Thursday, May 14, 2026

Stick figure drawing doodles 10LightStar01 is live!

Stick figure drawing doodles 10LightStar01 is live!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hq9CwopUH1s

This is a fever dream of a digital age—a sprawling, surrealist tapestry where crochet patterns meet high-speed police chases, and the Grim Reaper is just another guy trying to manage an office.

Here is the story of The Day the Grid Glitched.

The Morning Shift

The day began in a flurry of #ModernCrochet and chaos. At the local craft guild, a "Magical Crochet Gargoyle Quitter" was throwing in the towel, leaving behind a trail of freeform stars and loose ends. Meanwhile, in the corporate underworld, the Grim Reaper CEO adjusted his tie at his administrative desk. "It’s my panel," he hissed to a room of trembling interns, "and you will respect the filing system."

Outside, the physical world was losing its grip on reality. A green avocado was spotted zip-lining across the forest canopy, screaming "Wee!" while a dairy cow and a buffalo experienced love at first sight on the prairie. It was beautiful, until the "Authorized Official Shambulance" sped by with off-key sirens, driven by a DoorDash driver who had clearly taken a wrong turn at the interstate.

The Midday Madness

By noon, the legal system was buckling. A divorce attorney was arguing for a 4% inflation alimony increase, while a stubborn police officer attempted to ticket a driver for doing 55 mph, despite the driver’s GPS claiming otherwise.

In the skies, things weren't much better. An airplane pilot abandoned the cockpit—not because of an emergency, but to fix a sewer leak in the bathroom. This left the County Sheriff’s helicopter pilot to pick up the slack, shouting the command code "Accel UR L8 twerk" into his AI navigator.

Back on the ground, the "Microwave Preventive Maintenance Team" (composed entirely of trolls in tin foil hats) was conducting a rigorous inspection of a breakroom, while nearby, a police officer and his best friend were formally interrogating a hairball.

The Evening Gala

As the sun set, a tarnished copper green armadillo drone took flight from the roof of a skyscraper, filming the most anticipated event of the year: the wedding of the Grim Reaper and the Reapress. They exchanged vows of "invisible threat control" while a dancing xenophobic xylophone provided the music.

However, the party was crashed by a Giant Plushy Octopus looking for hugs and a "Slip and Fall Droidbot" seeking a lawsuit settlement. In the corner, Holly Bitcoin gave tap dance lessons to a singing pickle, while a group of mushroom soldiers set up tents inside a refrigerator’s cooling system to escape the heat.

The Final Stitch

As the clock struck midnight on March 8, 2026, the digital world began to "URL barf." Google Meet was exposing phone numbers, and the #DreamTrackAI was telling everyone to "try again tomorrow."

The chaos finally settled into a quiet, bizarre peace. A Jack Rabbit and a Skunk shared a moment in the woods, and a single claymation blue bird tucked its family into a nest made of crochet scrap yarn. The world was a mess of unredacted reports, stuck cruise controls, and singing rainbows—but as the Star and Hammer cartoon faded to black, one thing was clear: nobody was above the law, but everyone was definitely above the limit for weirdness.

The scene opens on a high-stakes, high-altitude pursuit. Jack, a lanky cartoon cat with whiskers that twitch like radio antennas, is dangling from a vine. Hammer, a stout mouse wearing a tiny tool belt, is standing on Jack’s head, squinting through a pair of brass binoculars.

"Target sighted," Hammer squeaked, pointing a tiny paw toward the horizon. "And he’s moving fast."

Zip-lining across the triple-canopy rainforest at a reckless velocity was Avocado. He wasn't just a fruit; he was a daredevil with a pit of pure adrenaline. Wearing tiny goggles and a GoPro strapped to his pebbly green skin, Avocado let out a high-pitched, "WEEEEEEEE!" as he blurred past a troop of confused howler monkeys.

The Chase is On

Jack didn't have a zip-line, but he did have cartoon physics. He grabbed a passing toucan by the feet, and with a rhythmic "Bang! Bang!" of Hammer’s literal mallet against a hollow log to create a beat, they swung into the sky.

"We need to intercept him before he hits the Cloud Forest!" Hammer shouted over the wind. "If he zips into the 'Modern Crochet' sector, we'll lose him in the yarn fog!"

The Obstacles:

  • The Sourdough Rapids: A river of fermented dough they had to skip across.
  • The Giant Plushy Octopus: A sentient obstacle that tried to hug them mid-air.
  • The Interior Microwave Team: A group of trolls in tin foil hats who were trying to "inspect" the jungle for grease fires.

