TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Ten31 Timestamp: Schrödinger's Regime Change

Episode Date: April 6, 2026

Schrödinger's Regime Change is upon us. With the Trump administration sending contradictory signals on Iran and global markets whipsawing on every headline, Marty Bent and John Arnold cut through the noise to focus on the physical realities actually driving geopolitics. From oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz to the return of quantum computing FUD, we separate signal from noise in an increasingly chaotic world. 🔗 https://bitcoinproducts.com In this episode: In this episode: Schrödinger's Regime Change: Navigating Trump administration chaos Why "Leroy Jenkins" is the perfect metaphor for current foreign policy Physical oil flows increasing through Strait of Hormuz despite tensions Unfreezing sanctioned assets and the fading Western sanctions regime Helium shortages threatening semiconductor manufacturing Qatar-Exxon Texas LNG venture and North American energy security Alberta separatist movement and the future of Canadian oil Quantum FUD returns: Google's new paper and Bitcoin's cryptographic future Why rushing quantum resistance upgrades could be dangerous The load bearing cryptography people protecting Bitcoin TIMESTAMPS: 00:00:00 - Schrödinger's Regime Change 00:01:05 - The futility of headline watching 00:02:26 - The Leroy Jenkins foreign policy 00:03:03 - Strait of Hormuz oil realities 00:04:33 - Unfreezing Iranian assets 00:05:57 - Helium and semiconductor supply chains 00:06:26 - Texas LNG and energy dominance 00:08:23 - Alberta separatist movement 00:09:40 - Quantum FUD returns 00:11:24 - Theoretical vs physical quantum progress 00:13:44 - Jonas Nick's SHRIMP proposal 00:16:57 - Load bearing cryptography people 00:20:00 - Action bias and protocol safety 00:22:01 - Bitcoin's talent attraction signal SUBSCRIBE › Newsletter (free): https://tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ › YouTube: https://youtube.com/@TFTC?sub_confirmation=1 FOLLOW US › X: https://x.com/tftc21 › Nostr: https://primal.net/tftc FOLLOW MARTY › X: https://x.com/MartyBent TEN31 › Timestamp: https://www.ten31timestamp.com/ › John Arnold: https://x.com/JohnArnoldTen31 › Ten31: https://ten31.xyz TFTC #MartyBent #JohnArnold #Bitcoin #QuantumComputing #Oil #Iran #Geopolitics #Ten31

mr arnold here we are again another monday morning how was your weekend terrific great easter hope everyone else had a great easter as well got to mass jam-packed as we were talking about before we started so very bullish in a world with not not always a ton to be bullish about that was bullish yeah there there is one number going up and that is catholic converts in recent years but we're not here to discuss catholicism we're here to talk bitcoin markets and what's going on in world you titled this week's 1031 time stamp schrodinger's regime change and basically highlighted that it's very hard to discern what's going on if you're simply looking at the headlines coming out of the trump administration particularly and the irgc for that matter obviously we have two

sides of a war that have very specific motives to try to get what they want in terms of leverage and that is leading to a lot of chaos and uncertainty in markets and a lot of your focus this week is what should we be focusing on to actually discern some signal from all the noise out there yeah absolutely in putting this newsletter together week to week it's just gotten to the point where you know you try to stay on top of all the headlines and all the data points that could be pointing one way or another and it's just gotten to the point where it almost all feels kind of pointless to really follow it all that closely um if you pull up the the first slide for, for today, I just kind of screen capped the, a piece of the newsletter

with the bullet points showing all the, all the different ways that Trump and the administration more broadly seem to have flip-flopped intentionally or not often within like the same hour on like key things, like whether the Iranian regime has, has changed or not, whether he's now working with people he can, who want to, you know, make a sensible deal or whether they're doubling down, whether we're going to force the straightforward moves to be reopened or, and take all the oil or make other people do it, or we're just going to leave without dealing with it. You know, you can see kind of all these things every single, basically every single hour, there's, there's a version of this and it feels very, you know, for the, for the,

