What Bitcoin Did - Should Satoshi’s Coins Be Frozen? | Rob Hamilton

Episode Date: April 21, 2026

“Bitcoin’s values are easy to defend until they become inconvenient.” Rob Hamilton returns to the show to get into Bitcoin as a hero’s journey, and why its next great test may already be here. Rob explains how Bitcoin evolved from a cypherpunk rebellion into an institutional asset, and why that shift is creating a new fault line inside the network. As more Bitcoin moves into ETFs and corporate treasuries, the question is no longer just whether Bitcoin succeeds, but who defines what it is. We get into the debate around quantum computing, whether vulnerable coins should ever be frozen, and why that decision could trigger a chain split. Rob lays out the tension between protecting the network and preserving Bitcoin’s core principles, and why this may become the most important battle since the block size wars. THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: ANCHORWATCH BLOCKWARE LEDN BITKEY SWAN CLUB ORANGE CAPE FOLLOW: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/\_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny Rob Hamilton: https://x.com/Rob1Ham

Bitcoin is this somewhat of a hero's journey. It is a call to adventure in this technological cyberspace world, this very powerful tool for self-sovereignty and a check on government's authority over your life. It's a global universal story, and it's something that everyone gets different value out of. And you constantly have tests. Every day you hold Bitcoin as a test. There's plenty of post-quantum algorithms that have been proposed that a classical computer can trivially break.

You could be bullied into putting in broken cryptography into Bitcoin. Everyone's just kind of throwing stuff against the wall right now and seeing what sticks. You have to go from 15 to 2 to the 256 before this is actually a problem. It's almost like people are setting up a chessboard. Like the boards being like the pieces are being laid out on the board right now. And we'll see where the trajectory of these things go. How's it going, man? It's good to see you. Doing well. How are you?

I am doing good. This is a show that we've been promising to make for a long time. I think we first talked about doing the hero's journey in Bitcoin like six months ago. And finally, we are here. We're going to do it. I think it's even longer than that. I originally thought of this as a concept show when Pete used to still run the show. Oh, there you go.

And then I brought it back to you. See, you appreciate me, though, for my think-boying and not just my technical chops, whereas Pete brought me in as his like nerd to come in and explain all that stuff. Well, not originally. Your original appearance on what Bitcoin did was a think boy show about a piece that Eric Weinstein wrote. That is true. I was just playing it up because Pete's not here to talk about it. That's right.

That was August of 2021. That was my first podcast appearance ever really. It was before Anchor Watch and everything else. And then we just saw each other like three weeks ago in Bedford. We were just there at Cheek-Co, too. That was awesome. It came up again because for those who have watched the talks from the show, American Hoddle did that talk at the end about, you know, this is not an interview. This is an intervention. And I made the point to Hoddle and you before it all started that Pete was kind of absconding on the end of the hero's journey by stepping away from Bitcoin. So that can maybe be a little bit of preview jump off point. Yeah, I think we need to explain what the hero's journey is, because until you, like, I'd heard of it of this story art concept that's used in, like, basically every film.

But do you want to explain what the hero's journey is? Yeah. So, popularized by Joseph Campbell, the hero's journey is basically a very compelling story arc and how you could, you know, compartmentalize stories. I think most people, the easiest one for them to grok would be like Star Wars. Like Star Wars, the movie Star Wars, like the original trilogy is the hero's journey where you have this call to adventure,

you go forth, you get like this help from outside people, you find guardians and mentors who kind of bring you through this journey, and you go through challenges and temptations. And then at like the climax, you're like in the abyss. You're like in like the throes of trying to figure out

how to resolve things. You overcome all of your adversity and lean on all of your training and your mentors and you get to the end and you succeed and then the last gift is you can kind of return that treasure to the community. Right? Lord of the Rings is another great one.

The Matrix. You've got Neo who like refuses to get involved and he gets pulled in. He gets the call to it. Orpheus is his mentor and then he's the one. Exactly. Right. So when you start thinking about it, and this is something that

as just like a high level arc of telling stories is just a very compelling one. It's, you know, what people want to see is like someone goes on a grand adventure. They learn through things. There's that, you know, there's adversaries and there's challenges. There's a loss of sense of self. You could think of that maybe when Luke gets his hand

cut off and finds out Vader is his father, right? Like, it's like the bottom of the journey. And then he uses that conflict to kind of rise up above all of it, right? And so that's like at the highest level. And I've thought for the longest time, looking at that story, for me personally, and I think for many people who get into Bitcoin, Bitcoin is this somewhat of a hero's journey, right? The call to adventure, though, is not I'm going to go out and slay dragons. It is, I want to opt out of the banking system. Or I think the banking system is unfair.

It is a call to adventure in this technological cyberspace world, right? it brings many people to get on planes and drive around and go to meetups and do other things too. And those are kind of like mentors that you see along the way. You know, people who, you know, for me, when I got into Bitcoin, it definitely would have been Andreas Antonopoulos, right? It was very like someone who as a mentor. I never have personally met Andreas. But it was very impactful for me and understanding kind of this story of Bitcoin as, you know, this very powerful. tool for self-sovereignty and a check on government's authority over your life. And as I'm

thinking about this now, like laying this thesis out just now, it's also interesting too because when you came into Bitcoin, your journey may look a little bit different. Because if you came into Bitcoin over the past five years, maybe Michael Saylor was your Andreas Antonopoulos, right? And for you, it was boosting the returns of your investment portfolio, right? and you like bitcoin is a very large tent it's really anarchy right there's no one really in control the and so we're kind of like this massive big disorganized tent of different interests and alignments right but for me like getting into bitcoin and maybe i'll just start talking a bit about just my journey in bitcoin uh you know back in 2013 i had multiple friends that were telling me hey rob you

should really check out Bitcoin. I was a Ron Paul libertarian and the Fed guy. I had some golden silver. And people were telling me to check out Bitcoin. And I kind of push it off, which is actually the start of the hero's journey, is it does start with denying the call to adventure. And almost everyone you talk to in Bitcoin, they very most often, they hear about it a couple times before they actually look into it. It's a very common motif. If you talk to anyone in Bitcoin in their journey, very rarely is it someone said the word Bitcoin and then I was fully invest. right? And so having this like call to adventure like you have this thing like the supernatural aid, which is this idea of like something cosmic like the force in Star Wars or the

ring in you know the in the Lord of the Rings right. There's always and I think just Bitcoin itself is somewhat also kind of like that supernatural like it's something that's otherworldly that kind of changes your perception and through the act of using holding leveraging Bitcoin you are able to better exercise your own sense of personal development. It's a funny thing, too, I think a lot about is that you have to kind of like take this on a case-by-case basis because I don't want to be fantastical and just say the end of the journey is hyper-bitquinization. And because that's just kind of like arbitrary wish fulfillment.