The Final Stretch

Avocado was gaining speed, his pit humming like a drone motor. He was headed straight for a transitional train scene—a steam engine locomotive puffing purple smoke across a trestle bridge.

"Now, Jack! Use the yarn smudging technique!" Hammer commanded.

Jack pulled a scrap of neon-pink crochet string from his pocket. With the grace of a Vaudeville performer defying gravity, he whipped the string forward. It looped around Avocado’s stem just as the fruit was about to clear the canopy.

ZIP—THWIP—BOING!

The tension on the crochet line acted like a bungee cord. Avocado didn't crash; he performed a perfect, mid-air 360-degree flip, his tiny goggles fogging up with joy.

The Landing

They all tumbled onto a soft mossy log near a Box Turtle who was busy falling in love with an Armadillo. Avocado bounced twice, his GoPro still recording the whole "Brainrot" investigation.

"Why were you running?" Jack panted, his fur standing up in static-electrified tufts.

Avocado adjusted his goggles and looked at them with wide, watery eyes. "Running? I wasn't running. I was just trying to get to the Holly Bitcoin Tap Dance Lessons before the early bird special ended."

Hammer looked at Jack. Jack looked at the Armadillo.

"Well," Hammer sighed, putting his mallet back in his belt. "At least we got the footage. This is going to kill on #DreamTrackAI."

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s0zhJiIvVI4 How to skip one crochet, stitch and count to 3 #moderncrochet #beginners
6rfXhtSP5xk Cuddlefish jellyfish love at first sight in the ocean, prairie of plankton.
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_UGblsuJUnw My artificial intelligence tool on YouTube is really popular, it's telling me to try again tomorrow.
5VYC607cWVw #DreamTrackAI pretty little baby, wiggle loves give me
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Q02wFzUWqq4 The Curiosity Hook: The making of Jack Star and Hammer Cartoon
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i_naFvEeaP8 The vacuum hose vent safety cleaning drone To reach high places inside the home Prevent slip fall
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iS6iZjXv8Ok The claymation cartoon story of spaghetti and noodle, the Blue Bird family Nest
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M7h1tuBSAaU No love anticipated from Chicago windy city or Detroit 8 miles, Eminem burn #seo
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8U1Yd92_9Tk Mirror Love Bird
RXg88dMgxf0 The dancing xenophobic xylophones, World stage collaboration
C2JpWEjuXB4 Happy Valentines Day from crochet Pup stitch
p5qNmwVz2d8 Google Meet calling replacing (legacy) Duo Exposes your phone number and email
Ln_4tmLAMSY Would a woman hire male lawyer knowing that he had cheated on his wife? #divorcelaw #divorcelawyer
a9IGBuS2a-E Logmei silly hairball dance
boavDBvWgjs Flashing police car drone lifts off from a top of very tall roof of a skyscraper.
jr_Yfh3y78c He set the country backwards with his domestic violent attitude with physical abuse towards me
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gPtMY579pjQ This guy is admitting he's purposely manipulating people by playing dumb frauds & scam
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-pmCMnQut-E Police arrest ogoniff sleeping on mailbox Dropbox #firstamendment #DreamScreenAI #aperturefoundation
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Building Stingray, an agentic backtesting and alert platform for perps traders.

https://i.redd.it/askdak0fm61h1.png

BTC -- 33 Weeks

https://i.redd.it/vif6115hc61h1.png

Wednesday, May 13, 2026

Bitcoin Forecast: BTC faces renewed weakness below the 80k mark

The trading week has not been entirely positive for Bitcoin price action. Now, BTC is posting a three-session bearish streak in the short term and is recording a decline of around 3.00%, which has started to reflect a new relevant selling bias in recent price action.

By :  Julian Pineda CFA, CMT,  Market Analyst

The trading week has not been entirely positive for Bitcoin price action. Now, BTC is posting a three-session bearish streak in the short term and is recording a decline of around 3.00%, which has started to reflect a new relevant selling bias in recent price action.

At this point, the loss of strength may have started to become more evident in the market as activity within the BTC network shows signs of slowing down, which could point to a short-term profit-taking effect. In addition, a stronger bond market outlook may also have started to affect appetite for risk assets such as Bitcoin. If these factors remain in place, selling pressure may continue to be relevant in the coming sessions.

