[ExI] You'd better sell your bitcoins

[Adrian Tymes]

1) Even if all of this is true, wait until that computer actually
comes out.  November 2028 (the next US Presidential election, assuming
no postponement due to Trump or Singularity) is 3 years away.
According to https://charts.bitbo.io/price/ over most 3-year spans
since 2010, Bitcoin's price has gone up (I haven't checked all 3 year
pairs, so there may be a few exceptions).  This isn't Roko's Basilisk;
this computer can't affect things before it exists.  (This advice only
applies to this specific factor.  There are plenty of other things
that could tank Bitcoin's price in that time, but not this one.)

2) A thing like Bitcoin has what value the public ascribes to it.
Something like breaking the fundamental security behind Bitcoin is not
something that most of the public will understand until after, not
before, someone starts exploiting it.  So the price drop won't happen
until after that computer actually comes out and someone does it.
Even after the computer exists, further investment may be seen as
speculating on how long it will be until someone exploits it at scale.
(Which, granted, might not be long.)

On Sun, Nov 16, 2025 at 8:14 AM John Clark via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> Quantum computer expert Scott Aaronson has always been a vocal critic of the excessive hype surrounding his subject, but just a few days ago he wrote this:
>
> "I now think it’s a live possibility that we’ll have a fault-tolerant quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm before the next US presidential election. And I say that not only because of the possibility of the next US presidential election getting cancelled, or preempted by runaway superintelligence!"
>
> When we have a quantum computer big enough to run Shor's algorithm, bitcoin becomes worthless. Aaronson then says this:
>
> "The two biggest known application areas for QC remain (a) quantum simulation and (b) the breaking of public-key cryptography, just as they were thirty years ago."
>
> Quantum Computing, too much to handle
>
> John K Clark
>
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