the, the under 50 crowd, maybe under 40 crowd, there's an image you can hear on, on the left side of the screen here. Um, and the, the over fifties probably will not even be able to relate to it, even if they look it up. But for anyone who's aware of Leroy Jenkins, that's what it all feels like, right? Whether intentionally or not, whether you're a plan truster or a panic and And whether you think that there's a bunch of strategic logic under the hood or whether Trump is in the early stages of dementia and is flushing the country down the drain as a result, it feels from the outside like a lot of Leroy Jenkins with everything that's going on. And so it just got to the point where I was like, OK, well, what what can we actually what are the concrete data points that we can actually, you know, that we should be focusing on? What can we attach to to figure out what might be actionable or happening under the hood as a derivative result of all this, you know, regardless of what happens from here, regardless of what kind of logic might exist or not in the plan such as it is. So that was kind of my focus for this week.

And I definitely think there are a few big things that we can dive into that are worth thinking about that are going to be relevant, you know, regardless of what happens with Hormuz, regardless of what happens with Trump and Israel and the IRGC. you know i think maybe starting with barrels of oil and how much are actually how not only being produced but actually being delivered from that part of the world and you touched on this is roughly four million barrels of oil exited the waterway on thursday the largest outflow since the start of the conflict at the same time the french owned container ship crossed the strait marking the first explicitly western crossing since february and so it seems like the activity in terms of ships actually making it through the strait is beginning to increase consistently and i thought i was telling you before we had record i thought it was very fitting

that citrini released their report of analyst number three heading to that part of the world to observe with his own eyes what was going on because it essentially confirms what you wrote about this week which is that it seems like activity is increasing and i think not only did confirm that that quantitative data but i think the qualitative data of this is not really a binary situation here it's very nuanced there are obviously multiple players and different incentives at play and i think the most important incentive that was highlighted by citrini in their report was that iran wants to keep the straight open because they need to project that they actually have control and are acting as a responsible actor in that part of the world um sort of enticing

countries that need oil to to work with them to create this toll way that many people have discussed yeah for sure it's a great piece everyone should go read it and i highly recommend paying for a citrini subscription to to do that but yeah i think it's the the big takeaway you know if you this won't be spoiling anything and you know there's a lot more alpha in there that you can go read about but i think the big interesting takeaway from it is the everyone on the ground seems to think both that we're going to get messy military escalation that That will not end soon. And more oil is going to progressively flow out of the strait, because, as you said, there are a lot of interests aligned on all sides to keep oil moving through the strait. Iran wants to do that both to project an image of itself as kind of the wise governor of those resources in that waterway in opposition to the crazy Leroy Jenkins U.S., also a key source of revenue for the country.

So, you know, shutting down oil flows there and also for its adversaries that may get even more aggressive with it if they literally can't ship massive amounts of oil through that strait for a meaningful amount of time. That all like leads in a very bad path for everyone. So there's this kind of tacit desire and understanding that everyone wants oil to flow out of the strait in one way or another. And Iran has thus far, it seems like it erected some sort of like tollbooth system that you can go read about that it seems to be getting broader and broader and the participants that are allowed to be involved in that. But I think that the piece also has an interesting set of implications that they outline at the end, which is basically like kind of undermining both poles of like reading what's going on. you know there's been on one side kind of like this very you know frankly like you see it a lot in our camp you see it a lot in the kind of pro bitcoin or pro gold sound money like death of the dollar type camp saying like this is this is the beginning of the petro yuan and all the only

tankers that can get through are paying in yuan and this is the beginning of you know china dominating global oil flows energy markets and on the other side you've got and perhaps it's not even appropriate to call it like the other side but guys that we've flagged on this podcast before like anasa haji who are you know real experts in global energy markets kind of saying that this the western consensus reading of what's going on is basically all a sham and the only reason that you're not seeing shifts flow through is because of you know the issues in the insurance market with all these tankers which maybe is driven by you know u.s interest and so in some sense like the u.s is kind of driving all this and i think the report's interesting because it basically puts

