It's the apocalypse day. There's so many apocalypses. Math apocalypse. There's a crypto apocalypse going on. Although the market is reacting in a very moderate way, but the timeline is being dramatic. So, we got to break that down. Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and others in crypto are sounding the alarm that AI-driven math could threaten blockchain security. And so crypto's going bunker mode. That's the term that they're using.
So we've all seen the progress in AI-driven math, solving new proofs, solving Navier-Stokes. There's a lot of impressive progress in math that maybe has applications in physics, maybe has applications in engineering, fluid dynamics. A lot of these things are further out, and if they wind up being useful, they might increase efficiency here,
But the big thing is that crypto is here today. And if there's an advance in the underlying understanding of how cryptography works, it could really shake up how the crypto industry works and how these products are secured. So are they in danger rising? It's the Ralph Wiggum meme. I think I'm in danger seeing all this. Matthew Green, who teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins, put the situation in stark relief. He said, "I think we might lose public key cryptography," which is a huge statement from an expert in cryptography. It would require a pretty massive restructuring of many security protocols, but also the crypto industry. At the moment, cryptography as a discipline has been exempted from the list of published papers related to AI-enabled math breakthroughs. So there were hundreds of papers, and it's very clear that either the agent swarms that were sent to go solve math problems, they said, "Hey, don't even bother with any cryptography stuff." Or if they did, they didn't publish those and they're burying them for now until there's a way to actually patch those. Or maybe the cryptography is just too strong.
That's true. That's a third option. The crypto industry is a little skeptical about that though. They think there might be some flaws. Of course, they've been preparing for things like this before. Quantum computing is potentially existential to many blockchains, and so there has been the concept of Q-day and how they work backwards from that to make sure that they are quantum-resistant. The interesting thing is, historically, when the crypto industry has faced headwinds, the strategy has been HODL,
And that's not necessarily going to be effective for this next chapter.
That's true. Yeah, that's a good twist. Of course, there are very weird dynamics where if you break all the Bitcoin keys and all the wallets wide open and you completely erode all the trust that's been built up in that virtual currency, yeah, you stole it all, but it's worth nothing. And so the game theory there of no one would ever want to steal all the Bitcoin, right? So it's more like, can someone go after long tail?
I'm sure there's some people that would do it just for the long... Watch the world burn.
Joker mode. Yeah, that's probably possible. We could be seeing a jokerfied... Oh, you have the Joker ready to go.
Yeah, a jokerfied AI agent swarm would be a bad situation.
Yeah, for sure. But there is some cause for optimism. You know, much like the broader cybersecurity scare that happened back in March of this year, there's a gap between closed-source and open-source models. Most people say it's around six months. You know, the capabilities catch up in certain areas. It seems like it's faster sometimes, it's three months, but six months is sort of a useful heuristic I have found. And that actually maps out pretty perfectly with the most recent news. So if you remember, Mythos Preview was dropped by Anthropic on April 7th, 2026. That's the fourth month of the year. And then CrowdStrike announced that a 26-year-old in China used an open-source Chinese-developed AI agent to execute cyber attacks against South Korean banks on October 7th. Like the same, I think the report came out October 7th, so it's basically just exactly six months later. You see like an open-source model be used in a cyber attack. Fortunately, the banks have, you know, a ton of redundancies, the ability to roll back transactions. They store things to tape. They store things on paper sometimes. There's a lot of different ways to secure a traditional bank that is not purely digital, even though they might have a digital front end and a lot of the money might be stored digitally. And the interesting thing is that when I read at least about one of the South Korean bank cybersecurity incidents, it was a pretty small amount of user data that was stored. It was like names and addresses and phone numbers of like, it was a significant number. It was like tens of thousands of clients or something like that. But it wasn't like they robbed the bank and they got the money or they got everyone. Somehow they got into like one system for information. So it could have been like they hacked into like their Paperless Post account. That was like what the bank used to send out invites to clients or something like that. Like there are a whole bunch of different systems, and at what level did they get in is important, but it's clearly happening.
They got into the client gifting software. Potentially everyone gets chocolates.
