MIGRATE BITCOIN

“So so quantum threat is to cryptography writ large. Right? And by cryptography, we mean encryption. We use encryption all day every day in the technology around us. Governments use it. Businesses use it. Encryption can, you know, can can can relate to transmitting messages over WhatsApp, over, you know, over iMessage. But a lot of this cryptography and, really, all of the cryptography deployed across all these different industries still comes from the same family of mathematics. And it's this family of mathematics that's particularly, vulnerable to quantum attacks.”

“Bitcoin's whole engineering apparatus is designed around stable and high guarantees that that something will work. And when it comes to quantum risk, that's sort of the last thing that we get. We're we're we're we're we're we're nowhere. At least, we don't have a a a sort of concerted thought into how into what a solution might look like. And that really is sort of bit Bitcoin's Achilles' heel when it comes to coordinating this this massive upgrade because not only do you have to get consensus from the developers, but once you do, then you need to push out changes to all of the miners, anyone who's running a node, and, of course, all of the wallet holders.”

“Where does Quantum stand? I mean, this is this is this is the position, you know, that the the that we take, which is that it'll be, you know, around 2030, I think, is is is is a decent benchmark. If you're looking at, you know, where quantum resources are at right now, we've seen the progress that they've gone through over the past, you know, three to five years. And if you sort of, you know, follow that that trajectory onto the curve, it seems relatively plausible that it could happen in or around 2030.”

“So so sort of the the best sort of or maybe not the best, but one approach there would be, okay. Well, why don't I just sort of, you know, hedge my risks and, you know, whatever 1% to whatever I hold in in in Bitcoin, diversify into quantum safe assets so that if Bitcoin doesn't get its stuff together and the value is ever adversely affected, you have, you know, a a basically, a a quantum hedge in order to to to to offset that risk.”

“What we're building is we we call it a quantum canary network for Bitcoin, sort of alluding to the old canary in the coal mine, where, you know, these these these coal miners would send out a little bird into these into these caves and figure out, you know, which parts of the of of of of the coal mines would contain toxic gases, you know, but essentially serve as as, you know, sort of future warning, future indication of of risks to come. And the same thing can be said about solutions. You know? You deploy a solution, what you think is a good solution, and you actually battle test it in in in a live network, and you realize that it has some problems.”

“So, when it comes to Satoshi's coins, you know, optimist, I mean, there's been some recent VIP 361, which talks about, you know, perhaps sort of shaving it off, severing it from the existing supply. Some people have been talking about, you know, to shave it, do we sever it off? Do we print new tokens into existence? I mean, I don't think either of those are very plausible, just because it breaks sort of first principles in Bitcoin, which is a fixed supply of 21 million. So I think sort of the best way to think about it for now, the one that will likely prevail is just assuming that those will be lost forever and will be sort of susceptible to quantum attacks.”

“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.”

“What we're building is, we call it a quantum canary network for Bitcoin, sort of alluding to the old canary in the coal mine, where these coal miners would send out a little bird into these caves and figure out which parts of the coal mines would contain toxic gases, and it would essentially serve as a future warning, future indication of risks to come. The same thing can be said about solutions. You deploy a solution, but you think is a good solution and you actually battle-test it in a live network, and you realize that it has some problems. How often is it that we get a solution perfect right on day one?”

“Yeah, we got 99 problems in quantum, probably the biggest one.”

“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?”

“You hit it on the head. I mean, that's been in its entire value proposition today, right? Which is that it's actually quite a slow moving machine. If you try to push an upgrade through Bitcoin, you're not going to see that happen overnight. Like you might see that happen in Solana, for example. Bitcoin's whole engineering apparatus is designed around stable and high guarantees that something will work. When it comes to quantum risk, that's the last thing that we get.”

“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.”

“I mean, I I think I think that that the sort of best and safest assumption to make, the the most conservative assumption would be to assume that those are gone, you know, that that that that they will be hacked at some point. And as we think about, you know, what are the implications of that is, you know, as as you point out, if, you know, we $150,000,000,000 problem. It's not the end of Bitcoin, but that assumes that the rest of Bitcoin was able to fully migrate to to to be post quantum.”

“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.”

“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.”

“There's been two conflated ideas of quantum risk. One is to the signatures, the other one is to the mining of Bitcoin. Something that our team had done last month was show that the mining algorithm, the Shaw 256 proof of work that secures Bitcoin is actually very secure. We anticipate it will be secure long into the future, long into the quantum era. But it's really the signatures that are at risk.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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?”

“Where does quantum stand? I mean, this is the position that we take, which is that it will be around 2030, I think is a decent benchmark. If you're looking at where quantum resources are at right now, we've seen the progress that they've gone through the past three to five years. And if you follow that trajectory onto the curve, it seems relatively plausible that it could happen in or around 2030”

“So sort of the best sort of or maybe not the best, but one approach there would be, okay, well, why don't I just sort of hedge my risks and whatever 1% to whatever hold in Bitcoin, diversify into quantum safe assets so that if Bitcoin doesn't get its stuff together and the value is ever adversely affected, you have basically a quantum hedge in order to offset that risk.”

“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.”

“Bit Bitcoin will exist, but the value of which the value of which it will carry is sort of is is up for question once once you factor quantum, into the equation. But you're absolutely right. There's been sort of, you know, two conflated ideas of quantum risk. One is to the signatures. The other one is to the mining of Bitcoin, And and, you know, something that that our team had done, last month was show that, you know, the mining algorithm, the SHA two fifty six proof of work that secures Bitcoin is actually very secure, and we anticipate it will be secure long into the future, long into the quantum era. But it's really the signatures, that that are at risk.”

“I I would just like to go on record and say to our AI overlords in case they're listening that I am a calm. I will not fight back. I've always used please and thank in my prompts, so I think I'm on the right side. I I I I I too. Yeah. I I I feel bad about yelling at my AI now.”

“I analogize upgrading cryptography to thinking about it like a set of pipes underneath the city, like a plumbing system where if you need to upgrade the pipes, you need to dig up the roads, and these pipes feed into different buildings, you need to upgrade, you need to go into different people's homes, into the bathrooms, and upgrade all of the infrastructure there. It's actually a very deep and non-trivial task at hand.”