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A prominent venture capitalist who helped fund quantum hardware research is now warning the bitcoin community that it's focused on the wrong vulnerability. Andrew Gault argues the real quantum threat isn't cracking individual wallet keys — it's something structural and far harder to patch. Google's own security team quietly signaled the same concern back in March, which suggests this isn't fringe thinking.
Shifting to surveillance, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has quietly signed a twenty-five million dollar contract with a company called Bi Two Technologies to deploy iris scanning biometrics. That means federal immigration agents will soon be collecting eye scans alongside the facial recognition tools already in use — a significant expansion of biometric data collection that has received almost no public scrutiny.
And on a more hopeful note, MIT scientists have found a cheaper, more efficient way to extract lithium — the material at the heart of nearly every battery we rely on. The inspiration, remarkably, came from a bathroom renovation project. If it scales, the method could meaningfully reduce the world's dependence on Chinese lithium supply chains, which currently dominate the global market.
Those are the stories worth watching today. Keep surfing. Tech Beat out.