Maybe, maybe. And so obviously you don't want hackers anywhere. And so cybersecurity is more important than ever. And so the crypto community does have, you know, a couple months to go bunker mode, as they are putting it. And it feels like there'll be an incredible amount of progress on these like AI-proofing systems, but it's an entirely new challenge. It's much less understood than quantum computing, which has been theorized mathematically and sort of formalized for years before the capability came. This is different because we're getting this capability before we've really characterized the shape of the threat. Like they know with quantum, like there's something called Shor's algorithm, and like they got to fix that. So they got to make sure that Shor's algorithm doesn't work to break Bitcoin wallets open. They know the mathematical problem. They got to solve that. In this scenario, it's like there might be a different algorithm that runs on commodity hardware that works. And how do you know when you don't know the shape of the threat that's coming? So it's a crypto apocalypse potentially, but the market doesn't think it is. Bitcoin's only down 3% today, and it's still up 3% for the month. And so the market is, you know, digesting this and optimistic. There's still, you know, lots to do if you work in crypto, and potentially even if you only own some crypto, there's things to do. Vitalik gave some recommendations on, you know, don't panic, but also maybe start thinking about this more intently. He said, "I don't recommend anyone scramble to move their funds to new wallets today, but we should take the risks of cryptography from AI-accelerated math seriously and minimize our exposure to not just quantum-vulnerable cryptography, but also AI-vulnerable cryptography. The new core area of risk from this viewpoint is unfortunately ML-DSA lattices, and this is also another reason, along with quantum, why ECDSA might fall even faster than expected, hence the fresh address recommendation. So far, most people have been in the mode of thinking elliptic curves broken, hash is safe, lattice is safe, but there's a good chance that the concrete security of lattices will take serious hits from the next two years of AI math." And so some people were posting, Scott Low here was saying, "Oh, that's weird. The AI math god is somehow no better at cryptography than a 2026 human. We got superintelligence in math, but not cryptography. What's going on?" He thought for a minute. He says, "Oh." And I think the interpretation of this, and you can tell me if you disagree, is, yeah, it's because the AI math god is run by an American company that has no interest in destroying...
Yeah. But in the open-source world, it's a very different game. And so still interesting to think about the game theory even in the open-source world, but I think that will all be downstream of a whole bunch of changes. And then there is the question of how does crypto handle this? Like the cryptocurrency industry has been libertarian, they've been against the government in many ways, small government, I want to own the money. Well, now you're facing a threat from open-source, from a non-government-regulated entity. And so while a lot of people in the AI safety community have said this is the moment for big government, this is the moment to register large clusters, this is the moment to track all the data centers, to have licenses for inference and training and reporting to the government, that is a solution. Like if you lock down open-source and you say, "Yeah, if you're going to spin up a million agents and try and do a bunch of inference to try and break Bitcoin wallets, like we're going to find out about it. We're going to arrest you, and it doesn't matter that you're using an open model." That's a very different psychological frame of mind for a Bitcoiner.
Yeah. The other thing here is that there's obviously biorisk with model advancements, but it is going to be wildly different for somebody to use an open model to try to create a bioweapon and then actually sort of distribute that out into the world than like using a new model to try to like mess around with cryptography.
Yeah, that feels squarely in the hacker camp. Like there's people that would just be kind of messing around and then accidentally have a breakthrough or accidentally...
Or maybe intentionally cause financial chaos.
But that's purely digital.
And that's the kind of thing that millions of people have been doing for a very long time.
Just generally kind of hacking around. Wildly different than the kind of person who would go out and try to create, you know, a new pandemic.
Yeah. And then also another layer of this will feed into like the whole AI doom, loss of control scenario because you get an AI agent that's hyper-intelligent and it's also able to break Bitcoin wallets. It breaks a couple open, then it has capital. With capital it can marshal more compute, hire people to do things in the real world, etc., etc. And so the doom scenario becomes like way more human-enabled if you are able to amass capital pretty quickly as a rogue agent. Do you have a take on this, Tyler?
Yeah, I mean, I feel like the crypto industry broadly is like fairly good at self-governance, right? You've seen like, even if you're talking about like Bitcoin, you know, there's like, they can actually like change the protocol, you know, like Bitcoin Cash, which is the fork and stuff like this.
Yeah. I think the Bitcoin Policy Institute, like, I don't know, maybe a month or two ago had this open letter about how, you know, the solution is we got to build up defenses much more and we got to spend a lot on inference to try to like figure out what is the right path moving forward. I think most people are very against like limiting open-source models, stuff like that.
Totally. It'll be interesting to see how these worlds collide and where things go.
Ben, I don't know if you included this earlier, but he says, "Lucky coincidence. The labs are only successfully cracking esoteric math problems and not the problems where a solution would give the winner an asymmetric commercial advantage." Again, this is what I've said a bunch of times on the show. Now, math problems are the perfect category of problems where you get a result and you're, you know, incentivized and excited to share the result. There's no immediate opportunity to commercialize a lot of this stuff.