But the act, though, of discipline and saving and giving yourself the means and the tools to be able to kind of build and like kind of reflect on your actions is a really I would just say like a interesting idea of thinking about right and it's a it's a element many people talk about when they got into Bitcoin that they started thinking longer term planning for families taking more better care of their health challenging themselves and pursuing and working harder right and when it comes to just Bitcoin in general like that's kind of like the jump off point right You don't have any exposure to Bitcoin. You hear about this Bitcoin thing.

You start going into it. I started going to New York City BitDebs in 2014. My actual, the actual jump-off point for me was after people have been telling me to get into Bitcoin all across 2013, my friends and I were all like computer gamers. We all had our graphics cards and Dogecoin came out. So we all started mining Dogecoin with our GPUs like solo mining blocks because it was like this funny, silly thing. And you download the Dogecoin client. It's all in rainbow font and comic sand.

and you're like, okay, I know internet culture, this is satire. This is inspiring enough though to actually learn more. And that's when I went to New York City BitDev's. And I started just really going deep into Bitcoin. This is like the end of 2013, beginning of 2014. And for me, like, that was a very challenging and humbling prospect because I was in a room with a lot of people who knew infinitely more about me, about not just Bitcoin, but computers, programming, distributed systems. decentralization, right? And it's a whole culture, nomenclature, threat modeling. All of these things

are entirely different to any other kind of software project or any kind of real financial product that has ever really existed before. And it's a, and the reason why it's a journey is not everyone completes the journey, right? A lot of people, and this is just in stories and life in general. People for either internal choice or external circumstances, deny the call, and that's where the story ends, right? And the reason why I like thinking about Bitcoin as the hero's journey is it is a very optimistic, positive way of thinking about you having agency and being able to have control over your life and having a financial tool that actually supports that vision for you. Do you wish you could access cash without selling your Bitcoin?

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I was reading a lot of the stuff that Pierre Rochard was posting. I'd never met him at the time. And that was the thing that kind of convinced me really to go Bitcoin only. But Bitcoin, this is what makes it sound like a cult, right? Because Bitcoin is just software, it's money. Like, why does it inspire this kind of story arc? Well, why Bitcoin specifically has this story arc of the hero's journey? Yeah, because no one has this with the dollar or with the pound or with the euro.

Well, so the beautiful thing is that the hero's journey is like a literary concept. You can apply that story for a fictitious medieval empire or a dystopian cyberpunk like matrix, right? It's a general thing that you can apply to everything. But most people, and this is also why many people compare it to the matrix, like when you, most people just go around in the world and they're very happy with the financial system as it exists today. Right. And so you have either a friend that mentions it or something kind of pulls you in. And I think what's interesting about Bitcoin is that it's a global universal story. And it's something that everyone gets different value out of, right, in the sense of, I would venture to say the people who got into Bitcoin in 2022, 2022, 2023, kind of following Michael Saylor, have an entirely different perspective from the people who got into Bitcoin during the Silk Road.

Or people who got into Bitcoin during the bank crisis and collapse, the bail-in that happened in Cyprus in 2014, right? So every person comes to Bitcoin with their own unique perspective and context and how they view the world. And that's why it's a beautiful, universal thing because Bitcoin is a tool at the end of the day. I always always always say that like Bitcoin is a means to an end. It's not the end of itself, right? The Bitcoin and wealth accumulation, like it is a system that allows you to leverage to achieve your other end goals. Bitcoin really should never be the end goal of your life or your ambitions, right? And so, and like I mentioned before, the refusal to the call, like, oh, it's too volatile or it's not, you know, like it's a scam or whatever else. Most people kind of like Peter out there. But it also kind of calls on this sense of community where people all around the world, even though we all have different perspectives. Someone, you know, someone had a mentor, Andreas Antonopoulos. Like Michael Saylor talks about how he listened to a bunch of Bitcoin podcasts before he got in, right? It's this kind of like, again, the network effect of Bitcoin.

where you get to kind of build this system of different people who see Bitcoin differently and use it for different reasons and it grows that tent larger and larger. And you constantly have tests. Every day you hold Bitcoin as a test. Do you sell it or do you hold it? Right. And so it's something that you constantly reinforce over time

as you continue to hold it. You kind of invest yourself deeper and deeper into this journey. And I think that you have large, moments in Bitcoin. And I think one may be coming up in the next couple of years, but we'll get to in a bit. But you mentioned it before, the Block Size Wars. The Fork Wars

is a perfect example of like this major crisis moment where everyone comes together. You had smaller versions of this with like Mount Cox. Yeah. Right? Or other exchanges getting down and hacked. FTX. I would say really the Block Size War is like the most significant one of like this.

And in the Heroes' Journey, it's called the ordeal. Like a thing happens. right? And that's kind of when everything gets really soft and fuzzy. People form alliances. Like I'm thinking about the block size where it's coalitions form. And there's like a big action, like a big to do of something going to happen. And ultimately with Bitcoin over time, as it continues to financialize, part of that is the reward too. How many countless stories of people who have held Bitcoin for 10 years and then they retire or, I think a really great example of this is actually Pete up in Bedford.

So, and he's not here to tell the whole story, right? But he was gambling in a bunch of crypto pump and dumps and buying minors and losing money left and right. He talks about his recovery from addiction. But then he got to the other side of all of this and the challenge of his own self-development. And what did he do? He didn't just like go get a yacht and go fuck off. He went to his local community. He was like, I'm going to buy this coffee shop.

I'm going to buy this football club. I'm going to build something. I'm going to get security teams to help patrol and keep the peace in my local town that was kind of deficient. He was bringing back the reward and treasure that he earned by being part of the Bitcoin journey and returning that treasure to the community. And I think that's just one of these things that I think it's every person's free to do whatever they want with their wealth and their means. he's a great example though of someone who is trying to do better right

and realizing there's a responsibility that comes with wealth and that's kind of like as that big picture you know you can break each of these sections of the hero's journey down to different parts where like the three big pieces are the departure to start the adventure the initiation

of the trial of whatever happens and then the return home that return home though is like I think a lot of people when they get into the Bitcoin, they just think about like, and I'm going to have a bunch of money, and I'm going to be rich. And then understanding, like, what does it mean to actually leverage and use that wealth after the fact, right? And I think that was, um, at the highest level, we can dive into particular points and pieces that you think are interesting. But like, I think that's,

you know, I think it's a universal story because Bitcoin has all these different perspectives and how people view and see it. And it's one of those things that I, uh, um, I think it's a helpful mental model as people are in their journey wherever they are, to think about kind of like the greater purpose and pull yourself out of the context of your current life and what you're living and think about it from, you know, where do you want to be in a decade or two? Yeah, the thing that I think is the most interesting in that is how Bitcoin has changed in the last decade plus. Because if you've got into Bitcoin before 2021, it was this like rebellion counterculture thing where the like key fundamental values were, the, like, key fundamental values

were the self-custody, running a node, decentralisation. And then we were weirdos for, like if you were saying that Bitcoin was going to go to 100 grand, then the biggest institutions in the world are going to be buying it, like you were kind of a weirdo. And then 2021 happens, and that starts to really shift. And I think that the core fundamental values of Bitcoin start getting a bit diluted where running a no is not something people talk about nearly as, well, actually, I guess with the Bit 110 stuff, it's more and more. But, you know, these don't become the core tenants. Instead, it's like by strategy or buy an ETF. And really, like, if a broker's coming to you, telling you about Bitcoin and you buy an ETF, you're never

touching Bitcoin. Do you ever understand what Bitcoin truly is? And what does that do for, like, the future of any contentious changes in Bitcoin? Well, that's an interesting place to jump off too. So I would agree that Bitcoin, now you could always dig in and make this like, further grouping ins in sections of like Bitcoin's history and phases. I would agree that we're actually like in like the larger sense, Bitcoin's second phase

where the first phase it was a niche technical project. And sure, for the first year, like it was super super niche and most people weren't doing like using or touching it at all. But this like institutional adoption phase which was always inevitable.

