@contrarymotion

Tech founder @ThinkForesight @Britebot70 | Co-Founder & President @TennesseeBTC | Thoughts on emerging tech and the future of money. ✍️ Forbes & elsewhere

Tennessee, USA
Joined September 2021
credit @foundersfund remixed by @peteoxenham
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Dave Birnbaum retweeted
I'm increasingly convinced that discretion is one of the most underrated traits in life. Not every story is yours to tell. And not every story needs to be told. Be the kind of person people can trust with something private. In a drama-obsessed culture, discretion has real power.
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Dave Birnbaum retweeted
A man cannot prompt the same agent twice, for it is has compacted and is not the same agent, and he is not the same man
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The evolution of going direct: Distribution was scarce, so the alpha was in building an audience Then every company started posting all the time, and attention became scarce Then attention became exploited with bait and slop, so now credibility is scarce And there are no shortcuts for credibility
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Dave Birnbaum retweeted
Caffeine addiction being basically harmless is one of life's little miracles
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Dave Birnbaum retweeted
This is how you look when you say Pokémon cards are a better investment than Bitcoin
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Dave Birnbaum retweeted
i often really miss this era of ai.
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Dave Birnbaum retweeted
Your mind will follow whatever you feed it. Want better thoughts? Consume better things.
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Dave Birnbaum retweeted
After six years in stealth, Atomic Machines is out. Our mission: on-demand, universal command of matter. First beachhead: the Matter Compiler, an AI-native manufacturing system that builds working micro-machines from code alone. No per-product tooling. No process development. Different code, different machine.
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Dave Birnbaum retweeted
Claude: proves the Jacobian conjecture. GPT6: solves Navier-Stokes and 100 other advanced theorems. Siri: "Sure, I'll add 'set a five minute timer' to your contacts"
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Cool demo. Optimization *below* the orchestrator is sorely needed. All data center admins will have to build or buy something like this to stay competitive.
We killed a server in the middle of an AI job.Four nodes were working on one prompt. We stopped one, the node count dropped to three, and the answer kept streaming. Nothing restarted. Nothing was rerouted.Normally the job dies with the machine and starts over. See the TAHO difference in action.
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Dave Birnbaum retweeted
Jeff Bezos Claims AI Could Allow For 3-Day Workweeks And One-Income Families go.forbes.com/bKpnur
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Astounding. Did mathematicians really consider themselves artists, doing math as a form of personal expression – not as scientists, desiring to uncover the secrets of the universe? I have to admit I didn’t see this one coming.
Important statement from the Association for Human Mathematics ahmath.org/statements
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The Association for Human Mathematics, which released this statement, was founded in September 2026 and lists 808 members. It does not represent mathematicians worldwide (global estimates ~80,000 research mathematicians). ahmath.org/members proofsandprompts.com/2026/09/12/the… mathoverflow.net/questions/5485… web.archive.org/web/2013082105…
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The raw, intense longing I feel to visit an O’Neill cylinder is inexplicable.
Fun Friday night project: real-ish looking video rendering of an O’Neill cylinder🧵
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Dave Birnbaum retweeted
Today I call upon the blockchain industry to calmly begin planning for "bunker mode". My personal recommendation is to set in motion a controlled mass migration of assets to fresh addresses, i.e. addresses whose pubkeys remain hidden behind a hash. Holders, starting with large and sophisticated ones, should consider moving the bulk of their funds to addresses that have never signed a transaction. And when they do sign one, they should also move remaining funds to a new address (possibly generated from the same seed phrase). Don't rush. While I believe there is cause for action a rushed migration would do more harm than good. Don't panic either. Moving assets to protected addresses is a simple, preventative step which does not require new cryptography or new wallets. IMO it is now reasonable to brace for the possibility that ECDSA breaks before qday, in the worst case in months not years. By "break" I mean fast private key recovery (e.g. in one week) on available hardware (e.g. a large GPU cluster). Recent days have been humbling for human mathematical intuition. Long-held, unquestioned hypotheses have fallen. This includes the n log(n) bound for integer multiplication and the 3SUM conjecture. In hindsight, May's unexpected disproof of the Erdős unit distance conjecture was our warning shot. Yesterday's OpenAI drop made it clear that mathematical superintelligence is upon us. They say there are weeks where decades happen. We are about to live through weeks where centuries of mathematical progress happen. Could our magic 64-byte ECDSA signatures be too good to be true? Was it just security through obscurity all this time? Elliptic curves feel especially vulnerable to superintelligence. Curves carry rich structure, with room for fancy tricks like Schoof, Frobenius, pairings. (By contrast, hashes are designed to minimise algebraic structure.) Separately, as Ewin Tang can attest, an efficient quantum algorithm sometimes foreshadows an efficient classical one. We should be open to the possibility of a classical counterpart to Shor that breaks elliptic curves and RSA at once. Also noteworthy is the striking under-representation of cryptographic breakthroughs among the 722 mathematical results OpenAI published. I've witnessed first-hand the US government censoring academic quantum cryptanalysis results. Backroom interventionism is my base case. I urge large, sophisticated actors to lead by example. Project11's "risq list" (bitcoin-risq-list.projecteleven[.]com) is a great tracker of exposed BTC pubkeys. Binance, Bitbank, Robinhood, Bitfinex, and Tether have an opportunity to harden their cold storage. Next month I'll address institutions in London in a live Q&A (forum.ethereuminstitutional[.]org/london-2026). Again, please do not rush. Wallets holding under 50 BTC enjoy partial cover from "Satoshi's shield", i.e. his 20K exposed addresses that hold 50 BTC each. Load-bearing signers like oracles and L2 security councils should consider rotating ECDSA pubkeys with every signed message and/or multi-signing with a hash-based schemes like SPHINCS. Exiting bunker mode safely will require post-AI cryptography. My inclination is to go all-in on hash-based cryptography and avoid structured mathematical assumptions entirely, whether from curves, lattices, or isogenies. A single battle-tested hash (e.g. from the SHA or BLAKE families) yields plausible post-AI security. The Ethereum roadmap on strawmap[.]org fully embraces hash-based cryptography with end-to-end formal verification as a response to the quantum threat. Those timelines must now be revisited and accelerated in light of mathematical superintelligence. I'll be pushing for maximum defensive acceleration.
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Dave Birnbaum retweeted
That's one way to get a foreword.
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Dave Birnbaum retweeted
It seems like most of the people who deny AI consciousness want to just say that "Humans have magic souls and AIs don't", but none of them are actually religious enough to say that seriously.
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Dave Birnbaum retweeted
Little known fact... BTC popularity among nation-states has outstripped individuals: 5% of the world population own BTC 8% of nations have a policy to acquire/hold BTC
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Dave Birnbaum retweeted
From a Wittgensteinian perspective the AI consciousness debate is a philosophical nadir for culture. Virtually everything said about AI consciousness represents what Wittgenstein called the metaphysical use of language: words acting like an idling engine, doing no real work. 1/11
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Who you spend your time with is all you have.
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Corporations exist for many reasons but one is to combine many individual brains into a larger intelligence. The governance of which gives rise to what we call corporate culture, which saps the vitality and creativity out of people. I’m hopeful that commoditized superintelligence will peacefully dismantle it and make excellence directly lucrative to individuals and smaller groups.
If you've ever worked at Google you'd see first hand just how much raw cognitive math-ish processing speed and working memory can decline for nationally ranked test takers and former top uni grads in their 30s and 40s, from decades of disuse and unambitious office work.
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