After reading Carter's https://murmurationstwo.substack.com/p/bitcoin-and-the-quantum-problem-part-47f and speaking to some Bitcoiners I consider well-informed, I have come to see that the threat to bitcoin is real and is coming worth paying attention to.
On the other hand, I don't think quantum will kill bitcoin--I think it will be the final nail in the coffin for bitcoin as money for plebs, and even, for the most part, as a P2P payment tech.
This process is actually already well underway, imo. Saylor and other BTCTC are buying up all the corn from bitcoin OGs. Most new entrants to bitcoin are getting "exposure" through ETFs or BTCTCs. As far as I can tell, the enthusiasm for hardware wallets and full nodes., etc. has waned. Maybe it's just me, but I hardly hear from the likes of Raspiblitz anymore. No Citadel Dispatch episodes on running nodes, for example. Very few Citadel Dispatch episodes at all, really, and none from Bitcoin Review. At the same time, shows like "MSTR True North" are going from strength to strength. All the energy in Bitcoin right now seems to be with Saylor and those following his ingenious financial engineering with the prefs. Based on his buys, he is on track to have more than 1M bitcoin within this year. He has a cult following around him and a ton of activity/ energy on X etc.
So back to quantum. If there is already a transition from "plebs" to professionals happening in bitcoin, how much more will this accelerate due to the threat of quantum. From what I can gather from listening to https://stephanlivera.com/episode/713/ Jonas Nick on Stephan Livera, while there are quantum resistant signature schemes available, these will come with trade offs, such as potentially increased block size (or, at least, transaction fees), increased node specs (more powerful CPUs to process more complex signature scheme), and more critically, potentially breaking things like multi sig or even Lightning.
It's a complex topic which really requires strong technical knowledge to navigate. If you follow the technical details, it is possible to have reasonable assurance that your funds are safe in bitcoin, provided you use modern address types and don't reuse addresses, and you are prepared to pay whatever you need to pay to re-encumber UTXOs once the quantum resistant primitives become available. But how many plebs, with significant USD denominated sums sitting in corn, are going to be able to navigate this with calm heads? Saylor can, because he has experts around him, and because he trusts custody to professionals. If push comes to shove, he can sponsor devs and work with other industry leaders to steer the direction of hard forks and make sure his UTXOs are ultimately safe from a CRQC. Can the average pleb have the same reassurance? Or will most get tired/ panicked and just sell their bags to Saylor and other BTCTCs/ governments?
For those that went through the UASF in 2017, do you think that similar energy exists among the "plebs" today? We can't even decide whether we are on Twitter or Nostr to talk to each other.
I don't want to disrespect giants in Bitcoin, who have done far much more than me for the industry, but I have sensed for a number of years now that there is a leadership vacuum. McCormack moved on to trying to fix the UK (May the Lord be with him), and Matt and Marty seem without direction. Again, no offence to a builder like Marty, but on the latest TFTC he was criticizing Bloomberg for not taking LN payments on their website, when 1) I think even Marty gave up on that experiment on his own site and 2) No normie wants to pay for anything with Bitcoin. Cards work fine for most people. Even if they didn't, people would prefer micro payments facilitated by a USD denominated centralized service. And as for Matt, seems like he's back on X as of today, so it'd be interested to hear his latest thoughts. But at the very least, (and if the account is genuine) seems to indicate that he's backtracking on some strongly held principles and therefore he himself is recognizing a need for a change in approach. (this is not a criticism of Matt, more pointing out that, imo, and in his, apparently, he has had a couple of bad takes and gone down a couple of dead ends these last couple of years).
It seems to me that Bitcoin is growing up, the last vestiges of plebs/amateurs able to be relevant is coming to an end, and looming threats like quantum are likely to accelerate the trend towards the "adults in the room/ suits" taking over, taking all the corn, issuing credit based instruments on top, and selling the paper back to the masses. And thus, history repeats itself. You will own paper, and you will be happy.
I would be interested to hear counter points to the above.
Bitcoiners and plebs shouldn’t concern themselves with the opinion of Nic Carter.eth.
I will also add that Saylor/MSTR can fail before quantum is introduced. In that scenario, a lot of Saylor’s followers on X leveraged to the tilts on MSTR will die a very painful death. They are the ones holding paper bitcoin, not the plebs.
