[ExI] Sell your Bitcoins!

[John Clark]

On Sun, May 17, 2026 at 10:19 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

*> Being and remaining a secure cryptocurrency is something everyone agrees
> with, and choosing the best algorithm to migrate to has an obvious
> technical answer.*
>

*An obvious technical answer?! There are many algorithms that claim to be
quantum resistant but nobody knows which one is the best. And they are so
new that nobody is even confident that there isn't a way for a small
conventional computer to break them. That's why in all the transition
strategies to quantum that I've heard of they intend to retain the existing
conventional encryption and stick the quantum resistant encryption on top
of it. *

*In the early days there were something called "knapsack encryption" which
was a competitor to both RSA and Elliptic Curve Encryption, and at first it
seemed like it would be superior to the other two because knapsack
encryption had been proven to be NP Complete, but to this day that has not
been proven to be the case with the other two. However it turned out that
despite being NP Complete there was a way for even a small conventional
computer to quickly break it; the problem was that although some knapsack
problems were NP Complete the vast majority of them were not, and there was
no easy way to pick out just the NP Complete ones to use. By contrast most
very large numbers are easy to factor BUT there is an easy way to pick out
the few that are not easy to factor, and those are the ones that RSA uses. *

*>> 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 one with the smallest (signature+public key) size is best for
> minimizing the size of the chain.*
>

*Needing only a small key is one important consideration but certainly not
the only one, or the most important one. Being confident that your
algorithm doesn't contain a huge flaw is also rather important, and it's
easy to figure out how big a signature is but it's much much more difficult
to figure out how secure your algorithm is.  *

* > Lattice based cryptography has a long history and it's security is
> fairly well vetted.*
>

*Long history? Lattice encryption was only discovered in 1996 and until
just a few years ago nobody paid much attention to it or tried very hard to
break it because nobody paid much attention to quantum computers; and
because RSA and Elliptic Curve still seemed quite secure from attacks by
conventional computers, so nobody saw an urgent need to switch to something
like lattice that was far more cumbersome to use. *

*This is what Claude has to say about that:*
==

*Claude:* "Elliptic curve crypto (specifically secp256k1, what Bitcoin
uses) is extraordinarily efficient — it was chosen partly *because* of its
performance characteristics. Lattice-based schemes like CRYSTALS-Dilithium
(now standardized as ML-DSA by NIST) are more expensive, but not
devastatingly so on the computation side. The bigger problem is actually
*size*, not computation.
Property ECDSA (Bitcoin today) ML-DSA (Dilithium)
Public key size 64 bytes 1,312 bytes
Signature size ~72 bytes 2,420 bytes
Signing speed Very fast Moderately fast
Verification speed Fast Roughly comparable

So signatures would be *~33x larger* and public keys *~20x larger*. For
Bitcoin, that's actually the more serious problem."

==
*And remember, lattice encryption is not going to replace elliptic
encryption, it's going to be added in addition to it. *

*Bitcoin was originally supposed to replace dollars and pounds and euros
for everyday use, but in that it has proven itself to be a huge FLOP
because it is an energy hog of immense proportions, and the addition of
lattice encryption will make things even worse. Bitcoin currently consumes
about 150 TWh/year of electrical energy, and there are about 100 million
transactions per year. So each transaction consumes about 1,500 kWh,  the
average US household uses about 900 kWh per MONTH! That is just nuts. *



> *>> 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.*
>>
>
> *> You've been telling people to sell their bitcoins since 2017.*
>

*I think you must be confusing me with somebody else, in 2017 I still
foolishly believed bitcoin might be a net positive force in the world. I
was dead wrong. In 2017 I never predicted the price of bitcoin would
collapse, and certainly not  collapse because of quantum computers. In 2017
I wasn't certain that building a fault tolerant quantum computer would even
be possible, much less practical. But things have changed radically since
2017. *



> * > If someone had followed your advice then, the definitely would not
> have been the best way to preserve the value of their bitcoins. In fact,
> this advice would have cost them 95% of their value.*
>

*I never gave anybody that advice, but it's interesting that the official
Trump-branded memecoin ($TRUMP) has lost 96% of its value. *

*> Bitcoin doesn't waste energy, it freezes the economic value of energy
> into an equivalent value of the coins that are mined.*
>

*What the hell?!  *

*This sounds strange and alien*
>

*It sounds ridiculous  *


> *> The value of gold is set in large part by the economic cost of mining
> gold, which primarily comes down to the energy that must be spent to mine
> it.*
>

*It might take a lot of energy and be difficult to make artificial dog
shit, and if you have the gift of gab you might be able to convince enough
people that artificial dog shit is valuable and everybody should own some
and create a fad, but no fad lasts forever. As for gold, I maintain that
our civilization would be just as prosperous if there was no gold at all in
the earth's crust; well OK nearly as prosperous, gold does have a few
industrial uses, bitcoin has none.  *

*John K Clark   *
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