Right. It was always and I'd say it was always inevitable. It's easier to say that back now. Like say that today, with all of these ETFs and kind of this institutional adoption, let alone Bitcoin treasury companies and whatever else, in that when I got into Bitcoin, I was so confident in just the basic properties of the network

that this was something that will have value and that it would be a good asset to hold. And part of that adoption was always going to be institutions. Like there was never a world where Bitcoin actually succeeded and it was used on the periphery on farmers markets and dark net markets. 100%. Sorry. Like it just never and it was just never going to win in the sense of actually being a successfully bootchap financial network if it never went beyond that.

So with these new cohorts, they have different perspectives and values of what happens at Bitcoin. You could say we got our training wheels with the block. size wars. I think it's very, I try to be careful in drawing parallels because I feel a lot of Bitcoin culture who came in post-2017, almost like to live action roleplay the block size wars, and they view every conflict with someone they have in Bitcoin through the lens of this one conflict. And I think that's, it's a dangerous generalization, right? There's a, there's a, I mean, there's that phrase if you never want to be, like, generals fight the last war. And so, like, you can't view everything in that sense because facts and circumstances change.

Significantly this time around, there's millions of Bitcoin that are being held at institutions. That wasn't quite the same case in 2017. And in this monetization upswing of Bitcoin, you have to view it as almost like a rotation of capital into new hands. If people are buying Bitcoin at 100,000, someone's selling it at 100,000. And you have this changing of the guard. And it's very healthy to do this, right? Every Bitcoin, unless you mine it yourself, was sold to you by someone. Every Bitcoin you ever bought. If it wasn't through mining, someone sold it to you. And if you mined, realistically, you were either doing it very much in the early days or you're doing as a hobby now as a couple people who have the professional

infrastructure and operations to manage as a profitable ongoing business. But those are, in this capital rotation in general, I think it's important to kind of reflect and understand the people that you are selling to may have different values for what they think Bitcoin is important for than you. And Bitcoin as a network of anarchy, economic weight is. is a very important factor when trying to resolve disputes. And so if you have millions of coins being held by these institutions, I think over the coming couple of years,

there is going to be another clash. I used to think it would be the Wall Street suit coiners, if you want to call them that, to the cypherpunk or OGs or people that are in this for, you know, the core properties of Bitcoin and they don't care as much about the quarter to quarter number go up. That's correct, but I never would have guessed the context that would have came through is around the recent discussions that have been happening around quantum.

I don't want to prematurely call the fire alarm and say that there's a crisis ongoing. I'm just observing conversations that are happening and conversations. have had in person. I was just at Op Next in New York City this last week. And not only were a bunch of the conversations around quantum computing, it was about how to manage like Satoshi's coins. And so to start, I'm going to, for the sake of this conversation, put aside the specific mechanics of a quantum computer because one, that's not my area of expertise. And two, there's probably way better people that you can bring on

to talk specifically about this. I'm trying to take like a step above the technological like breakthroughs and just talk about like in the event this were to happen, what would you do? I would caveat it up front that like I haven't like while there's been big advancements in quantum

there are still basic things like factoring a number larger than 15 that haven't happened yet. Yeah. So like the rest of this quantum adjacent conversation comes with a huge asterisk of where I sit today, I do not like being bearish the ingenuity of mankind. Just as I don't, I never want to be in that position, right? So a lot of people I know, and I think they're not wrong for doing this.

It's just not the way I want to think about it. It's like, oh, this is like fairy dust never going to happen. But specifically, like going to up next, hanging out at Pubkey in New York City after, and having, you know, three, four different conversations, with people, and their adamant position was, we have to freeze all of Satoshi's coins because Black Rock or the institutions as a group will never support that.

And the way this conversation happened several times with me was, okay, but they don't control the network. And the response would, in an almost an eerie sense of like a uniformed, like everyone has the same exact, like script, was okay, we'll then have fun getting market sold into in a chain split. Just to add some context, this, for anyone that's not been like following the quantum debate, if we get a cryptographically relevant quantum computer, the threat is any public key that's exposed, the coins there can potentially be stolen. And I think there's something like

six million, seven million coins that have exposed public keys. And then the debate really is around, if this is real, which I'm kind of with you. I think, I don't know if it is. I don't know quantum computing will ever get there, but I think we should be having a discussion about this at least. I think just bearing your head in the sand is probably the wrong tape. Then what do you do do with those coins? Do you prematurely freeze them so they can't be stolen by a future attacker, or do you just let them be taken? And I've got a pretty strong view on this. Obviously, that could change. But I remember when we first spoke about this, I don't remember if it was on the podcast or if it was in private, but it was probably a year ago or something like that. You were

actually on the side of freezing coins, and I am, I wasn't at all. and I still am not. But has your sort of take on that evolved? Yeah, no, it has. The initially hearing about this, like, well, so it's interesting because quantum was always one of those things. Now, mind you, since I got into Bitcoin was, well, with quantum computers, elliptic curve cryptography is entirely broken. So that was like standard fud for years in the background all the time.

Someone, it was almost like the thinking man's fud, because it wasn't just like Bitcoin is a scam or like, you know, it's too volatile or like a thousand other reasons why Bitcoin is not good. This is the thinking man's one because it says, ah, but what if the entire system of how computers and cryptography works breaks? What then? And it was, you know, like I call it the thinking man's fud because it at least attacks the core premises of how Bitcoin operates as a technology in the network to be able to actually try and crack in there. At the time, I was on the side of, yeah, sure, freeze him. Because like if Satoshi's gone, he has plenty of notice, why not? And I hadn't really put much thought into it since, maybe until like the past like month or two, with people kind of winding up more, like talking more about it.

The one other thing I just want to explain, too, is the reason why if you have a split in the network, this is just general Bitcoin, not even specific to this issue, if you have a split in a different change of the rules, you have to basically, since miners cannot simultaneously mine both blocks, they can only mine one of the chains, they have to make a decision on which chain they want to mine. And you are able to basically express your economic power in these chain splits by either selling your coins on one chain and buying the other, or as just a general hedge, you just don't have to touch either of. If a chain split happens, you don't have to sell your coins. You could just have one frozen Bitcoin and one non-frozen Bitcoin, right?

