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Maybe QC can work at scale, rendering current cryptography useless. Maybe it cannot. But, lets assume QC can work. Let us also assume some country currently has a QC. What do you do with it? Because, if anyone knows you have it, the world economy tanks. This is not like a nuclear weapon. Knowledge of its existence cannot be used for deterrance. No one is going to trust that it is not being used. So trust in our communication systems completely fails with knowledge of its existence. Commerce and cooperation fail. Social structures disintegrate. Order turns to disorder, which reduces the value of the QC itself. Instead, you want to very, very quietly use it to simply stop anyone else from achieving QC, all while encouraging quick adoption of quantum resistant cryptography. You want to convince everyone that QC cannot exist for a long period of time, but still hold out its threat in the future. And if someone does figure it out alongside you, you join forces and work together to hide its existence. But you want quantum resistance in place before you announce your QC achievement, such that you can monetize the value of the QC computing without destroying the economy which is needed to do so. In the interim, you quietly accumulate secrets. Whether bitcoin survives this transition, as a communication system with a monetary use case, is unknown. Quantum resistance maybe bloats the blockchain and is a bridge too far, etc. IDK. Not everything will survive. So interesting to see China lean into gold, while the US leans increasingly into bitcoin. View quoted note →

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I'm sorry, but I think you completely missed my point. Your "let's assume" is doing way too much work there. Let's not assume. Let's not do anything to Bitcoin that someone can't explain to us, from first principles, without smuggling in a "let's assume". Especially when we can disprove their premise from first principles ourselves. QC can't scale. Because, at scale, thermodynamics takes over. At scale, the cat is alive or it is dead.
↩ replying to Zsubmariner
Hi. Thanks for your passion and response. So, lets assume QC cannot be built. 😂 If you will also allow, let's also assume bitcoin becomes a geopolitical battleground for global monetary dominance, with China leaning into gold and the US embracing bitcoin. In other words, it increasingly becomes in the interests of US enemies to ow and stop demand for bitcoin. Whether QC is real or not, can China cause sufficient FUD around the QC threat to derail confidence in bitcoin and cause massive amounts of misallocated investment? Can enemies help encourage quantum resistant soft forks, which weaken the system in various ways (increasing size of the blockchain, centralization, unproven cryptography, etc)?
↩ replying to npub1elqf...xw9h
That's sort of my point. The FUD is the real threat. Don't feed it. And let's not assume anything. QC can't work. This isn't about betting on a engineering problem being solved or not. Engineers can't change physics. Just like AGI, this is not a question of engineering. It's a category error. Neither imagined technology is connected to reality by anything but pure imagination. They are each based on an unfounded, metaphysical, article of pure irrational belief. QC research assumes that there is some magical way to scale a quantum system without it turning into a thermodynamic system. There is no evidence of that. Microscopically, the universe appears to be quantum (or so they tell us.) Macroscopically, everything obeys thermodynamics. If you add a lot of quantum stuff together., you get thermodynamics. The idea that we can make the universe act any other way is absolutely unfounded. At best, all these billions in QC research will make a precise map of the scaling relationship between quantum and thermodynamic behavior. China can say whatever they want. They can say that Bitcoin is haunted or whatever. So what? Same with the AI Boogeyman (the one who is going to come and create QC scaling, by some accounts.) There is no reason to believe that scaling neural nets will some day cause them to come to life and produce new information. They are just fancy databases of compressed statistical data. They are cool and useful as such, but that's it. There is no amount of lighting with which you can hit Frankenstein's monster and bring him to life. We should not do anything to Bitcoin based on baseless fever dreams, particularly those coming from our enemies. We also should not burn our economy to the ground chasing AI specters either. Apocalyptic hype bubbles themselves are the danger. Here's a thought experiment for you, if you want one. Lately China has been releasing an "oh, yeah, we already know that" paper right after each one of ours. What if they are just posturing? What if they are amplifying gay woke stuff online and shipping precoursers for fent, while they double down on masculinity and push families and clean living at home? What if they are burning coal while they sell us magnets for the green revolution? What if they are gassing us up on AI and QC threat too? What if the point is to exhaust us with fear and make us burn ourselves to the ground chasing shadows, while they build real shit? Bitcoin should ignore the FUD and keep building real shit. That's my take.