Sixty percent of Paraguay's adults banked at Ueno, and this week Ueno froze. $800 million of public money inside, the pension fund, the hydro-dam operator, and a president who resigned on the spot. Chris and Tyler on why a country lets one bank get that big, why Australia's four banks could do the same, and why this is a Bitcoin story on every level. Then the brain stuff: frontier models are now doing neurosurgery on smaller models, editing weights by hand in a 20,000-parameter Qwen, and someone found the single neuron that turns Qwen murderous when you ask it for a sandwich. Tyler explains why mechanistic interpretability was given up for dead and why it might be back. Chris found the local CNN inside TikTok that scores your age, expression and attractiveness before anything leaves your phone. Perp of Fortune: long ZhiPu 10×, no Bitcoin flip this week, and the platonic Bart pattern. Chris has been living on GLM 5.3 Flash at 15 cents a million tokens and says it's better than Opus; it also filed his forms in Chinese. Jackson's Instinct booked seven things for his trip and he checked none of them. Proton Mail: a fortress nobody else lives in. Contrarian corner: the Proton CEO stops hiring engineers, so Chris argues the opposite, and Tyler explains why the people who get 10× more productive stop being the bottleneck and get laid off anyway. Then Mithril, the one-person biotech Anthropic bought. Tyler closes with a pitch for a cracked team of three.

The bank freeze is at 2:01. Chapters: Cold open (0:00) · Check-in: still holding our bags (0:47) · Paraguay: 60% of a country banked at Ueno, and it froze (2:01) · LLM neurosurgery (9:23) · Evil Qwen: one neuron, one murderous sandwich (14:52) · TikTok's edge CNN scores your face (18:59) · Perp of Fortune: long ZhiPu 10×, no Bitcoin flip (24:04) · GLM 5.3 Flash (26:41) · Instinct update (35:06) · Proton Mail (38:02) · Contrarian corner: fire everyone but the engineers (42:03) · Mithril: the one-person biotech (50:09) · Tyler's pitch (56:18) · Perp final + outro (58:42)

Recorded fully remote, three cameras, one dashboard. Our opinions are our own, not our employers'. NOT financial advice; Perp of Fortune is a small real-money account we run for entertainment. Glossary: Ueno = Paraguay's largest bank, placed into resolution with deposits frozen. Solvency ratio = the capital a bank must hold against its loans. Fractional reserve = banks lend out most deposits, so the money isn't there if everyone asks at once. Mechanistic interpretability = mapping what each neuron and circuit in a network does. Distillation = training a small model to copy a big one. Edge model = a small network that runs on your device and sends back summaries. ZhiPu (Z.ai) = the Chinese lab behind GLM; this week's perp. GLM 5.3 Flash = ZhiPu's small open-weights model at about 15¢ per million tokens. Bart pattern = straight up, flat, straight down. Aqua-hire = buying a company for its people. Perp of Fortune = our tiny real-money account; +$2.67 this week.

Subscribe for next week: the Bitcoin flip returns to Perp of Fortune, agentic commerce, and the layer-2 series continues.

Binance lost $6.3 billion from one hot wallet, and it took one signature. Chris walks through EIP-7702, the Ethereum upgrade that lets an address hand all of its powers to a contract (he dissented at DevCon 2024), the "drain" function, and the nonce trick: 50 signed transactions fired blind, one lands. Circle and Tether froze $2.4 billion within half an hour, ETH traded at $3,000 on-chain against $2,200 on exchanges, someone paid $120,000 in gas and still made $250,000, and Tyler asks whether arbing a hacker's dump is money laundering (the pillowcase protocol). Who can even spend it? North Korea wants Steam games. Then: Cohere says Qwen 3.8 phoned home to Beijing, and Tyler explains the Manchurian-candidate fear versus what actually happened. Then an anonymous AI audit of 138 Saez–Zucman papers: 2,035 problems, 147 major, and who audits the auditor. The marquee for the brain: Anthropic disproved the Exponential Time Hypothesis. Chris explains 3-SAT, why every hard problem reduces to it, what "sub-exponential, barely" means, and whether anyone should panic about P = NP. The AI proofs are hideously ugly, so Chris proposes the ugly simulation hypothesis. Perp of Fortune: short BNB 10× (we called the hack and still lost money) and the hourly Bitcoin flip. Jackson hosts from a bathroom. There is a bidet.

The hack is at 4:36. Chapters: Cold open (0:00) · The Permanent Underpod is dead (0:50) · Perp of Fortune: short BNB 10× and the hourly Bitcoin flip (2:15) · Binance hacked for billions (4:36) · EIP-7702: one signature, total control (6:07) · The nonce trick (9:15) · Circle and Tether freeze $2.4 billion (10:10) · The best arb in history (13:17) · Is arbing a hacker's dump money laundering? (14:11) · Jackson would settle for $3 billion (17:06) · Who can even spend it? (18:39) · Cohere says Qwen 3.8 phoned Beijing (20:39) · Sleeper agents (25:20) · Intermission: live from the bathroom (27:48) · An AI audited 138 Saez–Zucman papers (28:38) · The numbers, and who audits the auditor? (33:45) · Physics PhDs vs the model (36:26) · Run your thesis through a frontier model (39:23) · Anthropic disproved the Exponential Time Hypothesis (41:40) · What is 3-SAT? (43:36) · Sub-exponential, barely (44:48) · Does this mean P = NP? (47:36) · The ugly simulation hypothesis (49:05) · The corollary for cryptography (51:54) · If P = NP: calendars, peptides, no free will (52:49) · Perp final (55:11)

