What if adversaries decrypt years of harvested encrypted traffic?
Revealed mass decryption of harvest-now-decrypt-later stockpiles is an espionage/confidence event with real risk-off teeth — exposed government and corporate secrets trigger a scramble; VIX up, high-beta sold. No direct analogue; it rhymes with the Snowden-2013 trust shock in scope but with sharper market immediacy. The +9% VIX is at the high end — fade if the disclosure is historical-only with no live operational impact.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 1–3 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. Adversaries reveal decryption of years of stockpiled encrypted government and corporate traffic, igniting a crypto-migration panic. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.