[ExI] Sell your Bitcoins!

[John Clark]

On Sat, May 16, 2026 at 9:31 PM Kelly Anderson via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

*> Selling bitcoin now only puts your money in banks, stock accounts,
> or something else that quantum computing can break apart just as easily.*
>

*Banks and companies have a central authority to organize a transition,
very recently Google advanced the time when it would replace everything
with a quantum resistant algorithm from 2035 to 2029, it's a big job but
they will probably be successful. However bitcoin has no central authority
so I don't see how it can make a transition from elliptic curve encryption
to something more quantum resistant without it turning into a chaotic mess.*

*> You are aware that Bitcoin can and will change its codebase using its
> own quantum algorithms if necessary to protect itself.*


*I asked Claude about that, this is his response:  *

*Claude:* "It gets messy. Bitcoin changes through a process called BIP
(Bitcoin Improvement Proposal), which requires rough consensus among
developers, miners, node operators, and users. This has historically been
*extremely* contentious — the block size wars of 2017 resulted in a chain
split (Bitcoin Cash) over *a much simpler technical change*. A
cryptographic migration would be *orders of magnitude more complex*. The
challenges:

   - *No one can be forced to upgrade.* Coins sitting in old-format
   addresses (especially "pay to public key" outputs, which directly expose
   the public key) would remain vulnerable even after a new standard is
   deployed.
   - *Lost keys are a wild card.* Satoshi's coins, long-dormant wallets,
   and lost funds sit in addresses that nobody can migrate. What do you do
   with them? Let them remain vulnerable? Freeze them? Either answer is
   politically explosive.
   - *The UTXO migration problem.* Every unspent output needs to transition
   to a quantum-resistant format. That requires every single holder to
   actively move their coins. Historically, a meaningful fraction of Bitcoin
   simply never moves.
   - *Which algorithm?* Post-quantum cryptography is still maturing. NIST
   only finalized its first PQC standards in 2024. Candidates like
   CRYSTALS-Dilithium (lattice-based) look promising but have larger signature
   sizes, which would affect Bitcoin's block space economics. Picking the
   wrong one and having to migrate *again* would be catastrophic.

The most dangerous scenario isn't a gradual migration — it's a situation
where the quantum threat materializes faster than expected, the community
is still deadlocked on which PQC standard to adopt, and adversaries begin
quietly harvesting exposed public keys before anyone acts."

*> what doesn't make sense is that billions of dollars aren't going to
> defend themselves. They will.*


*The simplest and surest way for someone to preserve the value of their
bitcoins would be to sell them before the quantum shit hits the fan, that
is to say convert the bitcoins into Dollars or Euros or Pounds, or
maybe the Chinese Renminbi. In a post quantum world there will likely be
hundreds or thousands of competing quantum resistant crypto currencies
floating around (which one should somebody use?) and all of them will use
considerably more electrical energy to make a simple economic transition
than the ridiculously huge amount that bitcoin already wastes; I strongly
suspect most will find it's far more productive to use that electrical
energy to power AI rather than use it to play around with monopoly money.
And after observing the nightmarish chaos of the bitcoin transition I think
people will largely lose their taste for all crypto currencies. *

*John K Clark *
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