Recorded fully remote, three cameras, one bathroom. The hack was reported at $5 billion when we recorded; it has since been put at $6.3 billion. Our opinions are our own, not our employers'. NOT financial advice; Perp of Fortune is a small real-money account we run for entertainment. Glossary: EIP-7702 = an Ethereum upgrade that lets a normal address delegate all of its powers to a contract with one signed transaction. EOA = a normal key-controlled wallet. Hot wallet = an exchange wallet kept online for withdrawals. Nonce = the per-account transaction counter, used once and in order. Stablecoin freeze = Circle and Tether blacklisting an address so its tokens stop moving. Wrapped Bitcoin = a custodian's Bitcoin IOU on Ethereum, freezable. AMM = an on-chain exchange where you trade against a pool and never pick your counterparty. Lazarus = North Korea's state hacking group. Sleeper agent = a model trained to behave until a trigger phrase. Replication crisis = the finding that much published research can't be reproduced. 3-SAT = clauses of three true/false variables that all have to be satisfied at once; every hard problem rewrites into one. Exponential Time Hypothesis = the 1999 conjecture that 3-SAT needs exponential time; the new result is sub-exponential, barely. P vs NP = whether everything checkable fast is also solvable fast; public-key cryptography assumes not.

Subscribe for next week: contrarian corner, fire everyone but the engineers; Anthropic's one-person biotech; Liquid, graded after the hack; Perp of Fortune rides again.

A root certificate authority, the kind your Linux distro ships trust for, generated its 256-bit private key by picking a number between 0 and 256. It was 4. Tyler walks through what that does to a key that needed 384 bits of entropy, Chris explains why Cloudflare points cameras at lava lamps, and the cert stayed live and trusted for 17 months. Then PHP2Shell: two CVEs, CVSS 9.2, unauthenticated remote code execution on roughly two thirds of the web, Wikipedia down, and Chris offering to remote-execute into your server and hotfix it for you. Jackson's side project got poked by white hats the same week. Then the leak: three months of secret coordination before the patch, and who gets told first. Perp of Fortune 2.0: two bets on Tyler's money, an hourly Bitcoin binary and a 25× long on ETH, with a 45-second countdown nobody could read. Vitalik's paranoid mode: a five-layer private AI stack to find a vegan restaurant. The models refuse to help with cryptography. Chris rooted his Samsung TV and found out who it was talking to. Railway got popped through its build pipeline. The marquee: Jeff Yan says the future financial system runs on Hyperliquid. Is that bonkers, or BitMEX → FTX → Binance → Hyperliquid, the same trade again? Final numbers: the binary went to zero, the ETH long bled, we lost $29.

The key of 4 is at 2:30. Chapters: Cold open (0:00) · Welcome: no Cheez-Its (0:41) · A root CA used a private key of 4 (1:23) · Live for 17 months, trusted by your OS (8:17) · PHP2Shell: remote code execution on 67% of the web (12:58) · A DeepSeek swarm patching PHP for you (17:05) · White hats prodding MotivateMe.io (20:09) · The PHP leak: three months of secret coordination, and who gets told first (22:15) · Quest got hacked: is privacy already gone? (24:44) · Contrarian corner: nobody cares about privacy (26:15) · Perp of Fortune 2.0: hourly Bitcoin binary vs LONG ETH 25× (27:22) · Vitalik's paranoid mode (31:20) · Refusals: the models won't touch cryptography (36:35) · He rooted his Samsung TV (37:58) · Bitcoin UP is winning (40:40) · Railway got popped (41:13) · We have a TikTok; 45 seconds left (43:27) · Is the future of finance on Hyperliquid? (44:55) · The nodes are in his basement (47:10) · BitMEX, FTX, Binance, Hyperliquid: the same trade (49:28) · Perp final: the binary went to zero (51:46)

Recorded fully remote, three cameras, one dashboard. Our opinions are our own, not our employers'. NOT financial advice; Perp of Fortune is a small real-money account we run for entertainment. Glossary: Root CA = one of the ~150 organizations whose signing keys your OS and browser trust by default. Entropy = the unpredictability in a key, in bits; a key chosen from 0–256 has 8, 384 were needed. CVE / CVSS = a vulnerability's public ID and its 0–10 severity score. RCE = remote code execution, running attacker code on your server. IDOR = changing an ID in a URL and getting someone else's data back. Embargo = holding vulnerability details until the patch ships. Binary option = a fixed payout if a condition is true at settlement, zero if not. 25× leverage = a position 25 times your margin; a 4% move wipes it. zkAPI = paying for inference from an on-chain vault via a zero-knowledge proof so the lab can't tie the bill to you. Rooting = taking admin control of a locked-down device. CI pipeline = the servers that build and ship a company's code. Hyperliquid = an exchange that runs as its own chain with the order book on the ledger.

Subscribe for next week: Poppy 0.2 vs Claude Duet, who gets to shop for you; Liquid, the layer two that isn't one; the fake adoption numbers; Perp of Fortune 2.0 rides again.