How OpenAI's Math Dump Has Crypto Rethinking Its Cryptography: Uneasy Money

Ben DiFrancesco (0:00)

The speculative premium that these tokens had during the hype period is going away, right? So if you're going to put a governance token in front of your project and allow decisions to be made in one way or another, or mediated through in one way or another token holders, then you have to be able to provide economic security through that token, right? Because if the value of the token drops below what it would be worth to steal the assets that the protocol protects, then it's not just like something that you can just say like, yeah, we don't care about the price, that's not our focus. Like, no, that's like a key component to why the system works. And if it can work, that's why it's supposed to work.

Kain Warwick (0:37)

Go on, I'm Kain Warwick. Welcome to Uneasy Money, because what happens on chain never stays on chain. Before we begin, here's a word from the sponsors that make the show possible.

Austin Griffith (0:46)

This episode is brought to you by 1inch Aqua, the shared liquidity layer from 1inch. Back multiple liquidity positions with one wallet balance, and keep your tokens in your wallet until a swap fills. See how it works at 1inch.com/aqua.

Not listening to Bits and Bips yet, it's our weekly crypto and macro market show with Ram Allawalia, Austin Campbell, and Chris Burkins. Search Bits and Bips and subscribe.

Kain Warwick (1:15)

All right. Hey guys, I'm here with my co-host, Taylor Monahan, Security Expert, and Austin Griffith, Builder Enablement at the EF. We have a very special guest this week, Ben DiFrancesco, founder and CEO of ScopeLift, the team behind Umbra and Cactus, formerly Tally. That's quite the bio.

You were not formerly Tally. That was Cactus was formerly Tally.

Ben DiFrancesco (1:40)

That's right.

Austin Griffith (1:41)

Yeah.

Ben DiFrancesco (1:42)

All right.

Austin Griffith (1:42)

Just making sure.

Ben DiFrancesco (1:43)

I've always been Ben DiFrancesco, has not changed.

Kain Warwick (1:45)

Okay. You were never masquerading as a DAO that was going out of business.

Ben DiFrancesco (1:51)

Okay.

Kain Warwick (1:52)

Good to know. All right. So our first segment, I was saying before the show started, like slow AI Newsweek, and then I'm in Singapore. So yesterday it became not slow and it's only accelerated since.

So we're now in this interesting, weird rumor situation about MetaMask and Bunker Mode. So Justin Drake, who I love, like his tweets are the best. If he tweets, it's just like Max Chaos sometimes. It's amazing. So Justin Drake tweeted yesterday, don't panic.

Taylor Monahan (2:32)

Always a strong start. Don't panic.

Ben DiFrancesco (2:36)

That's what you want to hear.

Kain Warwick (2:37)

You may want to move all of your crypto out of the cryptography zone that it's in. Which is like not amazing. So don't rush though, guy, like don't rush. Just like slowly panic, exit, right? And the thesis was, this was all on the back of OpenAI being like, hey, you know how we take out startups all the time? Well, we're taking out mathematicians this week. Not a startup, but like we're going to ruin it anyway. And they dropped 722 papers, a bunch of them that were like formalized and lean. A bunch of them that like have implications for things. And one of the implications, I think, is maybe there's like faster methods to break. And again, like this is not saying that like elliptic curves are solved or something like that. It's just saying that like there might be faster ways to brute force keys, right? And so if you happen to have more than 50 Bitcoin, for example, right? Because there's a bunch of Satoshi wallets that have 50 BTC because that was the original block reward.

But if you happen to have accumulated more than 50 BTC and it's sitting in a wallet, maybe move it behind like a hashed wallet somehow uses like a different hashing function to protect it.

Like on one hand, it seems like fanciful and insane.

But I just think that we are in a situation where like it's unprecedented, right? Like this is an unprecedented situation. No one knows how to think about it. The average person doesn't want to think about things. And this is like, for me, it harkens back a little bit to like COVID, right? Like crypto people are like, autistically retarded, right? And crypto people were far more worried. People, crypto people were far more worried about COVID. Like I remember not going to ECC that year because I was like, this is going to be a catastrophe. I did send my co-founder. I was like, you have done of children, you go.