And the chain split happens. Your Bitcoin's in cold storage. You don't have to worry about it. If your funds are at an exchange, you're at the whims of how that exchange expresses their opinion, which is actually the first immediate concern. Is if you have not even the ETFs or like the institutions, if you're just a person who holds your funds at an exchange and this were to happen, you're at the whims of how the exchange decides to express.

it. Yeah. Can we just take one quick step back before we get further into this? Because you're talking about this as a hard fork. If we, if this happens, does it have to be a hard fork? No. And everything I just described doesn't require a hard fork. Okay. Like you can have a split without a hard fork. Yeah. You could, I mean, chain splits happen pretty regularly in Bitcoin, like once a week where you'll have two miners who find a block at roughly the same time. And then you'll have two You have a race on who finds the next block on top of which. So it's like the blockchain is going like this and all of a sudden it splits out like this. You have chain A and chain B.

You don't have to have a fork to have that happen. You just have to have two different miners find two different acceptable blocks. Yeah. And then longest chain wins. Longest, heaviest chain wins. Which is a very important distinction, not to get two in there. Because what happened with Bitcoin Cash is they did an emergency difficulty adjustment algorithm where if blocks weren't found in a certain amount of time, they would drop the difficulty,

and then a bunch of new blocks would get found. This is actually why Bitcoin Cash is, I think, when is Bitcoin Cash Block Explorer? I've never, let me, let me, they are current, so Bitcoin Cash is currently at block height, 947,000,

and Bitcoin is at 945,000. So there are 30,000 blocks ahead of us, right? That was a hard fork with what they did, but you, necessarily don't need a hard fork for this. And it's actually just while we're on the conversation, it would be a soft fork most like, well, I believe it's most likely a soft fork because you're just saying, hey, these UTXOs that are spendable are no longer spendable. And since that's a restriction of the rules, you would be able to do that as a soft fork. Now, as it relates to

like Bitcoin, the, like the, the, like the carrot. in the stick, the carrot is, hey, if we could just take a couple million coins off the supply, Bitcoin's even more scarce now. Yeah. Right. And Satoshi can't even spend his money anymore. So what happens if Satoshi comes back and sells his coins? We get to kill that fud. We get to make it 21 million and make it like 19 million or whatever. It actually, I think it'd be a little bit lower, but that's the idea it's sold. And the stick is, if you don't agree with us, we're just going to sell all of these coins into you, which means that you're the chain that you would want would be worth less. Very quickly, if it's worth less, miners are going to not build on that chain anymore.

And then you have an insecure network, like, because the, you have an insecure network because it's like with Bitcoin cash, let's say they have 1% of the hash rate of Bitcoin. At any moment, the entire Bitcoin network hash rate can just start mining Bitcoin cash and reorganize blocks, right? if you have a proof of work blockchain, you want to have most of the available compute that uses your hashing algorithm mining your chain. Because if it's a minority,

people can start playing funny games, right? And during the immediate split, there's a lot of people bouncing hash rate back and forth because the cost to go from chain A to chain B is one quick command line software. Yeah. And you can send it to a whole fleet of miners pretty quickly. So you don't have to, it's not like people have to go in there and flip a switch on all these physical machines. It's all software. So the switching cost is negligible, if not zero. And when you like think about this, what was, I'm not going to say alarming, but what was very eye-opening for me was having these conversations in person and just this very cavalier attitude of, well, the institutions won't allow it.

Because that's essentially saying the institutions have won at this point over Bitcoiners. not only the institutions have won, the institutions are where Bitcoin derives its value. Yeah. That's actually what is being said. When you say the institutions have blessed this chain, you're saying that their thesis and vision of what Bitcoin is is the champion.

Now, I don't pretend to understand or know how this is going to evolve. I think this is a very, interesting conversation in that it goes really to the core principles of what Bitcoin is. And thinking about it, honestly, the basic premise for people who don't want to freeze these coins is that Bitcoin confers onto you property rights. And those property rights are never violated. If you already self-custody Bitcoin, you know the deal with hardware wallets. Complex setups, clumsy interfaces, and a seed phrase that can be lost, stolen, or forgotten. Well, Bitkey fixes that.

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And I think people sometimes take a short-sighted approach to this where property rights are a key fundamental value of Bitcoin. So we cannot as Bitcoin and steal someone else's coins. And that is what we're doing if we freeze those coins. And I think when you try and look at the long-term value of a frozen Bitcoin fork. I think the long-term value is actually far lower than Bitcoin as it is today. Short-term value of Bitcoin as it is today, if we choose not to steal those funds, they get

stolen by a quantum computer and then dumped on the market. Sure, it's going to go down a lot in the short term. But long-term, it retains all those fundamental values. And I think people just will, are looking at this too short term. Like, I don't mind if someone wants to dump two million Bitcoin on the market. Like, it's going to suck for a while, but we'll get some cheap sats. Yeah, there'll be cheap Bitcoin and there are definitely secondary and tertiary impacts to that. There's also a big assumption is you're telling me the moment someone starts cracking, like public keys, like Satoshi's coins and starts reverse engineering them.

One, we're making a big hand wave that this is actually workable at reasonable scale, which is a very big handwave to explore this conversation. I don't believe anyone, even the people who want to free Satoshi's coins, do not want to do this until they have some reasonable sense of certainty that this is going to happen. Right. And I'd be really, if someone in like in the next four or five months is like, here's the code. Like, let's update this. Like, I don't think it's going to fly. I think to actually get capitulation on this, you need to start seeing this being probable or close to happening or a demonstration with one of them happening. But you need to. need to simultaneously hand-wave over all of the physics breakthroughs and the engineering breakthroughs. People who are very big proponents and thinking that this is inevitable say that this is strictly an engineering problem at this point, that all the fundamental physics has been done. I take them at their word at that because I'm not a physicist. It also means that they're able to engineer and design and build these systems in such a way that they're cost-effective and that

they're able to do it at scale. Because if so as a little bit of context for this, When Bitcoin first started, you got 50 Bitcoin a block. Satoshi's, what are generally attributed to Satoshi's coins, roughly a million, were sent to the default address when Bitcoin first started, which were called pay to public key. Since they are public keys, they are bare public keys. Like any wallet you use today or any wallet you've used in the past 10 years, do not support public key. pay to script hash and pay to public key hash, which is like, you would know them as like the one addresses,

the legacy original ones, have been around since Bitcoin since the beginning. And the script ones paid a script hash came around, I think, 2014. That began with a three. These are like before Segwit, before the box size were. If you ever seen a Bitcoin address with a one or a three, it's pre-seguit. Because those addresses are hashed,

a quantum computer cannot trivially reverse engineer what a hash is. It's a different problem. This is the computer science, like the algorithm is called Shore. S-H-O-R, like Shores algorithm is reverse engineering public-private key cryptography, whereas reverse engineering a hash is called Grover's algorithm. And to my understanding, even though Grover's algorithm brings some optimizations, it's not a trivial thing like breaking a public-private key. So most addresses up until taproot are totally quantum safe.

