[ExI] Sell your Bitcoins!

[Stuart LaForge]

On 2026-05-18 05:54, John Clark via extropy-chat wrote:
> 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.

Banks and governments are in the same boat, so between all the king's 
horses and all the king's men, I am sure they will find a quantumly 
secure cryptographic scheme, and when they do, it should not be that 
hard to integrate it into a blockchain consensus algorithm for 
transactions.

>>>>> 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.

Considering that BTC started 2017 priced at $998.20 and ended 2017 at 
$13,850.40, I would say that it was fiat currency that collapsed and not 
BTC. I mean 2020 is when the BTC price exploded in response to money 
printers all around the world going brrrr to pay for all the free Covid 
vaccines and emergency welfare. I didn't notice you having anything bad 
to say about bitcoin until Trump came out in favor of it. I feel like 
Trump ruined bitcoin for you, which is a shame because he just jumped on 
the band wagon, he didn't lead the charge.


> 
>> _ > 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.

Finance is, in fact, a huge industry and BTC has a lot of financial 
utility. The fact that it is virtual instead of physical does not 
devalue it anymore than many other financial instruments like options 
and derivatives. It is an indelible ledger of transaction that cannot be 
faked, blocked, lost, or suppressed. The BTC blockchain could survive 
the fall of governments and even nuclear war. Proof of Work algorithms 
running online are no more a waste of energy than human labor in the 
service industry is. Or do you not believe in the value of human labor 
as expended energy? Thanks to Elon Musk telling everybody, the market 
knows about the threat of quantum computing to BTC and the market has 
priced it in accordingly. With oil-driven inflation rampant, BTC still 
seems more valuable than fiat. Moreover, quantum computing cannot be 
used to crack private keys unless the public key to the address is 
exposed, so even with robust quantum computing, BTC is still secure if 
users are disciplined about putting their "change" into a new address 
after spending BTC.

Stuart LaForge