Bryan Jacoutot

Ships that want to transit through the Strait of Hormuz are being asked to pay fees in yuan to get a secret passcode bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

I had coffee with a banker attending his first @EthCC. He was surprised by how little some crypto builders understand TradFi: "They’re very strong on tech. But they don’t really understand finance - how it works, why it exists. You can’t replace or improve a system you don’t understand." And the problem is, he’s right.

@BryanJacoutot @JakeLangenkamp Great flag, Bryan. A good reminder that any material asset is at risk of being seized in these scenarios. The fact that bitcoin dematerializes gold sets it apart as a potential reserve asset.

📄NEW RESEARCH (from @JakeLangenkamp): Taiwan holds $602B in reserves, over 80% in USD. In a PRC blockade, gold is stranded and dollar access could be leveraged against Taipei. Bitcoin is the only reserve asset that stays sovereign and spendable under both scenarios.

Depending on launch time and conditions, those within the white range rings may be able to spot #ArtemisII on its way to space 🚀 (Map via @Dillonshrop06)

So everyone's talking about Google Quantum AI’s new research paper, “Securing Elliptic Curve Cryptocurrencies against Quantum Vulnerabilities: Resource Estimates and Mitigations.” Cue the predictable Bitcoin quantum FUD: “Why haven’t the devs fixed this already?!” Reality is, it’s not a simple patch. Post-quantum signatures come with serious tradeoffs and Bitcoin faces unique constraints that general tech and web apps don’t. Post-quantum signatures are generally much larger transaction sizes - often 5–50× or more in the signature-heavy parts → higher fees, more compute. Hardware wallets would need a big shift. The choice of scheme (stateless, stateful, or hybrid) would change how we custody coins. HD wallets, watch-only wallets, FROST, MuSig2, silent payments… some of the privacy and UX wins we love today could be gone, degrade or require clunky workarounds. Bitcoin has to stay decentralized: small blocks, permissionless validation. Web servers can throw bigger payloads around; Bitcoin can’t without sacrificing the very properties that make it Bitcoin. Even “standard” post-quantum schemes like ML-DSA (which Android is integrating) produce signatures 35–66× larger than today’s ~70-byte ECDSA signatures, making them too heavy for Bitcoin’s tight constraints on block space, fees, and hardware. That’s why researchers like @n1ckler (and @blksresearch) are doing vital work right now: exploring the right tradeoffs for Bitcoin specifically. Hash-based crypto? Lattice-based? Something else? Which Bitcoin-optimized forms of SPHINCS make sense? SHRINCS (tiny ~324-byte stateful signatures with static backups) or SHRIMPS (for multi-device stateful setups)? How many times will a user sign with the same key? Can we assume user devices can securely maintain state, or do we need fully stateless fallbacks? Would we expand the block size with some kind of quantum witness discount? What do we do about quantum-vulnerable coins? These are the hard, Bitcoin-specific questions that matter. Practical steps are already being taken. BIP 360, proposed by @cryptoquick, @Ethan_Heilman, and @isabelfoxenduke, is a thoughtful first step: it introduces a new Pay-to-Merkle-Root (P2MR) output type that gives us Taproot-like functionality without the quantum-vulnerable keypath spend. It’s designed as an enabling primitive — conservative, upgradable, and focused on reducing address exposure risks while the ecosystem figures out the heavier lifting of actual post-quantum signatures. Bitcoin builders have spent 15+ years improving what is otherwise a very clunky experience in a decentralized environment. Rushing big protocol shifts risks breaking that. This isn’t something to knee-jerk “just fix.” It deserves careful, ongoing research and exploration, not panic. That said, informed skeptics like @reardencode and @bergealex4 are also right to push back. The paper improves resource estimates for breaking secp256k1 (fewer logical qubits, potentially minutes-long attacks on a hypothetical machine), but as @reardencode notes, it’s still theorycrafting: we’d need a large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computer with hundreds of thousands of physical qubits maintaining coherence for minutes — something far beyond today’s best devices (hundreds of qubits coherent for microseconds). A true CRQC capable of breaking ECDSA by 2029 (or even soon after) remains a big maybe. Bitcoin's strength is in deliberate, methodical and conservative steps to address threats.

New blog post ⚡️🎥 - Rewriting History is Over: How Rolling Timestamps Make Video Footage Tamper-Proof simpleproof.com/blog-posts-art…

I have received three separate notifications about College Basketball from @coinbase in the past *hour* alone. It is absurd that, amidst arguably the worst collapse in trust in this industry’s history, the largest American CEX has completely pivoted to trying to get their customer base hooked on sports gambling, so that they can extract even more exorbitant fees. At this point, it is undeniable that Coinbase *is* part of the industry’s problem. I will be ending my Coinbase One subscription and moving my business to new a CEX, any recommendations?