Taproot, unfortunately, exposes a raw public key when you deposit to it, and then you tweak it if you want to use all of the taproot tree stuff. And with this, some of the quantum proposals like BIP 360 say, hey, we should just get rid of that, like keep taproot and all like pay to Merkle hash. Like you want to have one, a great thing about taproot was one address could have many, many spending conditions nested within it and you don't have to show them all. That you could do if you just disable the key path, which is the raw public key. Just to explain specifically why if you have the, all Bitcoin is secured by this elliptic curve. I actually, with my friend Fundamentals, started a like twice a month math podcast called Magic Internet Math.

We've done five episodes and we've only covered elliptic curve. of cryptography. And it's, the, the vibe is like, at the bar, post bit devs, if you want to talk about how the stuff works, how to go there. Right. So we don't, we try not to, we start very, very basic, like, I would say, junior high level math all the way to elliptic curve cryptography. But with these quantum computers, if you have the raw public key, which is the point on

the curve, you're able to reverse engineer the private key, but it can't undo a hash. So all this to say, Satoshi's coins are vulnerable. and all the taproot coins are vulnerable because they are the two address formats that expose the raw public key. And this is the number that I said earlier. So it's somewhere between six and seven million coins have a public key viewable on chain, I think.

Yeah, yeah. And also if you reuse addresses. Yeah. And but so that that's one of the attack vectors because there's like a short and a long range attack with this. So that's the one where these quantum computers have as much time as they want to try and derive the private key from the public key.

There's no time limit on that. But like if we get, a quantum relevant quantum computer, then there's also the MMPAL attack where as you send a Bitcoin transaction, you expose your public key, and if it can solve the private key from that public key in

less than the time it takes that to get confirmed, they can potentially steal the funds that way as well. Absolutely. So for those at home, to rehash it again, when you go to spend Bitcoin, no matter the address type, you have to reveal your public key. Because

that's when you provide your signature and say, yes, this is my Bitcoin. It says, okay, but to what public key? Right? Your signature is tied to your public key. And so whenever you go to spend, you have to reveal your public key no matter what. And to your point, a long range of a short range quantum attack, I'm not going to pretend to be an expert. From my perspective, long range of a short range means basically a long range attack is all of Satoshi's public keys are available today to be looked at. They have been since January 3, 2009. Since Bitcoin started, those public keys, keys have been sitting there. Anyone could have had a quantum computer trying to crack Satoshi's

coins since the beginning of time, basically. Now, if I go to send you Bitcoin, Danny, and there's a quantum computer that can solve this in less than 10 minutes before it gets into the next block and gets confirmed, that would be a short-range attack. And that actually, a short-range attack actually just entirely destroys how Bitcoin works at that point. Because if I go to send you money and someone can steal it instantly, that's a total collapse. My assumption would be that the time it takes between we can reverse engineer a public-private key pair with a quantum computer and being able to do it in under 10 minutes at scale so you can just attack all the coins. There is time. I would guess you're like even if it's like parabolic accelerated growth.

Like it's still going to take time to get to that point. And this goes into one of the other talks I saw it up next, which was Jonas Nick, who's like the lead cryptographer at Blockstream. he has new protocols called shrinks and shrimps which are these new post quantum proof siding algorithms there's a couple general

in the bucket of types of approaches the most reliable ones though rely as I said earlier quantum computers really can't undo a hash so most of like

the safer the well tested siding algorithms are there are hashes. You're doing a hash instead of just being a raw public key. Now,

there's massive tradeoffs with this stuff and it's a, I would say, a rapidly evolving and advancing field. So in the next year, they'll probably a bunch new breakthroughs. But one, the signatures are much larger. A typical Bitcoin signature right now, I think is somewhere between like 60 and 80 bytes,

something like that. So it's pretty small. These are hundreds of bytes on the smallest side. if not a couple kilobytes on the heavier side. And so there's a question of like when you're designing and architecting this, if you got to a world that was post-quantum proof, you would actually want to, you would get a decrease in the transactions per second

because the blocks are going to be fuller quicker. Now, an interesting talk that Jonas made, and he made a point that this is strictly unrelated to what Bitcoin should do, but as an observation, the reason why we want small block sizes is because we want anyone to be able to trivially run a node and do the computation related to maintaining the Bitcoin ledger for yourself, right? So every person who wants to participate in the Bitcoin network

can reasonably access hardware that will allow you to do that. Quantum, the signatures that Jonas was demoing, well, he was presenting about an up-net, next are one-sixth, the computational complexity of an elliptic curve. So Jonas's observation was, I'm not advocating for this. A case could be made for a block size increase, because if the whole point is making sure that the nodes are computationally robust enough to manage and verify the transactions,

we now have a much easier computational load, CPU cycle-wise. It'll take up more space, right? So that's context that's relevant. And I think over the next coming years there'll be more and more to do with that. The problem with that though is that this is going to be contentious anyway. And adding like a block size increase,

whether it's the right or wrong decision is just going to make it more contentious because of the block size wars. Yeah. And like blocks are empty at the moment. I know that if we get a quantum computer that is going to be capable of the short range attack, then people are going to be trying to move their funds

to a quantum resistant address as quickly as possible. So blocks will get full. But assuming we have enough time, which may be a big assumption, like, why not just leave the blocks alone and make this as uncontentious as possible at this point? If it is like an actual existential risk to Bitcoin. One, yeah, you, you, they are related, but not required to happen together, right? I think in general, what would be nice is if that like, as the cryptography gets hardened in and there's kind of consensus on this is a valid way to secure Bitcoin in a world with a,

cryptographically relevant quantum computer, you would be able to have this as an option. You're going to pay higher fees because it takes up more space on chain, and you can let it sit there. And then you can reevaluate if everyone does a mass migration over to this.

The funny thing, too, just to think about this when we're actually talking about blocks like throughput in space, like if Coinbase has like two, three million Bitcoin, they don't have to have two, three million UTXX. sows. Most of them are kind of omnibus aggregated thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of

thousands of Bitcoin sitting at these addresses. You can actually move most of the economic worth pretty quickly without it being a massive headache. What I'm just thinking through. The other thing I guess to keep in mind is actually, before I'm getting into that, there was a really great talk from Robin Linus at the MIT Bitcoin Expo last week, where he talks about, I'm going to keep it at a high level without going too deep in the details, but he has a paper called Bino Hash. And he basically has figured out a way

using many, many quirks of how Bitcoin works to create scripts that today, without an upgrade can actually be made in a quantum-proof way. He actually does that hash-based signing algorithm today. against both short and long range attack. Yeah. Yeah. It totally works.