both of those somewhat it really undermines both of those to some degree um you know the interestingly like the citrini's analyst unclear who that who that guy is i have to think he's not a denizen of traditional finance, because I can't imagine anyone who actually worked on Wall Street doing what this dude did. Very entertaining stuff. Again, I recommend people read. But, you know, what he found was that, yeah, there's a little Chinese yuan facilitating payments, but a huge amount of it is just through diplomatic channels, you know, back channeling between different countries, you know, and different quid pro quo trades being made totally out of band between those countries to guarantee safe passage for tankers that are aligned with

with different countries or different groups. There does appear to be ongoing fear of vaccinations. And so that's forcing kind of different ways of facilitating this. I think that's interesting and relevant as it relates to how dominant the U.S. dollar system still is realistically globally. On the flip side, also a lot of locals are reporting that, you know, their main concern is not getting killed, right? Not getting blown up, trafficking through the and, you know, insurance is kind of a secondary concern. Also some interesting data points in there on the rates that some of these tankers are getting paid just to basically be floating storage in in kind of the current disrupted market and how that also is kind of a disincentive

insurance or not to you know to to go through and risk your life and risk your ship too um so all that is to say like i think this just highlights what we've been saying in the last few weeks like the simple stories just like don't really work you're gonna have to have like an interpretive lens that's kind of multivariate and doesn't and isn't reducible to kind of one simple story um and so again i think that just further highlights the need to focus on data points outside of the constant stream of headlines, whether pro-Trump or anti-Trump, pro-Iran or anti-Iran, and look at what's actually happening in other markets that are maybe downstream of this or potentially orthogonal to this and flow that back to the decision tree that the U.S. is going

to be looking at over the next month or two. Yeah, I thought after having read the piece that the tidbit here, which you've highlighted a bit, I don't think the direct highlight, But some countries are unfreezing sanctioned assets, Iranian assets, to let things flow. And to your point, that does throw a wrench in the U.S. and Western sanction regime. And it really highlights when push comes to shove, this rule-based order that many people have talked about for decades. And Trump specifically called out in his national strategic or security strategy letter last year. It definitely seems to be fading away. And this is yet another sort of data point that proves like, OK, this the sanction regime that that has existed and that's been dominated by the West seems to be dissolving in front of our eyes and pushes coming to shove.

whether the U.S. likes it or not, the countries that are working with the IRGC right now need the oil. I thought two names on the list, and they've made the headlines the last couple of weeks. But I think this report verified, I mean, Japan and France are essentially forced to play ball. They're deciding, hey, we need this oil more than we need the sort of social cachet with the United States right now. We need to make sure that our systems are operating and our economy can actually function and so you're seeing the sort of physical reality enter into the realm of geopolitics and reshuffling of the board in real time and we're you you posted this as well but obviously again leroy jenkins on on easter trump is praising a law and saying that we're going to

blow up uh power plants open the fucking straight you crazy bastards you'll be living in hell um very Caligula esque as some, some were describing yesterday. I was not on Twitter much, but I did catch this Bitcoin reacted to this. Who knows if it reacted to this, but coincidentally after this, this true social post was sent out, Bitcoin rallied a bit. Yeah. You know, my, my, my guys out here having a normal one on, on Easter morning, um, with, with this tweet, but, and yeah, I threw the Bitcoin chart on there just cause I think it's, it's an interesting direction for, for it to move. This is the 24 hours after this, this tweet was posted. So do you know, do I think it was popping on this exactly like, no, but this is the kind of thing that I think, you know,

my knee jerk would have been like, okay, we're going to dump another couple, couple grand on a comment like that. And we kind of did the opposite even over the weekend and kind of a liquidity constrained time when most markets aren't open. So, you know, an interesting counterfactual data point and we'll see if it ultimately means anything, but yeah, I think it's, you know, gets to the same, the same Lior Jenkins point we've been, we've been talking about. And I think, you know, that maybe we can jump into from there, like a couple of slides down some of the physical world realities that you're talking about that are highlighted in the piece or in the newsletter this week. And we've mentioned this before on the show, but just

