Weekly Roundup 04/03/26 (Two big quantum papers, Drift protocol hack, Maritime Salvage law) (EP.711)

Key Takeaways

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  Quantum computing is reaching a critical threshold for Bitcoin's security - new research from Google and Caltech has drastically lowered the estimated resource requirements and runtime needed to crack elliptic curve cryptography.

  “Their big contribution was realizing if you had a quantum computer this size, you could actually crack elliptic curves in around 10 minutes, which is how long it takes for a transaction to be included in the blockchain.”

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  The Bitcoin developer community lacks a clear quantum mitigation strategy - despite the emergence of specific resource estimates for attacks, there is currently no public roadmap or consensus on the Bitcoin mailing list for a post-quantum upgrade.

  “If you look at the Bitcoin mailing list, there's no real evidence that there's any kind of posture that Bitcoin is going to upgrade. We have to somehow eavesdrop on their private conversations to get this information, which is not very helpful.”

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  Stablecoins are rapidly displacing traditional banks in the wholesale FX market - the absence of major financial institutions in on-chain liquidity is allowing startups like OpenFX to scale to massive volumes and attract significant venture funding.

  “The FX market is just being completely upended by stablecoins right now. And the big wholesale banks are nowhere. So you're seeing these companies like OpenFX just get to tremendous scale.”

Episode Description

Matt and Nic are back for another week of news and deals. In this episode:  The significance of the new Google and Oratomic papers on quantum computing and ECC256 Why short range attacks are now part of the threat model Is Nic conflicted out from discussing quantum? What will be the fate of the Satoshi coins? What maritime law and shipwreck recovery tells us about the fate of Satoshi's coins Drift protocol is hacked Gary Gensler does not like prediction markets DATs are selling BTC Content mentioned in this episode: Cain et al, Shor's algorithm is possible with as few as 10,000 reconfigurable atomic qubits Babbush et al, Securing Elliptic Curve Cryptocurrencies against Quantum Vulnerabilities: Resource Estimates and Mitigations