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https://preview.redd.it/wzrkikp6tz0h1.png?width=1420&format=png&auto=webp&s=3738f80f0e9800a9e73a2b903c141062882a2747

Is demand starting to weaken?

In recent trading sessions, an interesting behavior has started to appear in Bitcoin’s Open Interest indicator, which measures the total number of open positions, both long and short, in the market. Over the last few sessions, this indicator has shown a slight increase toward the area near $27 billion in open positions, according to figures from May 12.

What is important to consider is that this slight increase in Open Interest has been accompanied by a consistent decline in BTC’s price. This suggests that the increase in the indicator may not be mainly related to the entry of new long positions, but rather to the addition of some short positions in the market. As a result, demand appears to be facing a weakening dynamic that is starting to become relevant within recent Open Interest movements.

https://preview.redd.it/98otu6y8tz0h1.png?width=1137&format=png&auto=webp&s=bbbb09c8f7cdff0f3b361648e9268b76363958a0

Source: CryptoQuant

Activity within the BTC market could be showing a consistent weakening dynamic in price, possibly linked to profit-taking around the psychological 80k area. This type of behavior tends to occur when price remains near relevant levels and has been part of similar price action in the past. At this point, this dynamic could be reflecting a reduction in demand strength in the short term.

Taking all of this into account, it is important to keep in mind that weakness could become more pronounced if Open Interest continues to increase while price keeps moving lower. This behavior would show more consistently that selling pressure is accumulating positions in the short term, which could mean that downside pressure remains relevant in the coming trading sessions.

 

Is the bond market still applying pressure?

Another relevant event across markets has to do with the strengthening appeal of the bond market in the short term. Now, the US 10-year yield remains near the 4.5% level, while in Europe it is approaching 3.5% and in Canada it is around the 3.6% area. The general dynamic across these instruments is similar, as yields continue to show consistent increases as trading sessions move forward, maintaining a stable upward slope for now.

https://preview.redd.it/56ej599atz0h1.png?width=1500&format=png&auto=webp&s=9677e74269deec3f3a3fc2a4c0f6f0b30c91faca

Source: TradingEconomics

This behavior in the bond market may also be counterproductive for a consistent advance in Bitcoin. As the fixed income market begins to show greater appeal, it could attract capital toward instruments that offer fixed yields, reducing the amount of capital available for risk assets in the short term, such as Bitcoin.

In this scenario, a macroeconomic effect of lower exposure to non-traditional risk markets, such as cryptocurrencies, could also be forming. This dynamic may continue as long as the recovery in bond yields remains constant in the short term, which could also highlight relevant weakness in Bitcoin price action during the coming sessions.

 

Technical outlook for Bitcoin

https://preview.redd.it/rvrpqfabtz0h1.png?width=1538&format=png&auto=webp&s=4ff0a845b756e53cf9bfa677e0d66eb9f8e06e9f

Source: StoneX, Tradingview

  • Potential bullish trendline attempts to hold: Since the first days of February this year, a consistent pattern of higher lows has started to form in Bitcoin price action. To some extent, this has given way to a potential more consistent bullish trendline in BTC’s short-term movements. Although price is currently showing relevant weakness, the bearish correction still does not appear strong enough to show a clear risk to this potential bullish trendline. For this reason, it is important to keep in mind that this could remain the dominant technical pattern during the coming trading sessions.  
  • MACD: At the moment, the MACD indicator maintains a histogram with movements close to the 0 level, suggesting that a consistent balance has started to form in the average strength of short-term moving averages. This behavior could be signaling a possible phase of indecision in recent price action.  
  • RSI: The RSI shows a similar scenario, as the indicator line remains close to the neutral 50 area. This reflects a balance in the average momentum of the last 14 trading sessions, which also starts to highlight a phase of indecision that is becoming increasingly relevant in the short term.  

Key levels:

  • 82,600 – Important resistance: A relevant high area that coincides with the 200-period moving average barrier. Moves toward this level could reinforce the dominance of the bullish bias and, if broken with strength, open the door to a clearer extension of the short-term uptrend.  
  • 75,000 – Near-term barrier: A recent reference level that has acted as a retracement area in the last few sessions. This point could act as key support against possible selling corrections that may continue to appear in the coming sessions.  
  • 71,000 – Definitive support: An area located below the 50-period moving average, which currently stands as the most relevant downside barrier. Moves toward this level could reactivate selling pressure and call into question the recent structural shift, bringing a bearish bias back into focus in the market.  

