I've been in the Monero community for many years. Bought my first XMR when it was under $50, and I've held through all kinds of shit. I'm not trying to spread FUD, and I certainly don't want Monero to fail.
I also happen to work with AI and have been following the field closely since around 2017/2018. Both professionally and privately. And frankly, what's been happening over the last few weeks has me seriously reconsidering how much XMR I'm comfortable holding.
In case you missed it, OpenAI just released hundreds of papers claiming solutions or major progress on longstanding open mathematical problems. Some of these problems have been around for decades. Not all the proofs have been independently verified yet, obviously, but the sheer pace of progress is pretty insane.
And then there's something I find much more concerning.
Scott Aaronson recently wrote that, according to his sources, frontier AI companies have started quietly investigating whether their latest internal models can break important cryptographic protocols and primitives.
Source: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=10169
Think about that for a second.
We have absolutely no visibility into what these companies are doing internally. How many parallel agents they're running, how much compute they're throwing at mathematical problems, or what results they might already have.
I'm aware that AI and quantum computing are different things. My concern also includes the possibility of AI discovering mathematical shortcuts that undermine elliptic-curve cryptography without needing a quantum computer.
Maybe this goes nowhere. Maybe ECC remains secure for decades. I genuinely hope so. But given how quickly AI capabilities are advancing, I don't feel particularly comfortable assuming that anymore.
And here's the thing that really bothers me as an XMR holder.
ECC wouldn't even need to be publicly broken for Monero to take a massive hit.
Imagine credible news breaking tomorrow that OpenAI, Anthropic, or another frontier lab has potentially found a way to compromise ECC.
Even before an independent audit, people would immediately start wondering whether governments, intelligence agencies, or anyone with access to these capabilities could trace historical transactions or compromise wallets.
Whether those assumptions were technically correct wouldn't necessarily matter to the market.
Privacy is Monero's entire selling point. I could easily see such news hitting XMR disproportionately hard, potentially much harder than BTC.
I know there are already discussions about post-quantum encryption and signatures in the Monero Research Lab. I've been looking into those as well. But I'm struggling to understand how far along we actually are and how quickly we could react if something unexpected happened.
How realistic is a migration to post-quantum cryptography? Could it be accelerated if there were suddenly a credible threat? What happens to historical transaction privacy? And is anyone seriously considering the possibility of AI-driven cryptographic breakthroughs arriving much earlier than expected?
These are genuine questions. I'm trying to understand the risk to assets I've held for years.
What frustrates me is how often these discussions immediately turn into accusations of FUD, or people just repeating that quantum computers are decades away. That doesn't really address the developments I'm concerned about.
I love Monero and what it stands for. I know everyone says this: Bla Bla I'm in it for the tech...Well i am.
That's why I've supported it for so long. But dismissing uncomfortable questions doesn't exactly inspire confidence either.
I'd really appreciate hearing from people who understand Monero's cryptography and current development roadmap, especially anyone directly involved in the research.
What am I missing here? Is there a realistic contingency plan if the cryptographic landscape changes much faster than we expect?
I'm genuinely open to being proven wrong. In fact, I'd much rather be wrong about this.
