Incentives are building blocks. When you stack the wrong ones the wrong way, it does not make for a great load bearing base. - xh3b4sd

Google made some headlines this past week with their new quantum chip called Willow. This chip was developed on the back of some groundbreaking mathematical advances that people apparently tried to solve for more than 30 years. The gist of the underlying breakthrough here is the property of increased error correction the larger the amount of quantum states involved. Basically, larger chips, better computing. Everyone on the timeline started to lose their minds again because quantum computers may break traditional encryption schemes, one day. But that day has not come just yet. Willow contains 105 qubits today, which is one measure of quantum computer capabilities. I would say that qubits are somewhat analogous to the clock speed of traditional computer chips. Following those lines, Willow may be comparable with one of the very early computers from the 1950s. There is still a long way that quantum computers have to go in order to become really useful, or even dangerous. What people in our circles are most afraid of are quantum computers that are able to break the security guarantees that our beloved blockchain networks provide today. There are various ways in which quantum computers may break our chains. Let's take the simplest example of worst case scenarios. Imagine somebody finds the seed phrase of your wallet, simply by trying all combinations. All things being equal, this will be possible one day. But as mentioned, that day is far out into the future. And one thought that I have about guessing all the world's passwords and seed phrases is this. Even if you could snap your fingers and have all the possible combinations to your disposal, there will still be the laws of physics. What this means is that you need to test for all those combinations against some digital source of truth, until you find the right key. Brute force attacks do usually not exist in a vacuum. Some random person cannot just try all possible passwords against the Twitter API, because rate limits apply. In the same way, it is not possible to test for all possible seed phrases of Bitcoin wallets simultaneously, because memory has to be accessed and checks have to be executed, which all takes time. To my knowledge today, arbitrary programs cannot be arbitrarily parallelized, nor can they be executed infinitely fast. So knowing all possible combinations for all Bitcoin wallets is not necessarily useful on its own. Checking for their legitimacy does still require hardware access that cannot operate faster than the speed of light. And as with all distributed systems, resources have to be shared, which slows down any parallel computation effort. The timeline for quantum computers may have accelerated, but as usual, humans overestimate in the short term, and underestimate in the long term. The National Institute for Standards and Technology, in short NIST, is saying the following. "The United States must prioritize the transition of cryptographic systems to quantum-resistant cryptography, with the goal of mitigating as much of the quantum risk as is feasible by 2035". That basically means that all of our ECDSA curve magic used to encrypt anything on the internet today has to change within the next ten years. Though, that does not mean that quantum computers will be able to break the entire internet at once by that time. Some mechanisms that are surprisingly effective in order to give us more time, if need be, could look like this: just make the passwords a little longer. We could imagine a world in which quantum computers are able to decipher a standard SHA-256 within a month or a year. Those types of encryption algorithms function using rather short hashes and will be the first to break. We already have algorithms like RSA-4096 which operate under the use of larger hashes and take therefore far longer to exploit because the associated entropy is vastly larger. In the end, we will need to upgrade our protocols to use post-quantum signatures, however that may look like. Researchers in the Ethereum community are thinking about those challenges already today. And based on my understanding, we are going to make Ethereum quantum resistant within the next 5 years, far earlier than any new computing paradigm may become able to threaten the king.

The Solana ecosystem prided itself for quite some time now on the fact that it is very good at robbing its users via MEV. Key opinion leaders in that camp tell us all day long that this kind of value extraction is chain revenue in their books. It appears that the tides may be turning now in Solana land, because some people start to realize how much value individual validators extract from their own users. Millions of Dollars are grifted away and taken from those who are willing to pay priority fees, only to speculate some more on yet another meme coin. The entire revenue model of Solana is now dependent on the meme coin mania and at some point the music will simply stop playing, because none of this is actually sustainable. During those latest escapades, I found some more signal for myself validating the idea that Solana might not have all the answers after all. "chain go fast" sounds nice. But in reality many centralizing forces do now become increasingly tough challenges to combat. Challenges that require fundamental mechanism changes to address several root causes of centralized block building at the speed of light. The signals that I got from the ongoing debates to tackle those challenges point to the fact that nobody is willing, nor able to decentralize the chain. Neither now nor in the future. None of the witless responses coming from Solana's key opinion leaders seem to have anything to offer in order to address the core problems at hand. Nothing of substance anyway. Chain go fast, they said. And credible neutrality is nowhere to be found. On the upside, hundreds of teams are building the decentralized future onchain in other places. And so we do not have to trust some of the few very loud fintech startups that claim all day long how they got the answers we were looking. Because those actors tried to lead us down the path of maximizing trust assumptions, which is just completely backwards in our industry. And the lesson to take away from this episode is once again, don't fall for the snake oil salesmen, and know thy building blocks.

It is Christmas season in western societies again. Everyone is busy and everyone is spending. Those dynamics happen today in the context of rather sticky inflation and it is going to be interesting to see how the US economy fares during Trump's first 100 days of his new administration. My view right now is that the Trump administration understands their mandate, which means to weaken the US Dollar while increasing productivity at large. The economic activity in the United States happening today has to be viewed through a seasonally adjusted lens. People spend more during Christmas in any case, no matter the president. But, everywhere you look the economy appears to be booming, with many charts at all time highs. I am not an expert in any of this, but my hunch is that everything is on order as long as the Consumer Price Index fares below the Fed Funds Rate. Today we are at about 2.7 and 4.7 percent respectively on those metrics. Let us keep an eye on those numbers and see what the next year brings.

As I am writing this, 4k is still resistance for ETH on the USD chart, as well as 0.04 is resistance on the respective BTC chart. At the same time BTC itself hovers around its magical 100k level, while BTC dominance trails far below 60%. To everyone's surprise, the ETH ETFs started to punch above their weight, meaning that the ETH ETF flows have become greater than the BTC ETF flows on a market cap adjusted basis. Just to mention a notable day of the past week, ETH saw 305 million USD in net inflows, while BTC saw 450 million USD in net inflows. The comparison between ETF flows and market cap is then 68% to 24%. In other words, ETH does now see ETF inflows sometimes, as if its market cap were almost 3 times of its current size. And you know, maybe that is justified. To make another point on that matter. Tron has been the USDT chain for the longest time. Most of the available USDT supply has been minted and exchanged on top of the Tron blockchain, Justin Sun, respectfully. But as of this week, there is now more USDT on Ethereum than on any other ecosystem, while Tron is slowly giving away stablecoin market share. And you know, maybe the market is going to wake up to the realization, that every other day another billion in US Dollar denominated stablecoins is minted on Ethereum, and that Ethereum is the chain on which crypto economic activity is largely facilitated. I mean, just maybe, you know.