Managing Chaos in Atoms and Markets: Michael Egorov on Physics, Liquidations, and Financial Engineering Shoal Signal Ep. 19 with @newmichwill, founder of @CurveFinance and @yieldbasis, hosted by @zaddycoin We cover how cooling atoms to 100 nanokelvins taught him to trust an invariant instead of a price, why he took impermanent loss on a trade on purpose, the half year he sat in liquidation on purpose to test Curve, and why nuclear fusion gets solved sooner than the field expects. 0:00 Photons look like giant cucumbers 0:58 What coherence time actually is 4:46 Bose-Einstein condensate and laser cooling 8:47 A qubit that held for seconds 11:36 From ideal atoms to ideal markets 13:50 The invariant is the only signal 15:08 Control systems in the lab and DeFi 16:42 Quantum finance and prices tunneling 18:49 A toy universe made of vortices 21:18 Why there is no antimatter around us 23:57 Crypto as the revolution in money 25:29 Cycles from Mt. Gox to meme coins 30:40 Where retail's next opportunity sits 33:36 The Web3 promise that never landed 35:28 Why crypto fits agents better than humans 39:09 Working only on impossible problems 40:00 Solving impermanent loss with Yield Basis 40:48 Reversible liquidation in Curve 42:26 Half a year in liquidation on purpose 45:42 Where the risk actually sits 49:45 Paying authors when AI trains on books 53:28 Energy as the next breakthrough 57:17 Two roads to fusion 1:03:33 Thorium and the economics of nuclear 1:08:13 Where the alpha is 1:10:21 Turning mercury into gold in San Francisco