Those transactions are 10 kilobytes each. And they're not standard. So like men pulls by default on broadcast them. But he did it on main net. It works. He proved that it works. That's very cool because this is one of the big things. I know a lot of the criticism from the people who are, I guess, more bullish,

if that's the right word, on these quantum breakthroughs, is they're desperate for devs to like quote unquote do something. And obviously, like, through the discussions you're having, devs are taking the seriously, are talking about it. But one of the risks of rushing something through is that we get a suboptimal solution. And like if we wait, like things like this might appear that are ways of doing it without really making a change and without having a negative impact on how Bitcoin actually works. Oh, I'm going to agree and say it's so much worse than suboptimal.

You could be bullied into putting in broken cryptography into Bitcoin. There's plenty of post-quantum algorithms that have been proposed that a classical computer can trivially break. Yeah. So, like, being pushed into executing and deploying something, you could actually not to have it be suboptimal. It could just be rugging everyone's money, right? So I think I encourage, even if I disagree with the people, having a discourse and a discussion and thinking about and game theorying out and making prototypes and, like, proposals. I'm for every single one because it helps flesh out a discourse, right? Even people who I disagree with, I'd rather get it out, flesh it, flesh out of discourse.

And this was BIP 361, which got a bit number this past week, which actually just proposes freezing Satoshi's coins, right? And basically, you would have a declared window of in the next X amount of time. You have to move your coins. Afterwards, they get permanently disabled. I think if Bickland were to go down that path, you'd have to be presenting that stuff now years in advance, even before it gets like activated or implemented to help with that discussion. The tedious thing is just from my observation, everyone's just kind of throwing stuff against the wall right now

and seeing what sticks. Right? even like Jameson Lopp was one of the authors of Bip 361. He was like, I don't even like this. It's just an idea, right? Yeah. So like that's why I try not to get too worked up on what someone's like proposal is. I'm more concerned about thinking about the value, the values of which Bitcoin confers onto its users

and making sure that we are not very conveniently trying to dissuade. And we're just not trying to like push something out that would just kind of like make the institutions happy. Even like Peter Willa, when this conversation first started, and this is back on February of 2025, so this is over a year ago, specifically says, of course they have to be confiscated. And this is like in February 2025. And I find it interesting. I have much respect for him. Interesting to say that because it's such a definitive statement of a change in Bitcoin when he's typically very measured about any public comment about one change versus another. I mean, to read his full quote, of course it has to be confiscated if and when, and that's a big if,

the existence of a cryptography-breaking quantum computer becomes credible threat, the Bitcoin ecosystem has no other option than soft-working out the ability to spend from signature schemes, including ECDSA and 340, BIP 340, which is TAPRut, that are vulnerable to computers. The alternative is that millions of Bitcoin become vulnerable to theft. I cannot see how the currency can maintain any value in such a setting. And this affects everyone, even those who diligent move their coins to their post-quantum protected screens, saying that even if you were the responsible user of the network and you go and move the coins,

you have this negative tragedy of the commons where the supply gets kind of like sold and dumped out. But not to, like, he's obviously done amazing things to Bitcoin. He understands Bitcoin far better than I ever will. But that's not right in my opinion. Like, I don't think you can justify stealing people's coins because someone who you deem a bad actor is going to steal them in the future. It's still theft. Either way, it's theft. I agree with that. The thing that is an option to everyone who holds Bitcoin today is that when this day comes, you just don't sell either side of the fork. Yeah. But you have to hold your coins in self-custody to be able to express that opinion economically.

Yeah. It's not an option. I mean, it's too premature to say what exactly I would do. I mean, I've talked about this with the team. at Anchor Watch. And the initial thought is, we could maintain two different nodes and let you basically pick what network you want to look at. Right? You can just kind of toggle which chain. Exchanges have a lot harder of a time reconciling this because then you have an issue of if you send coins to someone. Like, you have an issue of did you send it to the Bitcoin network chain?

Because if I give you, I could give you a legacy Bitcoin address today. And you could send Bitcoin cash and Bitcoin to that same address because it's pre-segguit. So they look identical. But why do exchanges have an issue here? Because like with the Bitcoin Cash fork, like it took a bit of time. But eventually most exchanges at least for a period of time took both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. So why couldn't they just do something similar? Well, it depends.

Right. At first, it took them a while to list Bitcoin Cash. Yeah, it did. That was not immediate. at a buddy I got into Bitcoin years ago who held it at Coinbase he's like, what's this Bitcoin cash out of my account?

Because he bought it in 2015 and came back in 2020 to look at it, right? And by that point, it was worth a fraction of its value, which is if you were to fully skin in the game, express your opinion and sell one side of the fork for the other,

that's another reason why you have to self-custody it because otherwise you're not going to be able to actually do anything with it. I just think it's, one, operational adds a lot of complexity to running an exchange. I'm not saying it can't be done. You have to use a double your infrastructure stack of maintaining two nodes, two copies of the blockchain, two different records of transaction histories. Like, it's not something that's straightforward and easy.

Especially- That's an issue for the Bitcoin-only exchanges, but like the coinbase of the world have a thousand coins on them anyway. Sure. No, I think that's a good point. It also comes down to who gets the ticker BTC. Yes. I think that's a really important one. Right. So like you could easily just like, say, yep, this is BTC. And like, I mean, that happened all during the block size world. It was like Bitcoin.com or something was like all of the, all of the Bitcoin nomenclature when you click on the links went to Bitcoin Cash Software. Right.

Yeah. My core concern around all this and there's like, there's a bunch of things too, like hourglass, which I'm sure you've talked about, which basically works as a way of giving the miners an increased block. Reward. Hourglass of E2, which just came out is one Bitcoin that is quantum vulnerable can move per block. Yeah. And at that point that basically you would work with a minor to like give them some piece of it so they'll include your trade. Because the idea is that if you have multiple, you would need multiple teams with quantum relevant computers that are cracking

the Bitcoin. If my, if team A says, oh, I'm going to take one Bitcoin. send it to myself, and Team B said, hey, here's one Bitcoin and here's 0.1 Bitcoin for the miner, like 0.9 Bitcoin for me, 0.1 for the minor. Then the minor is going to include the one that pays them in the block. And so it turned, and then you could game theory out of whatever that price is, but you'd be able to get there. Um, these are all, I think it's good that's in a discussion stage in trying to figure this out. My concern, though, is just basically Bitcoin losing its own sense of purpose. a sense of kind of bending the knee to large interests in general.

It's such a mess. And I think the interesting here is that cryptography is always a game of cat and mouse. And at some point, there's no reason to think that a regular computer wouldn't have broken ECDSA. And there would have to be some kind of change in Bitcoin. But this just accelerates the timeline potentially with a huge caveat of the potentially side. But I can't see how this is resolved in a non-contentious way. I think it's going to be a real mess over the next decade, however long.