Written by Julian Pineda, CFA, CMT – Market Analyst

Follow him on: @julianpineda25

https://www.forex.com/en-us/news-and-analysis/bitcoin-forecast-btc-faces-renewed-weakness-below-the-80k-mark/

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OP_CHECKSHRINCS: A Hash-Based Signature Opcode for Post-Quantum Bitcoin

There is no concrete proposal for a post-quantum signature scheme in Bitcoin today. Over the past year, our team at Blockstream Research has been looking into exactly this problem. This post shares what we've learned, and argues that optimized hash-based signatures are a pragmatic choice for post-quantum Bitcoin that could be deployed in the near term. It covers SHRINCS and SHRIMPS, currently the smallest post-quantum signature schemes built on mature cryptographic assumptions, and then sketches what a concrete proposal could look like.

Modern Bitcoin outputs lock funds to a Schnorr key, and spending them requires a valid Schnorr signature. Schnorr signatures, however, are vulnerable to quantum computers. The most natural way to add post-quantum signature verification is to extend the Taproot tree with a post-quantum option. After a soft fork, an output can commit to both a Schnorr key and a post-quantum key. Because Taproot only reveals the path that actually gets spent, users can keep spending with cheap Schnorr signatures, and the transaction cost stays essentially unchanged. The post-quantum option sits dormant in the tree. Only once a sufficiently powerful quantum computer arrives do users switch to the second path, spend with the post-quantum signature, and pay its transaction cost.  

https://preview.redd.it/xmufypy8zu0h1.png?width=1600&format=png&auto=webp&s=5f2a97aa6b645328faa07e583d2eb1fc5279ccbf

Failure Modes of a Post-Quantum Upgrade

A post-quantum upgrade can fail in several distinct ways, and avoiding each of them shapes the design choices discussed later in this post.

  • Throughput collapse. If signatures are too large, block space fills up and many users won't be able to transact at all.
  • Verification costs. If the computational requirements are too high, there will be less full-node verification, which impacts decentralization.
  • Signing costs. Hardware wallets and constrained devices have to be able to sign in a reasonable time.
  • Broken cryptography, built on assumptions that don't hold up over time.
  • No adoption, because the proposal is too complex or doesn't integrate with existing infrastructure. If only you adopt the proposal, that is not enough: if the rest of the network gets compromised, your perfectly secure coins become economically worthless.
  • Implementation complexity. The implementation contains bugs or is vulnerable to attacks, and someone has to maintain this code in Bitcoin's consensus rules forever without accidentally introducing even the slightest incompatibilities.

A proposal that avoids these pitfalls has the highest chance of obtaining rough consensus.

Standard Candidates

The first set of candidates are schemes standardized by NIST. They already exist, have working implementations, and require relatively little additional effort to turn into a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal. The baseline for comparison is the Schnorr signature scheme used in Taproot. If every transaction used Schnorr signatures consistently, Bitcoin could support 6.5 transactions per second at current average transaction shapes. All TPS numbers in this post assume an average Bitcoin transaction with 2.27 inputs and 2.64 outputs (the 90-day average on 2026-03-30, per transactionfee.info), packed into the current block size limit.

Schnorr signatures support the features that current wallet infrastructure relies on, in particular BIP 32 unhardened key derivation. They also enable efficiency upgrades that the ecosystem has deployed on top of Bitcoin in recent years, like MuSig, and planned privacy and efficiency improvements such as threshold signatures, silent payments, and cross-input signature aggregation.

  • ML-DSA, based on lattice assumptions. Throughput collapses to about half a transaction per second (at NIST security level 3), and all of Schnorr signatures' features disappear, including BIP 32 unhardened derivation.
  • SLH-DSA, based on hash functions. Hash functions are conservative assumptions that Bitcoin already trusts, which justifies targeting NIST security level 1. Throughput, however, drops further to 0.36 transactions per second, and again, the same features are missing.

Neither of these schemes is a drop-in solution, and both decimate network throughput. A block size increase could mitigate the throughput problem, but bundling a timely, pragmatic post-quantum deployment with a controversial block size debate is unlikely to succeed. A block size increase is better left as a separate discussion.

Candidates That Need More Research

The NIST schemes are easy to deploy, but their trade-offs are hard to swallow. Other candidates promise better trade-offs, but require significantly more research and time before deployment is realistic.

