DEMON 🃏

If you own crypto, this is genuinely scary. A top bitcoin researcher, who actively works at the Ethereum foundation, is telling us to move our crypto to a bunker. He thinks there is now a reasonable possibility that superhuman AI discovers a way to break the cryptography securing Bitcoin and Ethereum before quantum computers do. That sounds insane, but there’s some important context. Bitcoin and Ethereum rely heavily on ECDSA. At a very basic level, your wallet has a private key, and mathematics allows you to derive a public key from it. Going forward is easy. Going backward and figuring out the private key from the public information is considered effectively impossible. A huge amount of crypto security rests on that assumption. Drake is worried that AI could discover some completely new mathematical shortcut that changes it. Why is he worried about this now? AI has made some pretty ridiculous advances in mathematics this year. Earlier this year, an OpenAI model autonomously disproved a famous Erdős conjecture dating back around 80 years, using mathematical techniques researchers hadn’t expected. Then, literally the day before Drake made this post, OpenAI released hundreds of AI-generated mathematical results across hundreds of problem families. One of those results broke through a longstanding assumption involving the complexity of integer multiplication. That does NOT mean AI broke ECDSA. It didn’t. The signal is that AI is increasingly demonstrating an ability to find novel approaches to mathematical problems humans have studied for decades. At the same time, researchers have been making progress on the other threat: quantum computers. Estimates for the resources required to attack elliptic-curve cryptography have fallen significantly, and researchers, including Drake himself, have been working on making those attacks more efficient. So his concern is basically: What if everyone is preparing for quantum computers to eventually break ECDSA, but superhuman AI discovers a mathematical shortcut first? That’s the part he thinks the crypto industry isn't sufficiently prepared for. If ECDSA were efficiently broken, the consequences could obviously be catastrophic. Depending on the attack and what information an address has exposed, an attacker could potentially recover private keys and steal funds. Drake isn't saying this has happened. He isn't even saying it's definitely going to happen. He's saying that recent AI progress has moved the probability from something he could comfortably ignore to something worth preparing for. His recommendation is surprisingly simple. If you're a major holder, exchange, custodian, ETF, treasury, etc., consider moving assets from heavily used addresses into fresh addresses that have never signed a transaction. Then don't use those addresses. That limits the cryptographic information you've exposed and potentially buys you additional protection if a vulnerability is suddenly discovered. For the really large players, he thinks the industry should begin preparing to move beyond ECDSA entirely and toward post-quantum / hash-based cryptography. The downside is enormous, the precautions are relatively cheap, and AI progress is moving fast enough that waiting until an attack exists may be too late. He thinks it's now reasonable to consider the possibility that ECDSA could break before AGI/Q-Day, potentially on a timeline of months rather than years. Nothing publicly known can currently do this. But his argument is essentially: For decades we've protected trillions of dollars with mathematical problems because humans couldn't figure out how to solve them efficiently. We're now building machines that may become much better at mathematics than humans. Maybe it's time to stop assuming those two facts can coexist forever.