Mm-hmm. I think decades, the right timeline for this to all get played out. I try to keep an eye on like these breakthrough papers that are changing everything. And I just keep, and I don't mean it to be a dick. I'm just, could it factor a number larger than 15 yet? Like, Bitcoin public traffic keys are very, very large numbers. And the factoring part is really important because the entire security of Bitcoin, relies on the fact that it's way easier to multiply two numbers than to divide a number and find

it like what, right? So the number 15, three times five is 15. But looking at 15, hmm, how do I break it into pieces? Oh, it's five and three. The larger the number gets, the more complicated is to break out those individual pieces. And so we're not even at triple digit numbers. And Bitcoin public-private key pairs are a number between zero and two to the two-fifty. 26. Two times two times two, which is more atoms in the observable universe. So you need to get parabolic exponential growth doesn't even begin to cover it if forever we've never been able to factor more than 15. And they'll factor larger numbers, but you'll find out they use the equivalent of like an ASIC of like a very specific pre-computed logic to help them find

the answer. At that point doesn't really count. Because they're, they basically know the answer ahead of time and they're kind of giving the path on how to find the answer in the code. You have to go from 15 to 2 to the 256 before this is actually a problem. And the other frustrating thing on that is that one of the arguments is that like the physics is solved. This is now an engineering problem. But it's still a huge engineering problem that needs like novel breakthroughs. Like it's not, none of this is trivial.

Yeah. And that's actually something I learned at up next is that there's not like one approach to do this. there's multiple teams with different perspectives on how to do this. And because of that, sounds to me that the engineering part, maybe just as hard as the physics part, because no one knows the right way to go about it yet.

I, it's something that I have a very strong feeling that over the next year, this is now the topic de jour. Like, this is going to be what everyone talks about. It's going to be that, you know, every time someone goes on a podcast, you're going to ask them their opinion one way or another. And this is why I think we're going to talk about.

I totally agree with this and that. And this is why I think the hero's journey part is like an interesting sort of starting point. Because like for us, one of the things we've talked about over and over again here is property rights, which is. Yeah. For my entire Bitcoin journey has always been one of the key fundamental values of Bitcoin. But for someone who's come in and bought an ETF because their broker said Bitcoin is digital gold, like do they know about the property rights part? No. They care about the property rights part.

And how does that skew the argument? No, not only do they not know. They probably don't care. And the reason why I say most of them probably don't care is because if they did care and they were back- They'd be more ideologically aligned and read it on it, right? And short of like a tax advantage play, they'd be holding it in self-custy. So all that to say, this isn't not a straightforward problem to solve. this isn't like most generic fud

in that it's someone who just needs to think about things a little bit more like or like read more Bitcoin books or go on more Bitcoin podcasts like they're going to have to act like this is not a solved problem the most bullish thing and I think people who are critics of this would lean on that is like why are you even talking about this it's not going to happen it's very dust goes back to though I don't like being bearish on the achievements of mankind and we've already seen exponential sudden changes to our life with AI usage that I'm not going to confidently say,

ah, yes, they can do with AI, but they can't do with this. And the really wild thing about AI, I guess the technology of large language models and transformers, all this stuff, all of the fundamental pieces to do this stuff was available like 30 years ago. Like there's an alternate universe where like all of the things that we do with AI right now that's like breaking through could have happened 30 years ago. It was just sitting there and you needed to find the right engineer to execute on it,

very much in the same way of Bitcoin. Like, Bitcoin could have easily been a decade younger. Like, came to life a decade earlier. It just came when the right engineer came forward and clicked all the pieces. So I try to be mindful of that of not, it just takes one person to figure out the answer. Yeah, it's like, I'm not a quantum expert. So to some degree, you have to sort of trust the science.

And so, like, if you do that, then you have to start having these conversations. I'm not saying that I believe this is going to be a threat in five years time, but at some point, I kind of have to assume that this is possible. And so from that perspective, you have to start talking about solutions and the solutions are a mess. And I don't think we have a great solution right now, but time will hopefully fix some of that. So my personal, what I met, I've just been thinking about this over the past couple of days since I got back from Op Next, what I would love. This is putting my cards out on the table of, like, what I think is important here is I would love for Robin Linus's Bino Hash to get the basic minimal technical support so that if you were really, really passionate about doing this, you could just go do it without talking to anyone. The biggest blocker to that is the mining pools don't have Bino hash as a standard transaction. on the technical side, what this means is that Bitcoin nodes have default memples. If everyone followed the BIP 110 stuff, Bitcoin Core changed the relay rules for transactions to go from 80-kabyte, sorry, 80-byte oper turn to 100-kilobite opertern, right?

Was it 10 or 100? Anyway. And because of that, you have this big change in what the miners naturally propagate. All of the Bino hash stuff is not natural to propagate in the default rules. But if you're telling me today that I could spend $100 to basically do the pre-compute work of Bino Hash, it's actually a proof of work puzzle in how you create the transaction. You have to spend a bunch of GPU cycles to create a proof, like your brute forcing hashes. so you spend $100

and if I could just click a button and spend $100 and just like send this to the network and you're technically quantum proof what I think is really important about that is it instantly dismisses all of the fud because if you really really really really want to have a quantum proof UTXO you can do it today and the moment that that's technically an option

it deflates this urgency it just massively just like okay is it going to be rough are some coins going to get stolen maybe but like you have a path to independent autonomy and agency to be able to secure your money if you want to. And I think that's like the perfect place to start. Just if you could get it technically working

and it's ugly and messy, but you know what? One, all of the custodians have teams of engineers who will make it a trivial easy problem. And for everyone who doesn't self-custody, they'll never even know about these details. Then you'll need some sort of like wallet software that will let someone in their basement do it. which is important for the network being fair and distributed,

give everyone a shot at doing this. But that's where I would want it to go. Like that's, that I think if that would happen over the next year, if over the next year, bino hashware became a standard transaction, and then you could if you were so motivated to, able to like get it in there,

then cool. Then like everyone now has an answer. It's sloppy and messy, but you know what? When I got into Bitcoin in 2014, it was sloppy and messy too. And everyone who's at an institution using a custodian, if they want to handle it in the background,

without any extra overhead. See, I love that because in 2017, when BitFenex released the futures markets for the upcoming fork, that was almost like a, it was kind of like a poll of what Bitcoin has thought the real Bitcoin was. And there was obviously people putting skin in the game

and betting money on what the real Bitcoin was. This almost seems similar, different dynamic, but similar in the sense that if we see enough people adopt something like that and try and move to quantum-proof addresses, then you kind of get a taste of what the market really wants. And if that is like a large majority or like even a small majority of Bitcoin, then you kind of get an idea of the direction people want this to go.

I like that as an idea. Just the one thing on the futures market, incredibly important for resolving messy disputes because it lets economic actors, like express their interest. The one thing is you need to actually have the quantum fixing team. Whatever they're going to do, they kind of need like a fight. proposal for people to actually appropriately price it. Because if you tried doing that today, there'd be a bunch of, I don't know, maybe, maybe. Yeah. Exactly. So you need to get like a cohesive

like fork proposal. But then once you do that, running a futures market is another great way to help distill an answer around the market. One of the things I've just thought about during this conversation is the pressure that freezing Stoci's coins puts on Stoci. So just for this conversation, let's let's assume he's alive. And it's taken insane, discipline for him not to sell those coins in the last 17 years. Clearly that if that's the case, if he is still alive, then that's a decision he's made. And at this point, I would assume that he plans to never sell those coins because it's already more money than you could ever wish for.