  • Falcon^WS, a recent lattice-based proposal. It offers significantly better signature sizes (throughput around 1 TPS at NIST security level 5), but it is far too immature to consider for deployment. It is included here as an illustration of what might eventually be possible with lattice-based schemes.
  • Lattice schemes that match Schnorr signatures' feature set, such as unhardened BIP 32 or threshold signatures. This is a promising direction for further research. Unfortunately, adding these features significantly increases signature sizes compared to lattice schemes that omit them, probably putting throughput below Falcon^WS's ~1 TPS. For example, a modified Raccoon-G supports hierarchical deterministic key derivation (including unhardened), but with 16 kB public keys and 20 kB signatures.
  • SQIsign, based on isogenies. Signature sizes are very good, with throughput up to ~3.6 TPS at security level 5, and isogenies have the potential to support Schnorr signatures' features. The catch is the cryptographic assumptions, which are far less mature than lattice assumptions. There is a real risk they could break, and that risk will not disappear anytime soon. Building confidence in new cryptographic assumptions takes many years.
  • Block-wide signature aggregation, a single succinct proof (a SNARK) that aggregates every signature in a block. Conservatively assuming a 500 kB proof per block, throughput would be around 6.7 TPS. Recent proposals along these lines include BitZip and LeanVM. On top of open questions like who computes the proof and how to avoid mining centralization, the engineering complexity is massive.

Optimizing Hash-Based Signatures and the Signing Budget

All of these candidates live in the same multi-dimensional trade-off space: assumptions, efficiency, features, and complexity. For hash-based signatures specifically, two directions look particularly promising. First, we can add a new dimension: statefulness, which opens up new design space. Second, we can accept a minor increase in protocol complexity in exchange for significant efficiency gains. Together, these directions make hash-based signatures an attractive candidate. They offer much better efficiency without a new cryptographic assumption, and the cryptography remains relatively easy to explain and implement.

Statefulness uses a concept built into every hash-based signature scheme: the signature budget, a parameter that dictates how many times a single key can securely sign a message. In SLH-DSA, the budget is set to 2^64, effectively unlimited for any practical purpose. Shrinking the budget deliberately makes signatures smaller, but accidentally exceeding it breaks the scheme's security.

SLH-DSA's signature budget of 2^64 yields a signature size of nearly 8 kilobytes and throughput of 0.36 transactions per second. Reducing the budget to 2^40, about a trillion signatures per key, is still more than enough: at current block sizes that is hundreds of years of nonstop signing. At that smaller budget, signature size drops to 5.7 kilobytes, improving throughput by about 33%.

SHRINCS

How low can we push the signature budget? On Bitcoin's base layer, best practice discourages address reuse, so a typical key signs only once or a few times. The signature budget can therefore be made very small. For users who do need to exceed it, a fallback option is provided. The construction uses a single public key with two signing paths: a compact path producing small signatures while the budget holds, and a stateless fallback that is always available.

https://preview.redd.it/xfm01wc5zu0h1.png?width=1600&format=png&auto=webp&s=29e1a4ebc0f0e23a1146cf2c02cae53f4ef40a2f

This compact path comes with a cost: the signer must persistently track how many times they have signed, so as not to exceed the budget. That counter is state, and a scheme that relies on it is stateful. Statefulness is difficult to support in environments like desktop or mobile wallets, where backups are routine. Restoring an old backup silently rolls the counter back to a value that has already been used. A subsequent signature reuses that state, which can compromise the user's funds. Bitcoin developers, including our team at Blockstream Research, have worked hard to ensure that Bitcoin is misuse-resistant. A stateful scheme is inherently more fragile than a stateless one. When we first explored this direction, our view was that it was a neat trick, but not really practical.

There is, however, one setup where the user cannot accidentally corrupt state: a dedicated signing device. On initialization, the device generates the seed and sets the initial state, which then lives exclusively on the device and never leaves it. The device produces compact signatures. Because the state is public, a software wallet can add an extra safety check by verifying that a candidate signature does not reuse state before broadcasting it. If the device is lost, breaks, or is replaced, the user loads the seed into a new device, which automatically falls back to the stateless path and produces a larger signature. By keeping the state entirely on the device, the setup eliminates any opportunity for the user to corrupt it. 

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We call the resulting construction SHRINCS. It rests on two core ideas:

  • Two signing paths under a single public key: a compact stateful path and a stateless fallback.
  • A particularly efficient compact path. The specifics are beyond the scope of this post, but the construction builds straightforwardly on existing hash-based signature techniques.

