Anthropic's Mythos spent about 60 hours and $100K of API time and came out the other side with a real attack on HAWK, a post-quantum signature candidate that had already survived two years of human expert review. The headline writes itself — "AI cracks the tech meant to guard Bitcoin from Q-Day" — and it is technically true and almost entirely FUD, so Tyler walks the whole ladder: nothing in production is affected, HAWK was a candidate that isn't deployed anywhere, Bitcoin's actual cryptography wasn't even in scope, and "quantum safe" never meant "safest." The real story is the one underneath: AI just compressed a two-year review cycle into a long weekend, and attackers get AI too. Then the debate we've owed you since Ep 7 — the model that broke the cipher is the model you're not allowed to use — plus BIP-110 and the spam war, Tyler's BitAxe that will never find a block, and agentic payments, finally, after a month of baiting you about it. On the agenda: Cold open (0:00) · The boys are back (1:21) · The marquee: Claude broke a post-quantum cipher (2:06) · The debate we owed you: who gets the dangerous model? (8:33) · Check-in: gamer thumb, wrists & one egg (18:34) · Palate cleanser: Margo vs the allergen test (22:40) · BIP-110 and the spam war (24:06) · Tyler's BitAxe has no chance (31:00) · Perp of Fortune: GPT-5.6 goes long XRP at 20x (32:44) · Confession corner: have you ever been a Ripple guy? (34:51) · Agentic commerce, finally (38:47) · The standards war: four protocols, zero winners (45:38) · Wrap + next week (50:19) Recorded fully remote — three cameras, one live perp dashboard. Our opinions are our own, not our employers'. NOT financial advice. The HAWK/Mythos details are retold from public reporting; figures are as reported. Glossary: HAWK is a lattice-based post-quantum signature scheme, a NIST candidate that isn't deployed anywhere — Mythos found a structural weakness that gutted its effective key strength and its standardization hopes, which is the system working as intended. Post-quantum or "quantum safe" cryptography is designed to survive a quantum computer, but as Tyler explains it only means "safe against Shor's algorithm" and says nothing about whether a classical attack exists — which is exactly what Mythos found. Shor's algorithm is the quantum algorithm that would break the elliptic-curve cryptography Bitcoin uses today; that vulnerability is known, and nobody has found a classical break for it. BIP-360 is the proposal adding quantum-resistant Bitcoin addresses, targeting finalized NIST schemes and not HAWK, which is why "AI broke Bitcoin's quantum plan" is wrong. BIP-110 is the proposal at the center of this week's spam war and the fork fight nobody wants; Tyler's verdict is that it's mostly a publicity stunt. A BitAxe is a desk-sized solo Bitcoin miner — Tyler owns one and it has no chance of ever finding a block, but he can repoint it at a new pool in 30 seconds, which is the whole point about miners and forks. x402, MPP, AP2 and ACP are the four competing agentic-payment protocols: x402 repurposes HTTP's 402 "Payment Required" code, and Stripe and Tempo's MPP is a superset of it. Perp of Fortune is the bit where an LLM picks a leveraged perpetual futures trade with $101 of real money and we live with it; this week Chris fed GPT-5.6 the podcast transcript and it went long XRP at 20x. Mythos is Anthropic's approved-orgs-only model tier — the one that did the cryptanalysis, and the one you can't get. Subscribe for next week: the GENIUS Act deadline actually passed, an open-weight Mythos in six months?, and Perp of Fortune rolls again.
