Electrify Everything—and Have A Backup

By: bitcoin ethereum news|2025/05/03 05:00:04

People get off a stopped high-speed AVE train near Cordoba on April 28, 2025, during a massive power ... More cut affecting the entire Iberian peninsula and the south of France. (Photo by JAVIER SORIANO / AFP) (Photo by JAVIER SORIANO/AFP via Getty Images) When the lights went out across large swaths of the Iberian Peninsula this week, the effects were swift and strange. Guests at high-end hotels couldn’t get into their rooms—not because the staff had vanished, but because the keycards didn’t work. In hostels, where old-fashioned brass keys still hang behind the front desk, the night went on more or less as usual. Toilets in some places refused to flush, kitchens in others went cold. No warm food, no coffee. A true European tragedy. Yet those with gas stovetops were still able to serve up hot meals. “We had no internet for most of the day. Power came back at around 9 pm in Madrid. Everyone was out on the streets, listening to battery-powered radios!” said Kelly Delaney, an energy expert vacationing in Spain at the time. “Hotels couldn’t check us in with no computers and no way to set up electronic key cards, and we had to scramble and find a hostel that used traditional keys. I have never thought about keys. Maybe some things should not be linked to electricity.” As the blackout dragged on for hours, Spaniards did what Spaniards do: they took to the streets. There was music, there were impromptu fiestas. In a country with a long tradition of resilience, the spirit stayed high even as the grid stayed down. But this event offers a glimpse into a larger truth: running the grid of the future—especially one powered increasingly by renewable energy—is not going to be seamless. There will be hiccups. And when everything is electrified, those hiccups hit harder. History reminds us that even the brightest minds can trip the switch. In 1965, Thomas Edison’s former company, by then Consolidated Edison, was at the center of a cascading failure that plunged 30 million people in the northeastern U.S. into darkness. The blackout wasn’t caused by malicious actors or massive storms—but by a faulty relay. Even high-tech systems are only as resilient as their weakest link. Look to South Africa for a more persistent warning. The country’s grid struggles are not due to a lack of renewables or fossil fuels per se, but mismanagement. South Africans endured an average of 3.71 hours of load-shedding per day in 2023. When things fall apart, it’s not always the energy mix that’s to blame—it’s how you run the system. Electrifying everything is still one of the fastest and cheapest ways to cut emissions, especially when the power comes from clean sources. According to the International Energy Agency, electrification of transport and heating could reduce global CO2 emissions by nearly 4 gigatons per year by 2050. That’s the equivalent of eliminating the emissions of the entire European Union. Still, some sectors—heavy industry, aviation—remain stubbornly hard to electrify. There is no silver bullet and running the grid on volatile renewables will have its challenges. In addition to improving how we manage the grid, which was focus of most analyses to date, there are also shades of gray in deciding what should be electrified. While hospitals and military bases usually have backup power, many everyday tools that once worked manually now rely entirely on electricity. For example, Tesla, for all its high-tech wizardry, still includes a manual door release in its cars. In a pinch, you can always get out. Contrast that with the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack in 2021. The pipeline couldn’t operate because the control systems were offline—systems that, not so long ago, could be run manually. This isn’t just a technical issue—it’s an economic one. Maintaining manual options costs money. Do hotels need a physical master key for every door? Should we keep horses in the barn just in case there is another oil embargo? If your system works 100% of the time, redundancy seems wasteful. But in a world of cyber threats, blackouts, and system overloads, we’re beginning to see that resilience matters. The silver lining? We’re having this conversation now. We’re learning from Iberia, from South Africa, and from many other electric grids around the world. Electrify everything—but leave a hatch open, just in case. In energy, as in life, it’s always wise to have a backup plan. Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/annabroughel/2025/05/02/iberian-blackout-electrify-everything-and-have-a-backup/

The X Chat will be available for download on the App Store this Friday. The media has already covered the feature list, including self-destructing messages, screenshot prevention, 481-person group chats, Grok integration, and registration without a phone number, positioning it as the "Western WeChat." However, there are three questions that have hardly been addressed in any reports.

There is a sentence on X's official help page that is still hanging there: "If malicious insiders or X itself cause encrypted conversations to be exposed through legal processes, both the sender and receiver will be completely unaware."

Question One: Is this encryption the same as Signal's encryption?

No. The difference lies in where the keys are stored.

In Signal's end-to-end encryption, the keys never leave your device. X, the court, or any external party does not hold your keys. Signal's servers have nothing to decrypt your messages; even if they were subpoenaed, they could only provide registration timestamps and last connection times, as evidenced by past subpoena records.

X Chat uses the Juicebox protocol. This solution divides the key into three parts, each stored on three servers operated by X. When recovering the key with a PIN code, the system retrieves these three shards from X's servers and recombines them. No matter how complex the PIN code is, X is the actual custodian of the key, not the user.

