[ExI] You'd better sell your bitcoins

[Adrian Tymes]

On Mon, Nov 17, 2025 at 10:44 AM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 17, 2025 at 10:11 AM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>> >>There will come a time when quantum computers have made a lot of progress very rapidly but they're still not big enough to run Shor’s algorithm; however, an increasingly large number of people realize that they soon will be, and then there's going to be a wave of panic selling.
>>
>> You grossly overestimate the technical literacy of the general public
>
> Perhaps so for the general public, but I'm talking about the very smart people who work at banks and hedge funds that own lots of bitcoins, they're going to be, not only selling their bitcoins as fast as they can, they're also going to be shorting it. And it will be impossible to keep the fact that smart money is fleeing bitcoin a secret.

Once that quantum computer is out and a public demo of the algorithm
done, perhaps.

Right now?  They aren't.  They have access to this same information
you do, and they are not fleeing for the exit right now.  Bitcoin's
price drop right now is post-all-time-high profit-taking.  What you
describe would mean a far steeper dive in Bitcoin's price.

>> > "This might someday happen" is leagues apart from "the computer is there now, and here's a demo of how it can break Bitcoin's security,
>
> But when one of the world's leading experts on quantum computers, somebody who had previously been a very vocal critic of the excess hype surrounding his speciality, now says that "we’ll have a fault-tolerant quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm before the next US presidential election" then it's time to sit up and pay attention if you want to keep your money. He might be wrong but he knows one hell of a lot more about quantum computers than you or me.

The potential for this to eventually become a thing, even in perhaps a
few years, does not mean it has happened already.

It's like speculating that the Singularity will happen in a few years,
and encouraging people to take irreversible action now that would only
be free of consequences if the Singularity was happening right now.

No matter how right you may be about it happening in a few years, "in
a few years" is not "right now", and there are definite signs that one
can safely wait on to take action after - in this case, the actual
(not just speculated) introduction of that quantum computer, even if
you don't want to wait for the algorithm demo.