Trading is fine. You can exit anytime.
This is about the life-expectancy of the protocol itself.
Discussion
One of the primary solutions Bitcoin is supposed to solve is that it will evolve and be competitive forever, or at least as long as money is needed.
In a world with quantum computation, unlimited energy, and abundance, money doesn’t serve as much of a purpose.
Idk, half of the internet crashes whenever AWS or cloud flare goes down. Bitcoin is much more resilient then the rest of the internet infrastructure encryption aside.
Unlimited energy would be a fun one, given that it'd violate the law of conservation of matter and energy.
More energy through breakthroughs perhaps, but given that we still have parts of the planet using WOOD as their primary energy source (not even coal) the risk of a post scarcity energy economy seems far fetched at best.
Even in Star Trek they needed to source dilithium to power their starships, despite having no use for gold, and the ability to send subspace transmissions.
I'd bet on getting access to the pleasure planet of Risa long before infinite energy, or even enough to make money unnecessary.
The protocol itself isn't remotely threatened by quantum. Old coins are -- the risk is that we get a sudden supply influx of 20% of the outstanding coins. That is, a one time sale. Except that when it happens, banking rails will be threatened by quantum -- unclear how anyone offloads the coins at that point.
Nah, this is paid for FUD to shake people free of their coins.
Game theory it out. As a pure thought experiment let’s say today there exits a military lab somewhere in Asia that just successfully tested a machine running 2.5k logical qubits (superconducting), 1 billion gates, whatever, key point it's enough to crack a key every hour or so, maybe 30 mins. And possible to make more.
Their goal, as part of a wider strategem, is to end Bitcoin, collapse it, cause as much panic in the west as possible.
What's their plan? How do the execute it? What happens when they do? What triggers what, and what cascades into what?
When you game theory it out you quickly realise it’s not a case of some 20 % of outstanding coins returning to the supply, we all have coffee, tomorrow is another day.
No no, it’s very bad.
Here are some things to consider
- They will have built up a supply of pre-cracked private keys to use all at once, for wallets with exposed pubkeys and the biggest balances
- For anyone with funds in a wallet that does not have an exposed pubkey, as soon as they hit 'send' the pubkey is visible to the lab.
- If the network is busy (which it certainly will be during a great panic) transactions can sit in the mempool for hours, even days.
- The lab will announce (true or not) that they can actually crack wallet keys in 10 minutes, and will pay anyone [insert low about] for their bitcoin now, or steal it on first attempt to move, your choice.
-And on and on. Add your own.
Users are terrified to move their money. If you leave it, it might be stolen later. If you move it, it is stolen now. Desperate users try to outbid the hackers by setting $5k USD transaction fees to get their funds in a pubkey hidden wallet. The lab, with its infinite stolen coin, simply sets their theft-fee even higher. The mempool fills with millions of transactions that will never clear. People break their transactions into small bits hoping some will get through. This just increases the congestion.
As the price collapses (which obviously it will) miners see the possibility they'll be hit with electricity bills they can't pay. The hash rate starts to drop off. With the hash rate in trouble the block time stretches even longer. This makes the sniper attack even more effective, as the lab has lots of time to crack a single key while a transaction sits in the frozen mempool.
By the end of the first week, the lab don't just have some coins. They have effectively destroyed the consensus reality of the asset, a knockout blow from which Bitcoin cannot recover.
This is of course a fantasy today. But it might not be a fantasy in 5 years, or 10 years. We are at 100 logical qubits, we need 2,000. That's not a huge jump. Gate numbers will move. Last month was a massive error-correction breakthrough over at Harvard. Other breakthroughs will happen. If at the time that this thought experiment vector actually exists and everything on the bitcoin side is just as it is today, well then, lights out.
Even if such quantum tech has only a 20% chance of existing in the next 10 years, why tempt fate but delaying the migration? It'll take years anyway, why not make it the #1 priority from today?
I love your story. And I wholeheartedly agree with the game theory. You should write a book with that plot. It would be very entertaining and probably encourage devs to push updates.
Couldn’t quantum also reenforce the hashing as well? Being an extremely efficient compute resource?
I just listened to Stephen Perrenod and he claims google is on the order of 1000 physical qubits and 1-10 logical cubits. Assuming an aggressive moores law they should double logical qubits about every 1-2 years. This gives us a deadline of 10 years conservatively. We should probably push a solution in the next 5 years.
He also reinforced that trad fi uses RSA and ECC and the quantum threat will actually incentivize movement *towards* Bitcoin, not away from it due to its antifragile nature.
Just depends, QuEra/Harvard ran fault tolerant algos on 96 logical qubits a couple weeks ago, error rate going down with scale, that was a shocker. Round two from that team early 2026 (trying to scale gates) could be a good indication.
It's kinda funny, so many bitcoiners super bullish on emerging tech, gene editing, AI, nuclear fusion .. except when it comes to quantum then suddenly everyone turns Amish.
I’m bullish on all of it. I think it’s an opportunity to harden and prove the antifragility of the protocol
Set up your zap wallet and I’ll zap you for that insight
Not sure why the network would be busy when the only dangerous move would be sending a tx, particularly during a time with a full mempool.
Meanwhile, this would be a very dedicated attack, and it'd be odd given how much more valuable so many other things are. Even at $1M bitcoin becomes a $20T asset. Global banking systems, nuclear launch codes, or heck, trusted trade secrets all become much more juicy targets, especially given that Bitcoin loses value dramatically in this scenario.
Given that nation states need Bitcoin more than most plebs even do (whether they realize it yet or not -- to defease their debt) this nightmare situation just doesn't seem to reflect anyone's actual incentives.
China needs Bitcoin. Bitcoin doesn’t need China.
You cannot have a currency where one entity steals 30% - 50% of the entire supply in 24 hours and it retains its value. It is guaranteed to crash. Same as a body going in to shock.
And this is just one game theory. There are 100 others. The community can try to poke little holes in them all -- or it just roll up sleeves and get to work migrating. What seems smarter?
Between P2PK and P2TR addresses combined, there's about 4.15 million BTC. Not sure where you get the 30-50% number from.
Not that I'm opposed to some new softfork to make a new address type. It'll probably have to be done eventually, and may as well be worked on sooner rather than later (though, frankly, CTV and CSFS seem a far bigger priority). It'd also not do any harm to have as long as it's done without opening the door for more inscription nonsense. Might be nice to see something used even less than taproot for a change :-D.
All right, it did occur to me I should be including reused addresses which use a hash rather than exposed pubkey. Don't have those numbers in front of me but it does seem likely we'd at least get in your range.
Yeah, hard to say exactly, but it's a lot. Enough of the supply that they'd be far too influential going forward.
Also the in-flight "sniped" transactions. The more panic the attacker causes the more congestion, so the longer it takes for transactions to clear, the more chance the lab to snipe transactions in flight. Once they see the pubkey for a big one they run the private key, they get the private key output before it's cleared, they punch in RBF with massive fees from their already stolen supply (anything less than the value of the bitcoin being transferred is profit) and they pick off some big ones. These all add up. A lot of people move their coin out of panic not knowing if their pubkey is exposed or not (not really sure what that even means).
This is why their main goal is to cause panic, chaos and critically massive congestion in the first 3 days. If they can slow it down to hours, they win big. They might also have a plan to pay off miners to slow down the hash rate.
It's actually quite a fun one to game theory out.