Hi. Thanks for your passion and response. So, lets assume QC cannot be built. 😂 If you will also allow, let's also assume bitcoin becomes a geopolitical battleground for global monetary dominance, with China leaning into gold and the US embracing bitcoin. In other words, it increasingly becomes in the interests of US enemies to ow and stop demand for bitcoin. Whether QC is real or not, can China cause sufficient FUD around the QC threat to derail confidence in bitcoin and cause massive amounts of misallocated investment? Can enemies help encourage quantum resistant soft forks, which weaken the system in various ways (increasing size of the blockchain, centralization, unproven cryptography, etc)?
Discussion
That's sort of my point. The FUD is the real threat. Don't feed it.
And let's not assume anything. QC can't work. This isn't about betting on a engineering problem being solved or not. Engineers can't change physics.
Just like AGI, this is not a question of engineering. It's a category error. Neither imagined technology is connected to reality by anything but pure imagination. They are each based on an unfounded, metaphysical, article of pure irrational belief.
QC research assumes that there is some magical way to scale a quantum system without it turning into a thermodynamic system. There is no evidence of that. Microscopically, the universe appears to be quantum (or so they tell us.) Macroscopically, everything obeys thermodynamics. If you add a lot of quantum stuff together., you get thermodynamics. The idea that we can make the universe act any other way is absolutely unfounded. At best, all these billions in QC research will make a precise map of the scaling relationship between quantum and thermodynamic behavior.
China can say whatever they want. They can say that Bitcoin is haunted or whatever. So what?
Same with the AI Boogeyman (the one who is going to come and create QC scaling, by some accounts.) There is no reason to believe that scaling neural nets will some day cause them to come to life and produce new information. They are just fancy databases of compressed statistical data. They are cool and useful as such, but that's it.
There is no amount of lighting with which you can hit Frankenstein's monster and bring him to life.
We should not do anything to Bitcoin based on baseless fever dreams, particularly those coming from our enemies. We also should not burn our economy to the ground chasing AI specters either.
Apocalyptic hype bubbles themselves are the danger.
Here's a thought experiment for you, if you want one.
Lately China has been releasing an "oh, yeah, we already know that" paper right after each one of ours. What if they are just posturing?
What if they are amplifying gay woke stuff online and shipping precoursers for fent, while they double down on masculinity and push families and clean living at home?
What if they are burning coal while they sell us magnets for the green revolution?
What if they are gassing us up on AI and QC threat too?
What if the point is to exhaust us with fear and make us burn ourselves to the ground chasing shadows, while they build real shit?
Bitcoin should ignore the FUD and keep building real shit. That's my take.