a couple to flag. You're really starting to see headlines about helium production shortages abiding. This is a key input to, among other things, semiconductor manufacturing, which is among the most sensitive, perhaps the most sensitive advanced manufacturing industry in the world right now. The split there is basically a huge amount from Qatar. A lot of that's offline now with all the damage to infrastructure in the Gulf. And that leaves basically the U.S. in pole position to kind of control flows of this critical input. And you also see, interestingly, this past week, Qatar and Exxon's joint venture to produce LNG, 18 million metric tons per year, which would more than offset the amount that's currently offline as a result of the attacks on Qatar's

facilities in the Gulf. That's coming online. And interestingly, that is, you know, that's not a replacement facility in the Middle East or somewhere else. It's in Texas. It's a 70-30 joint venture between Qatar Energy and Exxon. And headlines I've seen suggest that's going to ramp up to full capacity over the next 12 months, like roughly. So we'll see if that happens. But just interestingly, you know, highlighting like the cards to some extent that the U.S. does have to play right on the physical production and reality side, you know, definitely does not mean that the U.S. is out of the woods. But things like this are, I think, going to be increasingly important to watch as, you know, supply chains fracture and basic materials that

a lot of us either took for granted or had never really heard of or thought of before kind of become the poles along which this fight progresses and along which countries kind of try to exercise leverage on one another. And, you know, the next slide shows the same thing in kind of different ways. These are not, again, things to like necessarily trade on or to, you know, construct a thesis on, but I think they're all like collectively, they form like an interesting mosaic for the, you know, what the U S might be trying to do TBD, whether they can, but I mean, our, our friends to the North in the, in the province of Canada that produces most of Canada's oil, Alberta seem to be on a separatist path, a secessionist path that is not going away.

And they've got apparently the required signatures now to launch a referendum vote on starting a separation process. That vote will take place in October. And it seems like there's a decent amount of linkage, perhaps engineered by the CIA, perhaps not, but a decent amount of linkage between Alberta separatists and the Trump administration. And on the rare earth side, you see on the right hand side, a couple of headlines from last week about the U.S. kind of moving aggressively to gain some control over some key rare earth materials. A key question here is still the refining of these things. They're actually not that rare in terms of deposits, but actually getting them refined is a very messy and difficult process that China has gladly

you know taken taken up over the last 20 years as the the west was collectively kind of casting out all quote-unquote dirty industries so moving in in a you know a strategically relevant direction i'm still still very much like first or second inning on on those things but collectively i just think like those are key data points to be watching like things like that or you know outside of the headlines outside of like trump tweets like those are the types of things that i think are forming the base that we should be watching more and more closely and are kind of telling you collectively as a mosaic you know where things you might be going over the next 12 months add a few tallies to the 4d chess uh column right there i mean again that's why i love doing this show with you every

monday because i think you do a good job of zooming out and really trying to filter and i think these are are definitely things that that make me believe okay maybe there is a plan here despite what trump may be posting on any given day or any given hour of any given day these are strategic moves to to re-industrialize and create alliances whether it's in africa latin america or soon to be our neighbors to the north alberta it's always been on my mind there's so much potential there and the the uh the sort of thirst for freedom that that exists in that particular province is palpable knowing some albertans ourselves having a having one very staunch alberta in the portfolio and steve barber in upstream data i'm cheering for them if

if i'm being honest i'm letting my bias shine through here but um i think we risk becoming too much of a macro geopolitical a think tank podcast uh so i think we should shift to some bitcoin specific topics i think the big one last week was the re-emergence of quantum fud it seems like that is re-emerging at a quick and pace as as new papers are released and obviously i'm sure most of you know google released a paper last week that basically cited or basically claimed that the amount of theoretical or the amount of logical theoretically the amount of logical qubits that would be needed um to use your sneaker algorithm to break ecdsa was reduced significantly um and this led many of the quantum panikins to come out and say that bitcoin needs to upgrade as quickly

