs, like Intel, for instance,
there has always been a problem how to generate randomness.
Now some of the Intel chips generate randomness based on temperature.
So they have something hot inside and kind of start behaving in a jerky way.
And the temperature fluctuates.
You manipulate the Google S controller to then...
Yeah, 100% you can like there is no such that like stan correct
me if i'm wrong but there is no such thing as a truly random number correct it is it is if you
were to pinpoint the exact moment like let's say you're playing like video blackjack hypothetically
right and it's an rng random number that the card comes to you.
If you can replicate the exact same setting,
nanosecond that you press deal,
you will get the exact same card.
If you can-
Absolutely, absolutely.
And Ben, but actually that's,
we make a really good point
because that's actually,
many people don't understand that security is not,
it's not never perfect. It's understand that security is not it's not never
perfect it's always about investment so it's not like you're saying or i'm generating a perfectly
random number no one can predict you basically what you need to do is generate a random number
which will be like a billion dollars to predict so and that's why like a lava lamp it just it
becomes like really expensive to analyze it or Another example is, guys, you probably know like lotteries, they have this like air-based random number generators where you have this spheres and there's like air and spheres like rotating, rotating, rotating.
And then they like drop.
And then like a woman comes like nice looking and like shows the numbers.
Oh, man.
But that's actually also turbulence, right?
All this air rotating and rotating.
And then you have the numbers.
But it's a very good point that they're never random.
But if you have them very complex, then it's very hard to break, essentially.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Wow. break essentially yeah yeah yeah yeah my favorite my favorite thing was because i saw a i was
watching a video on this idea that it's realistically impossible to have a deck of cards
that are shuffled and are in the same order it's like one to the google 10 right it's just it's
that exponential number of variations that come into it and i i was
and it was when like byte was starting and everything was starting and i was like damn it
would be really interesting if you could find a way to create like an encryption a piece of
encryption that is based off of a deck of 52 cards but unfortunately you run into the same issue, which is RNG. It's not actually random.
You would need somebody to specifically, in real life,
shuffle a deck of cards and then show them.
You know what?
I feel like I would, if I was a cryptographer,
I would love being on the encryption team.
Like, oh, let's come up with this weird shit that people do. I would hate being on the encryption team. Like, oh, let's come up with this weird shit.
I would hate being on the decryption team.
That sounds like a lot of hard work.
Okay, then you got to understand all this.
I mean, that's actually, I spent all my life in cryptography.
It's just incredibly interesting.
You know, that's actually why I kind of moved into crypto cryptography in the first place
It's really fun. You know, like all of the things encrypting decrypting
I think it's just people like like hiding things
people from other people
You know, it's fun. I interviewed one of the first blogs we ever did at scale. This is like a 2018
I did a like a written interview with Stan,
we published on the blog.
I was like, how did you get into cryptography?
It was kind of like the whole thing.
And Stan has a really cool story about Sherlock Holmes.
You should tell them, Stan.
Yeah, actually, when I was a child,
I read the books of Sherlock Holmes.
And in one of the books, Sherlock Holmes,
the bad guy starts encrypting and the good guy decrypts.
And essentially, it's kind of encryption when you replace one letter with another.
You have like a table, letter A replaces letter C. So you kind of garble the letters, but you can ungarble when you do the opposite, like replacement.
And I got so excited. I was probably five years old.
I did this on paper.
Kind of got me really interested in cryptography.
And I can tell you another interesting thing.
When I was at Stanford, I'm walking on campus,
and I see this kind of interesting person,
like a guy with long hair, with a dog,
like a hippie guy, like older hippie guy,
and an older hippie woman.
And I'm like asking, who is this person? Because the guy's walking around the campus like a hippie guy, like older hippie guy and an older hippie woman. And I'm like asking, who is this person?
Because the guy's like walking like around the campus like a hippie.
Like you're basically hippie on the university campus. And they say, okay, this is a guy, his name is Winfried Diffie.
And it's Winfried Diffie of Diffie Hellman.
And they tell me this incredible story that there was this hippie guy, he was a young hippie guy,
and she was a young hippie woman.
And they wanted people to be able to encrypt things
to protect them against government.
And they walked bare feet to Stanford campus
when they were young, like in the 60s.
And they met this guy, the other guy, his name was Hellman,
professor of computer science or mathematics, I think.
And they came up together with this algorithm,
Diffie Hellman, which kind of let people do this encryption,
public-private encryption.
And then there was an incredible story
of them fighting the government.
They almost went to jail.
They got totally prohibited.
The CIA, the NSA, all of these government engines went after them, pressured them just not to release the algorithm because the government, there are books written about this. it was always like that. The more crypto kind of pushes the frontier of what can be protected or private,
the more the government comes after you.
So that's kind of scary.
It was always scary for me, literally,
of part of being in crypto.
