Amazing research, thank you for sharing it. Hopefully this piece gets the attention it deserves (from the devs mentioned especially). Quantum risk is absolutely affecting the Bitcoin price right now (people are selling due to the perceived risk), and ultimately that impacts Bitcoin's mission.
Thanks for having the courage to write and publish this piece and taking it largely upon yourself to push for the necessary changes ahead of time. Many, many Bitcoiners appreciate it.
Thanks for bringing the receipts Nic. Will be interesting to see if aggregating these opinions will cause the devs to reassess or double down.
After reading this I think it might be a fun exercise to go over my crypto portfolio and do an assessment of which chains are actively pursuing PQ. Might create a "Quantum Risk Discount" into my ongoing purchasing of coins.
Be very scared BTC whales. This will likely shift the amount I'm buying every paycheck from $33 down to $25. You have been warned.
When I went to my first LA Bitdevs and looked at the room of people that had no understanding of what soft power or politics was it genuinely did make me bearish for a little bit. How is this thing going to clash with the highest levels of power in this world and then what will happen?
If Pieter Wuille is head and shoulders most influential dev, can we compel him either logically, financially, or otherwise to get the consortium in line to focus and execute on this?
We all don't want the coins to go down the drain, and am sure if any holder knew this was the reality we were facing that we would throw in some $$ (in btc) into a pool that is effectively an insurance pool to compel someone to solve the problem by X time by some measurement. Perhaps we contribute to a smart contract fund that enables this that is a compelling amount of $ that is $10-100 per holder but adds up to $1-2B to solve this problem by 1/1/27 or 1/1/28 or something.
I was thinking that a polymarket or a kalshi on BTC quantum q-day could be a way of getting people’s attention, but it probably would backfire and state a 4% probability, and reinforce their bias to do very little.
Thanks for pushing Nic, I see your X comments as well and you do considerable work to move the things forward. The only thing I do not see yet in the comments is the scaling issue when post quantum signatures are 5x-265x bigger than ECDSA and that will decrease tx throughput in bitcoin to a miniscule scale.
You are right. To maintain throughput we will have to do a block size increase. The good news is we are making progress reducing PQ signatures esp hash based. That has been one of the few strong efforts by the Bitcoin community. The other good news is that Bitcoin has a lot of slack in terms of blocksize capability. Other blockchains have shown us that we can increase 10x without a problem
It would be great to see some real talk about like... the Satoshi coins.
Do I think Bitcoin should deal with the quantum problem? Yes.
In doing that, do I think they should nuke a bunch of coins that are insecure and haven't moved in years? I don't know if I'm exist it, but I need to hear some more justification of that kind of move.
That's very The DAO fix coded, no?
I have extremely mixed feelings about "securing" coins that no one has touched in a long time. Sure if that supply came online it would depress price for a minute but...
Seems like the principled move
It seems hard for me to believe that if the devs decided to "protect" some "lost coins" they would INEVITABLY pick some that actually are still controlled
Also... some of us don't think Satoshi is actually gone. If he wants to dump those he could just do it...
I definitely agree that option b is the best, my understanding is that it's mainly older addresses that are affected so it makes sense that it would be those people's responsibility to move to a better address. And I don't hate the treasure hunt of the competition between "good" "bad" "neutral" actors trying to get satoshi's coins, I lean towards him not being alive.
Amazing research, thank you for sharing it. Hopefully this piece gets the attention it deserves (from the devs mentioned especially). Quantum risk is absolutely affecting the Bitcoin price right now (people are selling due to the perceived risk), and ultimately that impacts Bitcoin's mission.
Thanks for having the courage to write and publish this piece and taking it largely upon yourself to push for the necessary changes ahead of time. Many, many Bitcoiners appreciate it.
Very insightful. I hope this helps btc devs to take PQ more seriously.
Thanks for bringing the receipts Nic. Will be interesting to see if aggregating these opinions will cause the devs to reassess or double down.