Like, he's clearly not motivated by having more dollars in a bank account. And if you try, if you propose freezing the coins, you put Satoshi in a position where he has to move them or they get stolen by. you know, the, quote unquote, like good Bitcoin robbers. And if his perspective of it as of right now is, I want those coins to be stolen by quantum, by saying you're going to freeze them, puts him in a position that he may not want to be in, where he has to expose that he is still alive. And so I think the pressure that that adds is unfair.

And again, like, it's coercive behavior on property rights. Mm-hmm. that's a great point that Satoshi assuming they're alive and around maybe is very happy with this outcome

because it very cleanly gives the coins to someone else and genuinely an awesome way and I mean awesome in the word like awe

like awe-inspiring like someone is actually able to bend the rules of physics to reverse engineer public private key cryptography maybe Satoshi's like

cool take it like you get a right And Satoshi's like coins were necessarily required to be mined because when Bitcoin first started, there were no people mining Bitcoin. Would still be on block wrong. Right. The network never would have went. And actually, the first positive difficulty adjustment doesn't happen until December of 2009. And if you look at the strength of CPUs at the time, you needed like seven computers mining Bitcoin. You needed like seven to ten. computers mining Bitcoin at the same time to get the initial difficulty increase. So for the first year of Bitcoin's existence, less than 10 computers were mining Bitcoin at the same time.

Not 10 A6s, not 10 laptops or computers mining Bitcoin. So those coins just kind of had to be made because they weren't worth anything at the time, right? And you got to keep the network propagating going forward. So that's a good point, too, that we're the rest of the network is trying to make a decision. of trying to discern the motives and intents for why their Bitcoin should be moved or frozen without their permission.

To me, like, I don't think that's, uh, I never, I feel like that's a tough Overton window or a crossing of the Rubicon to do for the network. Um,

I try not to be too silly and hyperbolic, but like, you know, the Mount Gox coins haven't moved since they got hacked, right? I didn't know that. They're saying Mark Coppellas did a poll request to unfreeze those coins a couple months ago. I think on the, when you try and think of the motives of Satoshi, you have to, in my opinion, think that the person that enshrined the property rights on Bitcoin would want to retain the property rights on Bitcoin.

I would like to think so. It's going to be a mess, man. Oh, it's going to be messy and like, here's a thing. It's going to be messy in discourse. It only actually gets messy if there's actually observable progress in quantum computers. Yeah. And then you could say, you could look back on this episode two years from now and be like, those idiots, they're talking about this, nothing's happened since then. I would welcome that.

Would love it. Awesome. Amazing. Like, Bitcoin then lost some of its most powerful fud, Bitcoin to a million dollars. Right? You know, like, I would love nothing more for that to happen. We'll just see that. Right.

And I don't, I don't pretend to have answers, but this is, I know we kind of hijacked the idea of the hero's journey, but I just got back from this conference and having multiple conversations with people around this stuff. And, well, we have to do this because of Black Rock. And we have to do this because Coinbase won't support it otherwise. I'm not sure if you saw Brian Armstrong did a tweet about how he's going to spend more time evaluating the quantum stuff going forward. it's something that I'm mindful of. Like, I'm just, I'm just like, it's almost like people are setting up a chessboard. Like the boards being, like the pieces are being laid out on the board right now. And, um, we'll see where the trajectory of these things go.

But I think it's going to accelerate and become more of the more of the mind share what people talk about. And if the technology matches it, then it's going to accelerate even more. If we start getting more and more breakthroughs, not like here's a white paper hypothetically that is something, but like, we're factoring numbers. We're getting coherence, which means they're not like the quantum computers are stable and able do these computations than like that then we're in a whole different world. If you had to bet on it now, who do you think would win in that potential fork scenario? Would you think it would be the Bitcoiners that care about property rights or the black rocks, the coin base of the world with the economic weight?

My guess would be the people in Bitcoin, the anti-institutional side. Maybe it's a little bit of hope on my side. this is definitely a whole different animal compared to the block size wars in 2017. I would be hopeful that while there may be incredible short-term price volatility, that there would be a way to pull through it. The miners are a very relevant side for this cohort too. If they're profit maximizing machines and the unfree side falls apart, than in price,

then they may not mine on it anymore, which then causes a lot of headaches for the propagation of the network. It's funny because in 2017, going into it, I was like, oh, I cannot wait to sell my coins. Cannot wait. Cannot wait. I'm going to sell my B-cash and I'm going to get more Bitcoin.

And at least as of right now, I don't know where it falls yet, but it's still so early that maybe as things continue evolve, I'll get a more informed opinion. But right now, I'm hoping that it would be, even with short-term price volatility, the property rights side of the chain would work. Never better against Bitcoiners. I did the same in 2017 and sold way too early before Beacash had its final pump. But still, I think much higher than it is today. Rob, this has been awesome. I'm going to see you in a week. But thank you for doing this. Anywhere you want to send anyone. We've not even talked about Anchor Watch. Ah, yeah. Anchor Watch.

So we do Bitcoin custody and insurance. There's a lot of interesting things. No announcements for this podcast, but a lot of very interesting things coming out. We've now launched uninsured. So if you're interested in just uninsured custody, you can just check out anchorwatch.com. If you're interested in insured custody,

anchorwatch.com, you can get a hold of me of Twitter at Rob Oneham. We're going to be imminently launching multi-institutional custody, as well as a couple new ways for businesses that we're working with right now for API and white label access for people who want to be able to add the ability to leverage our tech and maybe not our keys or our insurance

if you just want to be able to pull that in, but you could also add insurance depending on who you are. And our ability, and what I'm putting a lot of thought into product development and execution this year too, is around more ways that we can make accessible like safely storing Bitcoin and kind of think of new ways about it. That'll include probably a generalizable API so that you can host it pieces. You can host your own keys on your own

infrastructure. But if you want to have like a with batteries included wallet management software, that can help you generate your transactions, get deposit addresses, get transaction history and all that stuff, those are things that we're going to be imminently coming out with as well. Awesome. Well, thank you for doing this. That was fun. We kind of got off the hero's journey. But like you say, this is going to be a huge top of your conversation in the next few years. But thank you, Rob. This is cool. Well, thank you.

The hero's journey, the abyss at the bottom. This may be the overlooking the next abyss and the mass chaos of a new fork war. Just add this to more fourth turning things. We'll be out of it soon. Well, we're in the first turning now. If you talk to the Bitcoin bugle boys, we're in the first turning. I mean, they called that way too early. They called that before Iran.

They did. It's just first turning things. The Iran thing didn't seem very first turning, but we will see. Awesome, thanks Rob. I'll speak to you soon, mate. See you.