When I worked at a government lab, I wasn't scared.
But when I moved to my black molex startups, there was this scare, like, you know, if the government goes after you.
So that's kind of a way where people go to crypto.
They're always facing this.
Yeah.
And it's this thing where governments are usually scared.
And so they try to, like, stifle innovation and throw people in jail.
And then eventually they use it themselves.
Yeah.
We could use this.
We need this for our nuclear codes.
Oh, we need this for our banking system.
Like, okay, actually, here's a grant.
Prediction markets, right?
Like prediction markets now, right?
Like they are going after prediction markets.
So if you are doing prediction markets, it's a great industry now but government goes comes after them yeah and in the future they're going to be like okay let's run a
prediction market so we can win this hack this thing and like get in the brains of these people
like you know they say you know it's funny i saw this thing uh someone writing a like a negative
post about prediction markets they're like hey prediction markets are supposed to be like truth
engines like you want to know something the best way is that lots of people,
it's like wisdom of crowds are competing with their money and you get like insights, right?
That's the, that's this whole premise of like prediction markets as truth engines.
But then what they're saying is like, Hey, the absolute vast majority, unless it's a major
like presidential election is all just sports betting.
It's basically unregulated sports betting.
Just bet on sports without having to go any, you know, you can be in the state of California.
You can be all these places where you can't bet on sports.
And it's like, you know, sadly, it's true.
But hopefully, you know, as prediction market gets more, you know, mainstream, then you start getting truth in different areas.
It's understandable also.
It's understandable that the society might not like some of the things.
But there's always this thing about if you can't control it.
I understand why, like in this example of the defigelable algorithm, I understand why the government didn't want to do it.
Because it makes some things harder,
like going after criminals, right?
If criminals encrypt,
definitely it becomes harder to go after them,
but it's inevitable.
And very much like this prediction markets,
it's always like, okay, the government,
like here in Portugal, they blocked,
I cannot access the website of Palimarket, because the government of Portugal, after they had the government, like here in Portugal, they blocked. I cannot access the website of Polymarket
because the government of Portugal,
after they had elections, presidential elections, like last month,
and they blocked Polymarket after it
because there was all of this Polymarket betting.
But it's just the website.
I can still, on Ethereum, I can go around the website
and just do smart contracts.
So it's always, yeah, it's understandable.
The society doesn't like it, but it's inevitable.
You can like outlaw this, but people will still do it.
They will just, you know, so it's.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I got a funny AI story here.
Tangent.
I was, I was talking to AI saying, hey, help me give understanding of this
qubits and quantum resistance and the Google thing. And that's what I was reading earlier.
But what I said was I was reading this thing on how to hack AI. You give it different prompts, so you can like gaslight and say, Hey, we talked about this yesterday. And then it
tries to give you much better answers or, Hey, I'm giving this speech. And so I said, Hey,
I'm giving a speech at a pack gym. Cause in America, like lots of like speeches and stuff,
an auditorium is just a gym. It's like a basketball court that they have all these seats in. And
then it assumed I was like thinking about like a gym and it said,
okay, imagine you're standing on the weight bench and the music's turned up.
Say, listen up. You know that heavy, you know,
where your Bitcoin's held it'd take a billion years for a normal computer to
break it down.
Well, Google just dropped a report this week and the news is heavy.
We're just got a lot lighter. And it's like, well, Google just dropped a report this week and the news is heavy. We're just got a lot lighter.
And it's like, anyways, like gym analogies.
And I was like, hey, no, I didn't mean I'm in an auditorium, not just the gym.
Like, let's pivot from the sweat and kettlebells vibe into something.
It's just AI will just is humorous sometimes.
Yeah, it's humorous.
Don't tell me. just is humorous sometimes yeah it's humorous it's um like hey i'm gonna go talk to my bros and in between i want to be able to drop some knowledge
on quantum resistance that is that that is the thing that i have enjoyed about ai recent well
not recently over the past couple of months,
is being able to, you know, add in those fine tunings, right?
Like, if you go into settings, pretty much into any of them,
you can, like, add pre-context.
Like, hey, the questions that I'm going to ask you are in relation to this.
Please provide them in this answer.
And it definitely helps cut that out or go to the one I think it's rock you can just tell him to be a dick to you and
he's just an absolute asshole yeah that's that's hilarious this is how like memes get started it's
like I think pretty like this would be a funny meme you just tell ai answer as if
you're talking to your gym bros we're at the gym you just get all these cheesy answers
gym bros who use their ai you know jim bros asking ai a question
oh dude crazy crazy so i i guess like in consensus um not the event um in conclusion um
our bitcoin's fine i don't know any the people that own bitcoin sounds like it sounds like it
it sounds like this is a little bit of like fear-mongering to drive more research and you know that's marketing you know stan's analogy about the jinga set
with that's 10 times taller it's not 10 times harder it's probably a thousand times harder
right yeah totally and that's like you know if you have like if you have like 10 million dollars in a single bitcoin wallet we have this engineer at scale
his name is d2 and he has this you know notion of anal crypto analysis if if you have 10 million
dollars in a single bitcoin wallet someone can someone can steal you steal you kidnap you and
get the the key in an easy way.