And so for every breakthrough in math, you should assume there's a bunch of other breakthroughs in other fields that have more commercial applications where the person that has... and it's not just the labs, it's people using the current frontier models to find breakthroughs in their own field. And so again, I'm expecting a real explosion of progress, especially as we enter the later half of this year.
Or the sort of end of the year.
I believe Will Depew posted about this. That's what I was thinking of. Will Depew posted, I think there was like a slight Bitcoin selloff like a while ago, like maybe around the midsummer time period, and he sort of took a victory lap or something, or was like saying like, yeah, in hindsight, once the AI community built like the hack machine 9000, it should have been obvious that you should get out of crypto. And then what was odd was that crypto rallied after that. So like he was kind of a little bit too early with the take, but now it feels like, okay, everyone's pieced it together a little bit more. But also there's so many other factors where you could see this narrative dying down and all of a sudden there's some other narrative that's driving crypto and people are piling in for whatever reason. So OpenAI's drop of hundreds of new mathematical proofs is now being called the math apocalypse. There's some white pills, there's some black pills. People are all over the place. Obviously, we talked about the crypto knock-on effects. Nabil Kashyap says, "Mathematicians: AI is plagiarism and we don't want to know the answers. Anyway, artists: AI is plagiarism and the art sucks anyway. Chess players: hm, I wonder if I can use AI to increase my rating."
How do you prevent against like botting in online chess? I'm comparing that to like, let's say, somebody using like an aimbot in Valorant. No, no, I mean bots are like undetectable. Like all the bots can like one-shot headshot and fake.
But not even that, but basically just running like an AI copilot that is like helping you make that.
So unless you're playing chess physically in front of somebody and watching them, you no longer... and then what do you think?
Well, I mean, if your ELO is like 800 and then you start making like, you know, 2,000-rated moves, like it's pretty easy to tell that stuff.
It's like, I think if you're on chess.com or whatever, I think it's fairly hard to cheat, or people just don't cheat because it's like, what's the point? And like, it's like, okay, yeah, I played against somebody who was like smurfing and they had an 800 ELO account, but they were clearly playing a 2,000 ELO. Like, okay, I lost that game. Let me queue again. Okay, I got someone who's actually 800 and I'll just keep playing until I get someone who's actually my...
Consistently using like an engine, it's like I think it's not that hard to figure that out.
Yes, but like this is going to change because the models will be so good.
That, I mean, the models will be so good that you'll be able to say like, I'm ELO 800. Help me play at 850 and also really mimic the human experience. So don't make... don't...
But yeah, I agree. There's like little incentive to actually cheat on chess.com because...
Says you can tell if they're bots if they statistically always or nearly always make the optimal move.
Yeah, exactly. Like there's no fun, and you can always just go play against the best Stockfish model if you want. Like you can just max it out if you just want to play against the best computer in the world. Nobody does. And so there's not that much value in it because everyone would just be like, "Cool. Yeah, you just ran the model that everyone else has. Like, do you want to play against me or not?" Like if you want to just be the model, just go and you don't win anything. So there's not any incentive. I think that's how it works out. I don't know. I mean, you in the gym have been accused of using, you know, robotic-assisted lifts, right?
You'll wear like big sweatpants.
Can you imagine having...
And you have, you know, your exoskeleton, you know, putting up, you know, 800-pound deadlifts. I mean, people, you know, know you're strong, but not that strong.
There's a very interesting post in the Wall Street Journal about a former NFL lineman who solved a decades-old math problem. John Urschel gave up his career with the Baltimore Ravens to study math at MIT and he has...
Got this guy on immediately.
He's so jacked, it looks like, yeah, he definitely doesn't need the exoskeleton in the gym. He's a former NFL player. John Urschel decided to do some light reading this week, and for him that meant leafing through the latest math papers from OpenAI about topics such as the Riemann hypothesis. "Oh my lord," he thought. "I was absolutely floored." Good rhyming. Urschel was blown away by the findings because he happened to understand the hundreds of proofs better than nearly any human on the planet. Nine years ago, he traded the National Football League for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Crazy that you can take, like, the NFL has got to be an incredibly demanding schedule. Like, you can take thousands of hours off of your math career and then go back in the game and not be...
Not to mention getting just slammed in the head for those years.