as possible to be quantum resistant because it seems like a cryptographically relevant quant computer may be on the horizon and so this started a lot of conversation last week i had brandon black also known as rear and code on the tftc podcast that episode dropped saturday morning and we tried to do our best to to do a methodical walkthrough of the spectrum of the quantum debate as it relates to bitcoin and where we actually sit i will put a hand up and say obviously i think brandon and i are a bit biased towards the it's not as big of a worry as many are making it out to be but i think we tried to to cover all the bases there um what are your thoughts on the quantum debate yeah i mean it's funny like as it relates to the theme of what can we actually

know like what can we actually reasonably assess you know that's why i titled the the essay this week schrodinger's regime change and said uh the subtitle was like a super super position of hot takes because you very much have that on the geopolitical macro scale of kind of what's actually happening is there a plan is there not a plan is is iran almost as strong as i've ever been or are they about to fall kind of both of those things are the case at once like there's kind of a superposition as well of takes on on quantum you know where we're almost there and bitcoin's cooked or this is literally never going to happen and it's all fairy dust and anyone thinking about it i'm just completely wasting their time i think your episode with brandon

a really good job of you know he's he's very skeptical of the the claims here i think i would put myself in that camp as well but you know i think you guys did a balanced job of walking through the the puts and takes and the pros and cons in different cases that one could make as well as you know realistic mitigation strategies um and you know i recommend people go listen to that and i also recommend people you know take as middle of the road and approach as is possible here generally i think both of those polls that i mentioned are probably not the place you want to be, even though I would probably say, if you've gone to my head, I would make the bet that if you said it's going to, is it ever going to happen? Is a CRQC ever actually going to be instantiated

in physical reality? I would probably still shade to no. That said, you made a really good point, I think, over the weekend that we should already be assuming that ECDSA is not going to last forever, right? Like there are always advancements in cryptography, advancements in technology. You You never want to short human ingenuity, especially when there's value involved in any kind of system that is monetary in nature or that has an incentive to be attacked, whether that's Bitcoin or any other system that depends on ECDSA or RSA or any other cryptographic scheme. So generally, I think it makes sense to have some level of preparation and some level of understanding of the problem space. I think it's important for people who see the scary headlines from Google and Oratomic to, like Brandon recommended, kind of think through there's the mathematical and theoretical side of things. And then there's the actual physical reality, like we talked about earlier with other elements of the world, the physical reality of bringing this into being. And the advancements on the latter have not been nearly as impressive as the advancements on the former of kind of the theory of how this could work on a machine that does not exist.

But, you know, regardless of what your ultimate view on all that is, I think the thing that you can most clearly like anchor to as something that's observable is that there has been a lot of work done on this by Bitcoin devs and people who are generally just around the cryptography space. I listed a bunch of them in the newsletter that people can go back and look at. You know, Jonas Nick had a proposal just last week, coincidentally timed, I think, on the same day as these papers dropped for, he's calling it shrimps. And, you know, you can just go look at kind of what that involves, but basically it would be post-quantum signatures on Bitcoin that are substantially smaller in terms of data requirement than prior proposals. That's a relevant tradeoff for us to think through as we add any novel cryptography to Bitcoin. You know, the amount of the way that heavier signatures to have quantum security might affect throughput. But so that's one of the trade-offs to think about. Another big one, the last thing I'll say

that I think people need to always keep in mind with this or any other situation is like, we as humans naturally have action bias toward any problem. I think like we all saw that, especially during COVID, but you see it during any kind of, you know, crisis event. The impulse is to do something, just literally do anything. And oftentimes, like it's very easy to forget that doing something is not itself riskless

and, you know, can carry, Especially if the thing that you do is very rushed in nature and done in a sense of panic or false urgency, you know, that can carry its own downsides that need to be thought through, right? And, you know, I've said this elsewhere, and I think you said it too, but if I were a state actor and I wanted to disrupt Bitcoin, one of the things that I would definitely do would be to engineer some sort of panic state that would make people add untested novel cryptography to Bitcoin, right? and make people rely on that and potentially have, you know, the possibility for backdoors that are undiscovered due to being, you know, untested or not tested sufficiently. So not at all saying that that's my base case for like what is happening here, not attributing any bad faith to anyone who is involved in quantum projects or talking about this, you know, on Twitter or elsewhere, but simply just stating that's an example of like an