Throughput compared to the schemes seen so far:

  • SLH-DSA: 0.36 TPS.
  • SLH-DSA with the signing budget reduced to 2^40: 0.48 TPS.
  • SHRINCS compact path (580-byte signatures): up to 3 TPS if every signature uses the compact path.

The risk profile of SHRINCS is notably different from that of the other PQ candidates. Those alternatives carry systemic risks affecting every user on the network: low throughput, questionable crypto assumptions, or fragile consensus protocols. SHRINCS carries localized risk instead: state management on individual devices. With the possibility of safe deployment and these throughput numbers, SHRINCS no longer looks like a neat trick, but a pragmatic post-quantum option.

SHRIMPS

In SHRINCS, loading a seed into a new device is costly because it triggers the stateless fallback, which produces large signatures. The number of such events during a key's lifetime can be bounded, however. SHRIMPS exploits this by adding a second compact path specifically for these backup devices. With a budget of one thousand signatures, this path produces signatures of about 3000 bytes. This is roughly five times larger than the primary device's signature but two and a half times smaller than an SLH-DSA fallback.

Optimizing the Fallback Path

Statefulness was the first of the two directions identified earlier. The second is to optimize the stateless fallback path itself.

Starting from SLH-DSA at 7,872 bytes (0.36 TPS), several optimizations stack on top:

  • Reducing the signing budget to 2^40 brings the size to 5,792 bytes (0.48 TPS), a ~26% reduction.
  • WOTS+C (coauthored by Blockstream cryptographer Mikhail Kudinov) and PORS+FP, drop-in optimizations to the underlying SPHINCS+ scheme that were not adopted into SLH-DSA. These bring the size to 5,060 bytes (0.54 TPS), a further ~13% reduction, with no performance penalty. The only downside is deviating from the NIST standard.
  • Accepting 5× longer signing and key generation time yields another ~11%, to 4,496 bytes (0.60 TPS).
  • Allowing per-byte verification time up to ~1.5× that of Schnorr signatures yields another ~13%, to 3,896 bytes (0.69 TPS).

Together these roughly halve the size of a stateless hash-based signature scheme compared to SLH-DSA. Pushed further, at the cost of even longer signing or verification times, signatures could shrink more still.

A Toy Proposal

The proposal rests on two design principles.

First, do not increase verification time compared to SLH-DSA. This avoids making any future block size increase harder. It also significantly simplifies SNARK proof generation should block-wide signature aggregation ever be adopted.

Second, abandon the idea of a one-size-fits-all signature, and introduce multiple signature schemes tailored to specific use cases.

  • Desktop and mobile layer-1 wallets cannot safely keep state, but they typically have fast CPUs. They use a stateless scheme that trades signing time for compactness: ~4,496-byte signatures at a 2^40 signing budget. This budget is far above anything that could be hit accidentally.
  • Dedicated signing devices can be designed to keep state securely, but their processors are often weak, so high signing cost is not an option here. SHRINCS and SHRIMPS instead use statefulness to keep signatures small while signing stays fast. The stateless fallback uses a 2^32 budget (no one will physically press a button on a hardware wallet 4 billion times); signatures are ~580 bytes from a primary device, ~3,000 bytes from a backup device, and ~4,336 bytes from the fallback.
  • Lightning nodes are stateful by construction and benefit from fast signing. Channel updates use the same stateless scheme as the fallback for dedicated signing devices: 2^32 budget, ~4,336 bytes. A node that somehow reaches 4 billion signatures can roll over to a new key. Cooperative channel closes should be able to use the SHRINCS compact path (~580 bytes).

The result is four specialized signature variants working together. Effective throughput ranges from 0.60 to 3.04 TPS, well above the 0.36 baseline of standard SLH-DSA.

Open Questions and Downsides

The proposal is a starting point rather than a finished design. It comes with downsides and raises a number of open questions:

  • Verification time prioritized over size: the proposal could be more size-optimized, at the cost of verification time. The per-byte verification cost is more than 6× lower than that of Schnorr signatures, so the block size could theoretically be increased by a factor of 6 without increasing block verification time. A more rigorous argument requires better benchmarks.
  • Reduced fungibility and privacy: giving the option of combining multiple signature schemes instead of a single one weakens both.
  • Coverage and layer 2: which use cases are not covered by the proposal, and how does it interact with layer-2 protocols?
  • Future SNARK aggregation: how should the signature schemes be designed so they are ready for SNARK-based aggregation in a potential future soft fork? Should that even be a consideration today?
  • Signing time: how much signing time is tolerable on different platforms? Better signing benchmarks would let us reduce signature sizes significantly.
  • Reference implementation: C++, or a formal specification? In the age of LLMs, formal verification of consensus-critical code is more feasible than ever.

