[ExI] Sell your Bitcoins!

Fri May 22 11:54:19 UTC 2026

On Fri, May 22, 2026, 6:54 AM Giovanni Santostasi via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Every single person or entity that has bet against Bitcoin has ultimately
> lost. Over and over again. Companies, governments, institutions,
> individuals.
>
> Bitcoin will overcome the quantum challenge as well. In the worst-case
> scenario, some vulnerable wallets — only a fraction of the total market
> capitalization — could be exposed and hacked, with those coins eventually
> sold back into the market. That could create a temporary shock or dip in
> price, but not a long-term existential problem for Bitcoin itself.
>
> Bitcoin is simply too useful and too deeply integrated into a massive
> global financial ecosystem at this point. It amazes me that people still
> make these claims today.
>
> Read my article here:
>
> https://x.com/Giovann35084111/status/2048484749203906852
>
> In fact, read that article, the others on my account, and the book I wrote
> on Bitcoin. They explain what Bitcoin truly is: a self-organizing monetary
> system that is destined to become the largest monetary network in the world
> — eventually larger than the entire global real estate market.
>
> https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GQSYF9PR
>
> The entire point of Bitcoin is decentralization. That is not a bug; it is
> the core feature. Yes, decentralized consensus can be messy and difficult,
> but Bitcoin has already successfully navigated major technical and
> governance challenges multiple times. The effort and risk are worth it
> because decentralization is precisely what gives Bitcoin its resilience and
> antifragility.
>
> If anything, we need more work and preparation in this direction.
>
> So actually, buy more Bitcoin. Selling because of the “quantum boogeyman”
> is, in my opinion, a terrible idea.
>

I am happy to see you and Kelly weigh in on this. I spent a few days
researching Bitcoin's plan to migrate to post quantum cryptography (PQC),
spoke to Bitcoin developers on the mailing list, and listened to a several
hour interview with one of the authors of the Google paper (Dan Boneh).

I now have full confidence that competent people are taking this very
seriously and they have numerous, solid, secure and efficient alternative
algorithms to choose from.

Chief among these are "hash based signatures". These have been around since
1979, before elliptic curves. Further, their security is not based on any
exotic or esoteric mathematics. Their security rests on the same functions
that the block chain rests on: cryptographic hash functions. So they make
no new security assumptions, and migrating to them and away from ECDSA will
actually make Bitcoin more secure.

The reason hash based signatures weren't used at the start is that the old
schemes were inefficient and had very large signature sizes. This has been
largely alleviated, with schemes such as  having a 324 byte signature -- a
few times larger than the 72 byte ECDSA signatures but smaller than nearly
all other PQC, with the exception of the very new SQISign, which is based
on math that is little-understood, which produces signatures around 148
bytes.

These size increases are marginal and well within the technical capacity to
support expanded block sizes (drive storage capacities have increased 30X
since Bitcoin was released).

The interview with Dan Boneh was also interesting as he described the two
current approaches for quantum computers (superconducting vs neutral
atoms). Superconducting are faster but less scalable in qubits. Boneh said
that for the best known circuit sizes, implementing Shors's algorithm to
break ECDSA on a superconducting quantum computer would take 10 minutes
(which coincidentally is on par with the block time of Bitcoin, so a
quantum computer this fast would threaten live transactions sitting in the
mempool (pending transactions yet to go on chain).

However it seems unlikely that superconducting QCs will be the first to
scale to the sizes necessary, and instead neutral atom quantum computers
will get there. However these are much slower, and current estimates are
that it would take over a week to break an ECDSA key with one. This means
pending live transactions would remain secure, even without migrating to
post quantum cryptography, since even those with a large scale quantum
computer couldn't break the ECDSA key in 10 minutes before the transaction
is committed on the block chain, and after it is, the funds have already
moved to an address which is the hash of a public key, not the public key
itself.

So the immediate threat of QCs to most Bitcoin users, whose public keys
aren't exposed to the world, is quite low. And there are numbers
well-trusted, and technically viable post quantum algorithms to choose from.

If I were a financial advisor, I might therefore on this basis, give the
opposite advice of John, but since I am not a financial advisor I offer no
investment advice, only my technical understanding of the state of affairs
as a non-expert having some background in cryptography.

Jason

>
>
> On Fri, May 15, 2026 at 10:35 PM John Clark via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> *I said it before I'll say it again, sell your Bitcoins. *
>>
>> *Google Just Moved Q-Day Up By 6 Years *
>> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYaODWIg8Ok>
>>
>> *  John K Clark    See what's on my list at  Extropolis
>> <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>*
>> 2rs
>>
>>
>>
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