Bear market rationalisations are just as irrelevant as the hopium.
Bottom line: everything stable in the world is built on proof of work. Bitcoin is the ideal, the most perfect proof of work system based upon the criteria:
It will breeze past all of these short term sentiments because it's agnostic to the environment around it, like the media paradigm we live in, the tech stack we use for communications, the geopolitical landscape. Things change, tick tock next block.
If quantum is a threat bitcoin will adapt, painfully or seamlessly, and on the other side quantum will be behind us.
When was there a global decentralized triple-entry ledger with fixed supply backed by a PoW algorithm that only requires the necessary circuits, electricity and internet connection to operate?
We'll evolve past fiat, just not linearly or predictably.
Respectfully disagree. Nothing more human than fiat. As long as we have human governance we will always have fiat, imo.
I really like the lowery softwar thesis, i think once saylor has amassed the honeypot, yhe US will nationalise it and once other central banks realise there isnt enough to go round, the first mover game theory kicks in, Bitcoin staying as a pleb 2 pleb paying for coffee is like using a quantum computer to add single numbers
The governments will move, they will have to, and to get the corn the price either needs to go up to get it out of the hands of the holders, or they use violence to take it from them
Satoshi wrote peer to peer cash because the whitepaper was a few pages long and he couldn't write 50k chapters on the potential transcendent impact on humanity, so p2p it was
Like factoring 15? 😂
🤣🤣
If your bitcoin education rely on watching Citadel Dispatch and Bitcoin Review podcasts... then you learned nothing about Bitcoin until now.
Fair points. Re-reading my post, calling these (and WBD) as "giants in Bitcoin" was silly. Anyway, I would say my education in Bitcoin really is more about studying history and studying humans. The stuff Saylor was trying to explain to Danny at the end of that recent pod. 1971 was not particularly special or unique. The history of debt and debasement and monetary reset is the history of humanity.
That's good, a good starting point.
For what it's worth, I know you will never capitulate, Darth. But the Lord broke the mold when he made you. Most are made of weaker stuff.
I was born in 1971... maybe it's a sign 😂
I would tamper your quantum worries until they demonstrate they can factor numbers considerably bigger than 15....
For your other points, there are elements of truth to them, but those are all unconnected to quantum.
A better way to envision bitcoins growth, and the problems associated with such growth, is to see it how the internet itself developed.
When the internet first arrived on the scene in the late 80s / early 90s (I was there), it was ruled by a real cypher / cyber punk aesthetic. The internet was going to decentralize everything. We would all be running our own mail servers - all comms would be P2P, encrypted and secure.
As the masses started to pile into the internet in early 00's, that dream fell apart. The masses, by and large don't care about ideology, they just want something that works with the most minimal effort. So we got gmail, facebook, and youtube.
However, the original internet is still present. You can actually run your own mail server. You can still communicate securely, etc. It just takes some effort.
I see Bitcoin growing in exactly the same way, >95% of the masses will use their SQL backed custodial wallet and invest in ETFs. However the real bitcoin will still be available for those who want to use it.
I believe we will have a CRQC by 2035. I also believe Bitcoin will upgrade before then and be just fine. But, in the process, we will see the cycling of Bitcoin ownership from individuals to institutions accelerate. That is the true point of my (admittedly probably poorly written and meandering ) post.
FYI, "factoring 15" was about factoring a specific kind of composite number, the smallest whole of which is decimal fifteen. IIRC there are multiple composites that could be used as RSA moduli that were simultaneously factored by the researchers, and the interesting / worrying challenge is the question of determining whether some arbitrary RSA modulus belongs to that kind of composite, and after confirming that, interconverting from binary to quantum becomes a negligible cost.
The world is going to end, sell all your sats now
No
If the « plebs » capitulate and sell their sats to Saylor because it’s too hard to make a bitcoin transaction to a quantum resistant address, maybe they weren’t plebs to begin with. Just my two sats.
Why would transferring Bitcoin to quantum safe addresses be so difficult for plebs?
It will be the straw that breaks the camel's back for many. The FUD, etc, expense associated. Many will choose to cash out and sell their stack to Saylor et al, imo
tl;dr ... or rather, I'm gonna give you my priors before reading, and any actual counterpoints will probably end up in a separate comment due to the editing timer.
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