After reading this I think it might be a fun exercise to go over my crypto portfolio and do an assessment of which chains are actively pursuing PQ. Might create a "Quantum Risk Discount" into my ongoing purchasing of coins.
Be very scared BTC whales. This will likely shift the amount I'm buying every paycheck from $33 down to $25. You have been warned.
When I went to my first LA Bitdevs and looked at the room of people that had no understanding of what soft power or politics was it genuinely did make me bearish for a little bit. How is this thing going to clash with the highest levels of power in this world and then what will happen?
If Pieter Wuille is head and shoulders most influential dev, can we compel him either logically, financially, or otherwise to get the consortium in line to focus and execute on this?
We all don't want the coins to go down the drain, and am sure if any holder knew this was the reality we were facing that we would throw in some $$ (in btc) into a pool that is effectively an insurance pool to compel someone to solve the problem by X time by some measurement. Perhaps we contribute to a smart contract fund that enables this that is a compelling amount of $ that is $10-100 per holder but adds up to $1-2B to solve this problem by 1/1/27 or 1/1/28 or something.
we can't make them do anything. they choose what they work on. the ones that have corporate sponsors don't even get bossed around, normally.
we just have to persuade them that they should assign a higher risk value to this.
I was thinking that a polymarket or a kalshi on BTC quantum q-day could be a way of getting people’s attention, but it probably would backfire and state a 4% probability, and reinforce their bias to do very little.
Thanks for pushing Nic, I see your X comments as well and you do considerable work to move the things forward. The only thing I do not see yet in the comments is the scaling issue when post quantum signatures are 5x-265x bigger than ECDSA and that will decrease tx throughput in bitcoin to a miniscule scale.
You are right. To maintain throughput we will have to do a block size increase. The good news is we are making progress reducing PQ signatures esp hash based. That has been one of the few strong efforts by the Bitcoin community. The other good news is that Bitcoin has a lot of slack in terms of blocksize capability. Other blockchains have shown us that we can increase 10x without a problem
So what do you think is the way forward?
BIP360 would be a good start
more concretely, what Arthur says here: https://x.com/ArthurB/status/2019473937281773932
It would be great to see some real talk about like... the Satoshi coins.
Do I think Bitcoin should deal with the quantum problem? Yes.
In doing that, do I think they should nuke a bunch of coins that are insecure and haven't moved in years? I don't know if I'm exist it, but I need to hear some more justification of that kind of move.
That's very The DAO fix coded, no?
I have extremely mixed feelings about "securing" coins that no one has touched in a long time. Sure if that supply came online it would depress price for a minute but...
Seems like the principled move
It seems hard for me to believe that if the devs decided to "protect" some "lost coins" they would INEVITABLY pick some that actually are still controlled
Also... some of us don't think Satoshi is actually gone. If he wants to dump those he could just do it...
Yeah.
Bitcoin WILL HAVE TO either
a) do something completely unprecedented (DAO "irregular state change" x 10) and violate the property rights of the system or
b) suffer and injection of 10% of system liquidity into the hands of an unknown and possibly malevolent assailant
there is no plan c. (unless we do what I wrote about in my short story)
both are very bad outcomes.
Maybe is the lack of urgency or willingness to discuss because the devs on this list don't care about price and option b isn't that bad in their eyes
There is a little bit of an option C.
Satoshi is not actually gone and when the fix is deployed he uses it to move his hoard? Could be!
(it's a little bit because that's not all the lost coins, but it is a lot of them)
Philosophically, I feel like someone needs to convince me that B isn't the best option in terms of provable neutrality of the chain
Yes, it would hurt price. Not forever. Undermining neutrality could hurt it worse tho.
I definitely agree that option b is the best, my understanding is that it's mainly older addresses that are affected so it makes sense that it would be those people's responsibility to move to a better address. And I don't hate the treasure hunt of the competition between "good" "bad" "neutral" actors trying to get satoshi's coins, I lean towards him not being alive.