No offense Zoltan, but being an economist does not give me any confidence in your analysis of cryptography. Sure, Bitcoin is part of the economy, but the underlying technology is cryptography and math.

What a moron. His last name seems perfectly apt.

Can someone explain to me why this guy opinions get attention? Did he invent something? Build a business? Have a rich intellectual career? Made a killing in the stock market?

I am not being sarcastic, because he really sounds like an idiot for tons of stuff he spews out, perhaps everything. Reminds me of propaganda tv hosts in the Middle East - no expertise in anything but full of “wisdom” providing cope for the ruling class.

Why is he famous?

Lol

Generally, between 10% and 13% (fluctuates in the past few years) of Bitcoin is held on exchanges. This Bitcoin is probably fair game for 6102s.

Gold is wayyyyy worse though as far as custody centralization.

People talk about the Blackrock ETF as a centralization risk, but I see all Bitcoin not being self custodied as basically 6102-able anywho. Don't know if it will change the percentage much (though a decent price increase will naturally cause more people to take profits; last bull market being cut short by the China mining ban and the macro climate caused a dampened NGU) This may pull some more coins out of self custody (Unfortunately). But what's pretty crazy is that a few weeks ago, coins on exchanges were at 6.4%(!) Just because of all the SEC stuff, and people wanting to get coins off exchanges. Soooo. Who knows.

Amazon, FedEx, UPS and others go by my house multiple times per day. I order something, it arrives the next day. The mail carrier comes by once a day and things are received several days later. Oh, and rates go up tomorrow.

The government cannot even crack the code to deliver the mail on time.

Government cracking Bitcoin private keys?

I think we're okay.

Clearly this guy doesn’t know how incredibly to find a private key WITH a balance

Zoltan needs to learn a bit more

Any idiot that do not know much about code and protocols can say this. Protocols cannot be banned! Protocols will always resist!

Even if we are to take this seriously if they could brute force private keys, how long would it take before someone watching it reports coins are moving that they didn't sign? How much would it cost do perform an attack, so do you go for as many addresses or 1 big one IE satoshis?

If it's purely to take down the network, it remains to be seen how much damage they can do and how long they can sustain it for

Worst case, theres always snapshots that can be taken for a hard fork

I guess a breakthrough could happen but it would require an entity who just wanted to make BTC go to zero. That would be the only end result.