unintended consequence, a potential downside that needs to be thought through as we look to kind of restrain our action bias and just approach things, you know, from a, from as sober a lens as possible yeah completely agree there i would just add just to clarify like to me you reference the tweet i sent out but i think and again i'm not a quantum physicist i'm not a cryptographer but from what i can gather the theoretical side of quantum computing is advancing at a rapid clip which is great you have some of the smartest people in the world working on these theoretical physics problems and they're making strong advancements but the physical applied physics side of things just hasn't made the same advances and again brandon said it during our

conversation there hasn't even been one sort of standardized quantum computer that you could benchmark to itself that has made progress consistently over a certain period of time and the way he put is until you see one standard set and being iterated on and improved at a consistent pace then there it seems like you're panicking for for no reason he just a steel man it they're going to be fair to both sides the other side will say well we're not going to get the warnings that these advancements on the physical applied side are being made and q day is coming faster so you have to prepare now um and i'm not convinced i think methodical consistent progress towards a solution like you said many bitcoin developers think on a long

enough timeline ecdsa will be broken eventually and they've already been preparing for new cryptographic signature schemes that we will transition to you mentioned jonas nick's shrimps paper they released i think one sort of point of context i want to add to that it was an iteration on shrinks plus which was a solution that jonas nick and mikhail kudinov came up with through the research of hash based signature schemes that could be added to bitcoin to make it quantum resistant they released that paper in december so here we are beginning of april end of march a quarter later, Jonas has already sort of advanced that primitive idea and made it more efficient. And so the progress is being made on the research side of what we need to do to

upgrade Bitcoin signature scheme for a world in which ECDSA is broken or a world in which quantum computers manifest exist and are scalable and efficient. And so, yeah, I think I think level headed approach to this is the best way. And another thing, last thing I'll say on this, the when you're out there and you're not immersed in this debate and you're an outside observer looking at this you have chamath palapapatiya nick carter and others saying we need to do this now and they're saying bitcoin developers need to get together and solve this problem i think one thing to understand is that not every bitcoin developer is qualified or equipped to solve this specific problem there's many different parts of the bitcoin stack people working on the p2p layer

initial block download networking between nodes wallet guis all that and there is a subset of a subset of bitcoin developers that really understand the cryptography and then within that subset of a subset a subset that understands how to make it quantum resistant so finger wagging at every bitcoin developer and saying do something is completely unproductive because not every bitcoin developer is focused on this specific part of the bitcoin stack the people who are are making progress yeah i mean the last thing i'll say is there's a to that point there's a concept called a load-bearing internet person someone who's just like 10 000 x the you know the the median engineer or the median computer scientist on questions of the design of the

internet and the internet protocol i think it's very much like a similar concept here of a load-bearing cryptography person i mean there are literally like probably under 50 people in the world who are truly like masters of like this this domain you know or maybe under a thousand i don't know however you would frame it but you know to the extent that you think that that's like a risk to bitcoin it's also a risk to every digital system you know that we have in the world that there are so few people who are really equipped to to think through all this stuff um but you know it's so worth noting as you just asked yourself to that point like why isn't this solved well it's a it's a very thorny question that not everyone in the world or even a majority of people who are

deeply involved in bitcoin are really qualified to you know weigh in on and opine on so all the more reason than right to be methodical about it and to make sure that nothing is getting kind of rushed or pushed faster than you know it needs to go particularly given some of the questions that you highlighted around the actual physical scaling progress of getting the stuff out in the real world so yeah again you know avoid the black boxes focus on what you can actually analyze and get your hands around and try not to weigh in on the the stuff that's borderline impossible to really figure out yeah then to flip the frame there the fact that bitcoin the bitcoin project has a few of these individuals who are qualified and equipped to do this work is high signal that it is

a very valuable protocol. And the fact that it's able to attract that type of talent that can actually solve these problems is an endorsement in and of itself. Yeah. Go sign. All right. See you guys next week.