Crypto Going Bunker Mode, AI Mathpocalypse, Starbucks Explores Chipotle Takeover | Diet TBPN

John Coogan (0:01)

It's the apocalypse day. There's so many apocalypses. Math apocalypse, there's crypto apocalypse going on. Although the market is reacting in a very moderate way, but the timeline is being dramatic, so we gotta 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 is 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 or there.

Jordi Hays (1:01)

Not as far out as you think.

John Coogan (1:02)

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?

Jordi Hays (1:21)

Quartile rising.

John Coogan (1:23)

It's the Ralph Wiggin meme, I think. I'm in danger seeing all this. Matthew Greene, who teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins. 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. There were hundreds of papers, and it's very clear that either the agents 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.

Tyler (2:18)

Or maybe the cryptography is just too strong.

John Coogan (2:20)

That's true. That's a third option.

The crypto industry is a little skeptical about it. 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.

Jordi Hays (2:42)

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.

John Coogan (2:53)

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?

Jordi Hays (3:23)

I'm sure there's some people that would do it just for the Just to watch the world burn?

John Coogan (3:26)

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. 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. 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

It's the fourth month of the year. And then CrowdStrike announced that a 26 year old in China used a open source Chinese developed AI agent to execute cyber attacks against South Korean banks on October 7th, like the same, I think that the report came out October 7th. So it's basically just exactly six months later, you see like a open source model be used in a cyber attack. Fortunately, the banks have 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. 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 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 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 what level did they get in is important. But it's clearly happening.