[ExI] You'd better sell your bitcoins

[Keith Henson]

On Sun, Nov 16, 2025 at 6:06 AM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> 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.

snip
>
> 2) A thing like Bitcoin has what value the public ascribes to it.

That's true of money in general.  "Sapiens" has a lot to say about this.

The "market" for bitcoin is just as we discussed here many years ago,
people who want to keep their economic activities seret. (Mostly away
from being taxed.)

Keith
> 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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