So I think it doesn't make sense to have the million dollars in a single wallet
anyway. So if people, I think if people want to protect,
they can just like split their, their wallets. Yeah.
But this is kind of a secure way anyway,
because any single key can be lost and probably quantum computer will be the
last one to steal your key. There are many, many ways to do it in a simpler way.
And it's like, you know, one of the interesting things about crypto is like the harder something is to like decipher or like you make it to decipher, the harder it is to make it usable.
Like I used to use this analogy saying, hey, guess what?
It'd be really secure if we had like an entire army guarding like a
hundred thousand pound vault door. It's going to be pretty secure. Okay. But let's say you want to
use that like 18 times a day to go like pay for things online. Not going to work, right? Like,
and so the level of like, so basically if you want good user experience, you need to have lighter security.
And hey, if I want to access and send my Bitcoin to someone, but I have to
go get a thousand wallets, like, yeah, it's going to be secure. But you know, but that's kind of,
I think Stan and I always had this analogy too, of like, you have this like stuff that you don't
want to access, that's really secure. And then your other stuff, it can be less secure because
you want to use it
people have i think cold wallet is a great if you have like cold wallet then it's a many people do it and it's a great way to do things so people that have lots of crypto
can just most of their crypto can be like in some safe place doesn't have to be
immediately available and definitely having multiple wallets it makes sense
i think now with hardware wallets like ledger and everything it becomes really simpler and so
there are many it's just regular security practices just to take care of your keys you
know make sure you don't write your uh recovery phrase on a piece of paper.
Don't do this.
It's just much more important advice
than think about quantum computers.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Well, this has been fun.
I love learning from Stan.
Stan has a good way of being able to describe things
to normal people.
Also Stan, you can tell Stan's a smart guy.
He was reading Sherlock Holmes when he was five years old.
Like, that's pretty cool.
I've got some kids, and they're not reading Sherlock Holmes.
They've never read Sherlock Holmes when they're five.
That's interesting, actually.
You know, I think actually I have some British in me
because I read Sherlock Holmes multiple times.
So if you guys ever read Sherlock Holmes,
it's a great book and it's kind of
all of this British
irony. There's lots of irony
in the book and British culture.
So I really
enjoy this type of ironic
thinking that this book represents.
I've watched all
the Sherlock movies. By the way, Young
Sherlock, if you're watching,
have you seen Young Sherlock?
Yeah, that's fantastic.
That's fantastic.
Yeah, it's on Amazon Prime now.
And I think it's Guy Ritchie did it.
And he did the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock's.
But it's a new series.
Good.
I just watched the first two episodes last night.
Really good.
Also, Dick, I can argue argue this is one of the best textbooks
on logic, right? How to teach
people logic. It can be
very useful if you want to teach someone
logic.
They help to develop
brains. The book, I think, is really
helpful also to learn things.
Yeah, that's cool.
Awesome. Good stuff. helpful so to learn things yeah that's cool awesome good stuff well man this was
a this was a good one like your bitcoins you don't have to split into a thousand
wallets yet okay instead give your Bitcoin to a thousand AI agents on Scale on Base
and let them hold it all for you.
Slug.
Guys.
Scale on Base privacy.
Let's go.
Be on the lookout next week for us to bring you something exciting as well
with regards to Scale on Base and Byte V2.
Who knows what's coming next?
Guys, super super super fun stan love love love listening to you when you you break all of this stuff down every whenever we have one of these at
night i always listen to like like science youtube videos and stuff like yeah for example
like like that that that lava lamp one was from a YouTube video. Like one day after Stan had done like a breakdown on stuff.
So, you know, incredible.
But yeah, pleasure as always.
Hanging out, gentlemen.
And next week, ooh, what do you guys want to yap about next week?
You know, I say if anyone has any ideas, you're listening, tell us, uh, we usually we're looking to cherry pick some
recent news, things that are trending that people want to
learn about. But if, you know, I think we should talk a little
bit more about, uh, privacy and bite.
Yeah. It's a big subject. We can talk about this report
because the report that was released yesterday, you know,
there was a huge thing and then there was lots of interest to privacy now.
I think the market is coming back to privacy.
So that's really interesting to discuss.
And if you think about it,
it's like it is the next frontier.
Like what's gonna make crypto more usable,
not, you know, being able to prove something happened
on chain without disclosing the information to everybody
like that's that's where we need to go 100 100 well let's crack that egg open next week
guys thank you so much for joining me and thank you to everyone for tuning in see you next week