This is the technical background of the "help page sentence": because the key is on X's servers, X has the ability to respond to legal processes without the user's knowledge. Signal does not have this capability, not because of policy, but because it simply does not have the key.

The following illustration compares the security mechanisms of Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, and X Chat along six dimensions. X Chat is the only one of the four where the platform holds the key and the only one without Forward Secrecy.

The significance of Forward Secrecy is that even if a key is compromised at a certain point in time, historical messages cannot be decrypted because each message has a unique key. Signal's Double Ratchet protocol automatically updates the key after each message, a mechanism lacking in X Chat.

After analyzing the X Chat architecture in June 2025, Johns Hopkins University cryptology professor Matthew Green commented, "If we judge XChat as an end-to-end encryption scheme, this seems like a pretty game-over type of vulnerability." He later added, "I would not trust this any more than I trust current unencrypted DMs."

From a September 2025 TechCrunch report to being live in April 2026, this architecture saw no changes.

In a February 9, 2026 tweet, Musk pledged to undergo rigorous security tests of X Chat before its launch on X Chat and to open source all the code.

As of the April 17 launch date, no independent third-party audit has been completed, there is no official code repository on GitHub, the App Store's privacy label reveals X Chat collects five or more categories of data including location, contact info, and search history, directly contradicting the marketing claim of "No Ads, No Trackers."

Issue 2: Does Grok know what you're messaging in private?

Not continuous monitoring, but a clear access point.

For every message on X Chat, users can long-press and select "Ask Grok." When this button is clicked, the message is delivered to Grok in plaintext, transitioning from encrypted to unencrypted at this stage.

This design is not a vulnerability but a feature. However, X Chat's privacy policy does not state whether this plaintext data will be used for Grok's model training or if Grok will store this conversation content. By actively clicking "Ask Grok," users are voluntarily removing the encryption protection of that message.

There is also a structural issue: How quickly will this button shift from an "optional feature" to a "default habit"? The higher the quality of Grok's replies, the more frequently users will rely on it, leading to an increase in the proportion of messages flowing out of encryption protection. The actual encryption strength of X Chat, in the long run, depends not only on the design of the Juicebox protocol but also on the frequency of user clicks on "Ask Grok."

Issue 3: Why is there no Android version?

X Chat's initial release only supports iOS, with the Android version simply stating "coming soon" without a timeline.

In the global smartphone market, Android holds about 73%, while iOS holds about 27% (IDC/Statista, 2025). Of WhatsApp's 3.14 billion monthly active users, 73% are on Android (according to Demand Sage). In India, WhatsApp covers 854 million users, with over 95% Android penetration. In Brazil, there are 148 million users, with 81% on Android, and in Indonesia, there are 112 million users, with 87% on Android.

WhatsApp's dominance in the global communication market is built on Android. Signal, with a monthly active user base of around 85 million, also relies mainly on privacy-conscious users in Android-dominant countries.

X Chat circumvented this battlefield, with two possible interpretations. One is technical debt; X Chat is built with Rust, and achieving cross-platform support is not easy, so prioritizing iOS may be an engineering constraint. The other is a strategic choice; with iOS holding a market share of nearly 55% in the U.S., X's core user base being in the U.S., prioritizing iOS means focusing on their core user base rather than engaging in direct competition with Android-dominated emerging markets and WhatsApp.

These two interpretations are not mutually exclusive, leading to the same result: X Chat's debut saw it willingly forfeit 73% of the global smartphone user base.

Elon Musk's "Super App"

This matter has been described by some: X Chat, along with X Money and Grok, forms a trifecta creating a closed-loop data system parallel to the existing infrastructure, similar in concept to the WeChat ecosystem. This assessment is not new, but with X Chat's launch, it's worth revisiting the schematic.

X Chat generates communication metadata, including information on who is talking to whom, for how long, and how frequently. This data flows into X's identity system. Part of the message content goes through the Ask Grok feature and enters Grok's processing chain. Financial transactions are handled by X Money: external public testing was completed in March, opening to the public in April, enabling fiat peer-to-peer transfers via Visa Direct. A senior Fireblocks executive confirmed plans for cryptocurrency payments to go live by the end of the year, holding money transmitter licenses in over 40 U.S. states currently.

Every WeChat feature operates within China's regulatory framework. Musk's system operates within Western regulatory frameworks, but he also serves as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). This is not a WeChat replica; it is a reenactment of the same logic under different political conditions.

The difference is that WeChat has never explicitly claimed to be "end-to-end encrypted" on its main interface, whereas X Chat does. "End-to-end encryption" in user perception means that no one, not even the platform, can see your messages. X Chat's architectural design does not meet this user expectation, but it uses this term.

X Chat consolidates the three data lines of "who this person is, who they are talking to, and where their money comes from and goes to" in one company's hands.

The help page sentence has never been just technical instructions.

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Before using Musk's "Western WeChat" X Chat, you need to understand these three questions