What’s Next?

The design space for a post-quantum upgrade to Bitcoin is large, and no single signature scheme is obviously the right choice. Even so, optimized, stateful hash-based signatures can offer better trade-offs than the standard schemes available today. They have a chance at keeping Bitcoin functional without relying on future soft forks. At the same time, research into longer-term improvements such as better lattice-based schemes, aggregation, and isogeny-based cryptography should continue in parallel.

Fortunately, the deployment question is largely orthogonal to the choice of signature scheme: a new hash-based opcode could ship via Taproot, Taproot v2, or BIP 360 pay-to-merkle-root.

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The space of useful statefulness-based optimizations to hash-based signature schemes has not been fully explored. What other optimizations using statefulness are possible? How can careful engineering guarantee the safety of stateful setups? Can layer-2 protocols directly leverage stateful signatures?

For an introduction to hash-based signatures and their parameters, see our paper Hash-based Signatures for Bitcoin. The scripts used to generate the numbers in this post, a C++ implementation of SHRINCS, a Simplicity verifier, and a draft specification are all available on GitHub. SHRINCS is already deployable in production: we have demonstrated it on Liquid, and anyone else can do the same today.


Tuesday, May 12, 2026

Red Rooms analysis

Ludovic Chevalier is clearly guilty, and Kelly Anne knows it. She is at the trial, as she states directly when asked, because she is curious and she wanted to see him in person. She is an amoral character, and her motives are ambiguous, perhaps even to herself. I don't think she's there to get her rocks off on getting Ludovic's attention. I think she is there to get a thrill from participating in something real (Lady Shallott in the tower viewing the world through her mirror catches sight of something exciting and wants to experience it first hand, instead of the mediated version she is accustomed to). I don't think she is driven by a deep seated need for justice, but I do think she wanted Camille's mother to have the video and that is why she bet everything she had to get it. I don't think she paid 21.5 bitcoin and risked her anonymity and safety to watch murder porn. I think she wanted to be the one to facilitate the video coming into Camille's mother's possession more than she wanted Camille's mother to have the video. I definitely agree with the consensus that Kelly Anne is a psychopath who lacks normal emotional responses, for the most part. Like any other mental illness, psychopathy exists on a spectrum (yes, I know the DSM 5 says it is antisocial personality disorder, shut up). I think Kelly Anne shows legitimate empathy for Clementine, and losing Clementine is the impetus for her loss of control. Once Clem is gone, she is exposed. She took a risk, and she had to pay for it. She said that when she plays poker, she identifies the emotional players and exploits them, so she acknowledges the risk inherent to emotionally motivated action, but this is what drove her to attend the trial. And then, she loses her career because of it. Both because she was emotionally motivated to attend the trial, and because she was emotionally motivated to befriend Clementine and show her the truth, which drove Clem away and put her(self) in the spot light. Her carefully controlled persona, mediated by photographers and cameras, is shattered. But it seems worth it to her. It seems she felt bored and trapped in her tower. The most visceral reaction we see from her throughout the entire movie is the moment when she wins the auction for Camille's video. Not when she watches the video. Which tells me that her motivation was not to view the content but to participate in its acquisition. Now why the fuck she dresses up like Camille, I really couldn't tell you. Maybe she feels some sense of kinship with her? They kind of look alike I guess? Maybe that to some extent is what triggered her desire to participate in this specific media circus of a trial? Of course in addition to the intersection with her skills at navigating the underbelly of the internet. I think to some extent she wanted to share in Camille's experience, no matter how fucked up that desire might be. Because it is better than the soul numbing ennui she is accustomed to. At the end of the day I think the surface level true crime culture critique analysis is shallow. I think this is more of a character study. And if there is a cultural critique it is more so of the glass pane we place between ourselves and the world, and the effects therein. Including desentization to horrendous events, and the frustration and boredom resulting from living life from the sidelines. And the crazy shit we might do to reestablish a sense of balance, and to regain our sense of being a participant rather than just a witness.

Fight me.


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