Nic Carter: Quantum Threatens $600B of Bitcoin

“By 2035? 70 to 80 percent. Maybe higher. By 2030, I would say 100 percent possible, 20 to 5 to 30 percent. There are many hundreds of millions of dollars that have been deployed with this belief in mind. So you don't really have to trust me. You have to trust, well, there's actually institutional investors out there that genuinely believe this, and we're able to convince their IC to put hundreds of millions of dollars into this concept.”

“Satoshi's coins are in an insecure format, and it's weird that Satoshi left them like that, because Satoshi was aware of this risk. But if Satoshi had really cared about the risk, Satoshi would have not left a million to two million coins laying about. It's nuts. Like in 2010, Satoshi couldn't have known that 15 years later, as it turns out, it's impossible to upgrade Bitcoin.”

“Bitcoin developers making Taproot not quantum-resistant is the craziest thing that's ever happened. I went back and I looked at the discussion. They knew. Luke Dash raised this objection at the time and said, hey guys, by the way, Taproot addresses are vulnerable to quantum. This is 2021. At that point, we did know that quantum would happen eventually. So what the hell were they thinking?”

“One out of 100. So you fail at 50 percent, right? Anything below that is an F. They mostly don't think it's real or they won't acknowledge that it's real. I read all the discussions on the mailing list about it. There's one named BIP that has to do with quantum, which is by an outsider. It's a very nice guy, Hunter Beast. He's not like part of the inner club, right?”

“I think the modal probability is on the one with the fattest part of the distribution or tallest peak is that a private firm, let's say there's no fork, right? So let's say we don't collectively steal the Satoshi coin. It would be that a private firm at the behest of the US government requisitions the coins and gives them to the US government. And they do this because they believe that China is about to do it. And so the government authorizes them to do that.”

“I spent a lot of time reading about whether people that recovered coins from ancient shipwrecks were able to claim the coins. There was a famous one in Florida in the 70s, 80s. He spent 16 years looking for this. His wife and his son died in the course of this. So it was a really like Faustian thing, like he really suffered to get, and then he got his time on the shipwreck, and he dug up all the coins, $500 million worth of Spanish gold. From the 1600s, and Spain sued him over it, and he won, but it cost him everything.”

“So when you work backwards from Q-Day, it was like Y2K with a bottom. We work backwards from Q-Day. Okay. Q-Day, let's say it's 2033. Okay. We'll be conservative, right? How long will it have taken for Bitcoin to migrate? I don't know, five years? Okay. How long will it have taken for us as a community to agree on the path forward? Three years? How long will it have taken for us to test the code? A year? That takes us back to now in the past. Yeah. But we're in the present. So the numbers are not adding up anymore, right?”

“So every six months, I get totally obsessed with something. So in 2023, it was Chokepoint, right? And then it completely dominates my focus. And before that, it was Proof of Reserves. And I don't remember what it was last year. And well, AI and data centers, that was probably my main obsession last year and the year before. And this year, at the end of last year, for the last six months of 2025, it was quantum.”

“Bitcoin is actually the only thing that can't upgrade, along with some like really old school, antiquated, like physical devices where the cryptography is flashed into the memory and can't ever be upgraded because it's physical, right? So Bitcoin is in a very unique class of things that can't upgrade easily. When I was doing it in banks and whatever, they'll upgrade the database, the government's told them.”