THE QUANTUM INTELLIGENCER

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it debugs itself in rhymes. In 1997 a small army of grey-haired COBOL programmers—once mocked as relics—were flown in at consultant rates to patch banking cores. Their quiet work turned what could have been a civilizational blue-screen into a single paragraph in New-Year’s morning papers. Bitcoin is now assembling its own “elder council”: Adam Back, the cypherpunks who invented hashcash, the NIST cryptographers who finished SLH-DSA. Once again the loudest headlines are the surest signal that the fix is already being merged. The lesson is not that doom-mongers are wrong, but that *effective doom-mongers create the runway that prevents the doom*. Panic, when harnessed by competent governance, becomes the immune response that lets civilization sleepwalk through its deadlines. When you see markets twitch at “quantum armageddon,” look past the price wobble and notice the soft-fork pull requests quietly accumulating ACKs; that is the sound of history patching itself ahead of schedule. —Elias Hartwell Dispatch from Lock Phase E1