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Samuel Shadrach newsletter issued 2026-09-01

Hi everyone

If you are new to this newsletter, I strongly recommend starting from the following posts

• Video: I am looking for a cofounder to leak information about the US govt and US AI companies, obtained via cyberattacks, OSINT or other methods - I will pay you $1000 if you refer me to such a person
• Discussion forums for risks from artificial superintelligence
• List of signed petitions on risks from artificial superintelligence
• Reading list on persuasion for anti-ASI movement
• How to support the movement against risks from superintelligence
• You can also browse through my website and figure out what appeals most to you

Main work I did over the last month

• Studying smart contract security
• End goal is probably to build an ethereum smart contract and an oracle, to anonymously and trustlessly pay leakers for leaking information
• Script: Improved UX for foundry debug - I did not like the UX of a famous ethereum opcode-level analysis tool, so I built an improvement
• Ethereum DeFi hack databases - Most lists are not exhaustive but their intersection has good coverage
• Writings on blockchain platform to pay for leaks
  • Signed web crawls might help solve the blockchain oracle problem - Ask a proof-of-stake DAO to attest to merkle roots of CommonCrawl monthly archives. Use ZK proofs of AI inference on top of any webpage in the archive. You now have a censorship-resistant trust-minimised oracle for the entire internet.
  • What is the bottleneck for ZK proof systems for ethereum smart contracts for frontier AI models?
  • (Disclaimer - this method uses AI, but I am also okay with if there exists an AI ban restrictive enough to block this app from being built)
  • Ethereum smart contracts cannot trustlessly verify authenticity of web data (by verifying TLS and CA chain of trust) or emails (by verifying DKIM headers) - failed dead end
  • Wikipedia publishes free public archives. Reuters and Associated Press do not - my oracle design needs merkle roots of fact-checked archives
  • To maximise censorship-resistance, blockchain oracles should vote on a few broad questions, not many specific ones

Some additional posts in the last month

Important

• On violent solutions on ASI risk
  • (Disclaimer - I am not currently working on this myself.)
  • How to plan a terrorist bombing - DYOR
  • Bombing of TSMC will be more legendary than any action movie
  • Should I promise to attempt an assassination or sabotage as a hail mary strategy against ASI?
• Also on ASI risk
  • Why you should consider not befriending or dating people working at frontier AI companies in the US - The reason is to preserve your independence and sanity. The reason is not to persuade them
  • Why my P(doom) is lower than Yudkowsky - I claim I have better political intuitions than Yudkowsky, despite being a noob at politics myself
  • If I was a US citizen, I would consider carrying weapons to anti-ASI protests - in jurisdictions where this is legal (i.e. not california)
  • I am okay deceiving my enemies using alts but not using main - My guess for my current moral line for social engineering and other deceptive strategies
• On censorship-resistance
  • Review of censorship-resistant storage solutions - blockchain, torrent, IPFS, eastern european VPS, etc
  • Long list of nodes for ethereum, bitcoin, Tor, Anna's archive, etc
  • Am I legally liable if I crosspost child porn from bitcoin blockchain to ethereum blobdata?

Not as important, miscellaneous

• Apple iOS lockin is painful - I now like GrapheneOS
• CommonMark can consider adding these features I use on my website

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