Ben ☣️⚡️

“Going risk off” - When you convert unconfiscatable money that cannot be debased into fiat, which you then hand over as an unsecured loan to an insolvent institution (aka your bank).

Value is not a physical thing To all the people who think bitcoin can’t have value because it’s not tangible... Tangible assets constitute the following percentage of the Mag7 market caps: Nvidia: 0.66% Apple: 1.38% Tesla: 4.06% Microsoft: 7.29% Alphabet: 8.39% Meta: 9.56% Amazon: 16.28% Combined weighted average: 5.79% If you liquidated all of these companies’ physical assets, they wouldn’t amount to 6% of their valuation. There have been days in which the market caps of these companies have moved by more than the total value of their physical assets. If 94% of the value of the most valuable companies on earth is non-physical, then value does not have to be physical. If digital things have no value, then you should have no problem with giving me your computer to erase all the data from it. I will return your computer to you in the same exact physical form. I will just press a few buttons that remove all your data, photos, and contacts, and make it impossible for you to restore them. If value can only be tangible, then all of these digital things have no value, and you shouldn’t mind me deleting them as long as the devices return in their original state. I don’t think you would. Technology, data, business knowledge, customer base, brands, and so much more are non-physical assets whose value likely exceeds that of all the planet’s physical objects and land. This is something most people understand in their daily lives, but because most people have no understanding of money, they do not understand how it applies to money, too. Most people think their money is physical, but in reality, most fiat currencies today are 90%+ digital, and usually less than 10% of the supply is physical paper money. There are no stacks of dollars in your bank sitting in a box under your name, available for you to pick up at any time. A tiny fraction of the money is physical, and the rest is digital, manufactured in various quantities by your bank, government, central bank, and other pedophiles, in quantities based on pure vibes. People still give this non-physical fiat money value because it is the only money they can use with a bank account, since governments only license banks that use their local fiat shitcoin. There is no need for the money to be physical to work; digital fiat money works as well as physical fiat money; or as badly. Bitcoin is an entirely digital money, but it is given value for far more intelligent and peaceful reasons than fiat money. You can read more about that in my books The Bitcoin Standard and The Fiat Standard, which you can buy from Amazon or TheSaifHouse.com. A common objection to bitcoin’s value is: “But if people stop believing in the value of bitcoin it can lose all value.” But that is true of everything. If people stop believing in the value of gold, it would lose value and just become another worthless rock. If people stop believing in the value of electronic devices then Apple and Nvidia go to zero. If people stop believing in the value of Manhattan, then all Manhattan real estate goes to zero. If people discover that tomatoes are poisonous, they stop believing in the value of tomatoes, and the entire planet’s tomato industry goes to zero. Just because something is physical does not guarantee its value, as we can see from the infinite amount of sand and rocks on our Earth left completely untouched by human hands. Physical things can be valueless and non-physical things can have value. Value and physicality are two independent things that are orthogonal to each other. You are doing yourself a disservice if you are unable to benefit from the world’s most advanced money and best saving technology because you are unable to see that value can be non-physical in this one instance, when you have no problem seeing it elsewhere.

@HerrGrunewald @nvk Hourglass 2.0 could address this issue. Not perfect, but a good middle ground.

Great read. ~1M early P2PK coins already have their public keys sitting on-chain though. No upgrade path protects those. When a sufficiently capable quantum machine eventually exists, those coins get swept first – the keys were visible from day one. That's the honest asterisk in "Bitcoin is fine."

@oldirtys @SteveSimple @OrangeSurfBTC @BitBoxSwiss @bluewalletio @PocketBitcoin @GetBittr Not worth unnecessarily exposing public keys for a small fee discount. That’s why I don’t use taproot.

@SteveSimple @OrangeSurfBTC @BitBoxSwiss @bluewalletio @PocketBitcoin @GetBittr If simple tx means only 1 input, the fees will still be ~15% lower. Granted, that's "not much", but way more than "no" benefit? Tbh I can't understand why nobody cares about that :)

Taproot usage on Bitcoin 99% of taproot transactions since 2024 are dust. They are not financial transactions. This was not the expected behavior when we created taproot. Needs to be more widely acknowledged. Details in first comment. Thanks @OrangeSurfBTC for inspiration

@SteveSimple @OrangeSurfBTC I would never use a P2TR address and unnecessarily expose my public key. However I’m very interested in P2MR (BIP360) when/if it eventually gets implemented.

@nvk Even if CRQC never comes to be wouldn’t P2MR addresses (BIP360) still be a cheap insurance policy? I like the idea of being able to plug in a new signature scheme in the future without the need for users to migrate funds.

Quantum field is so far from having scaled devices to actually do the computation in reality that most of the paper claims are indistinguishable from scams.

@AshCrypto Yep

🔥 LIQUIDITY INJECTION HAS STARTED 🇦🇺 Australia has announced to provide A$1 billion in free loans to critical businesses because of on going energy shock. And this is just the start. Historically, every major crisis has led to massive QE. It happened in 2008. It happened in 2020. And it could happen again. This is because the ongoing energy crisis won't go away overnight. Even if everything is resolved tomorrow, the infrastructure damage and oil supply crunch would take months to recover. During that timeframe, most of the countries will face a huge crisis, which will lead to a massive liquidity injection. Today it's Australia. Tomorrow it could be Japan, Europe or even the US.

@SlyGoomba Subscribed ✅

Got a few killer guests locked in for season 10 of the pod. Still need a few more Hmu if interested Best pod in the Bitcoin game btw.

He's not wrong. I've been saying this for months now. Goldbugs do not yet realize they've been rugged by the accelerating rate of innovation. We must accelerate further into our shiny goldpunk post-scarcity fully automated hyperbitcoinized future.

@dr_orlovsky @giacomozucco @_Checkmatey_ @dr_orlovsky I appreciate the reply. In your opinion do you think CRQC will ever be a threat to Bitcoin? Or do you think we are perfectly safe to leave things unchanged long term?

No, you are kot doing your best working out what is true. “Don’t trust, verify” means “do not trust whatever LLM is hallucinating”, that’s simple. Just use old ways of working out what’s true: learn science, do experiments, in the worst case ask human experts with no conflict of interests and proven reputation.

A few thoughts on quantum: The debate around "if" vs "when" a CRQC comes to market is a fruitless one. You won't convince either side to switch, because there is little observable progress, and the risk is there may not be until its too late. The risk a CRQC comes to market is existential if Bitcoin doesn't have a credible plan of action. Risk is probability x consequence, and even if the probability is low, the consequence is 100%. Thus any sane actor should see developing a plan as worth the effort. Arguments that Bitcoin devs are doing nothing appear to be false. Arguments that 'we're all good, do nothing' are also mistaken. Reality is in between, it's a solveable issue, folks are working on it, AND we do NOT have a credible plan yet. Rushing PQ-cryptography is a massive risk, and is the wrong approach. Not developing a credible set of BIPs, is also a mistake. Coinbase and Nic absolutely have an incentive...to protect their bags and business models, which are massively long Bitcoin. They may also have incentives which are misaligned with Bitcoin, and yet that still doesn't disqualify their opinions. Coinbase has millions of BTC folks, they are the 'longest' entity in the world. Question them yes, but assuming pure malice without considering that they are capitalists looking after their interests, is frankly retarded. I'm a Bitcoiner who is massively long the asset (holdings and business), and I try my best to adopt a reasonable middle ground opinion of things. The two extremes of 'emergency' and 'no problem' are both wrong, because they do not understand the simple equation of risk = probability x consequence. I fully support the development of PQ BIPs for Bitcoin. I very much look forward to learning about the proposals, discussing the trade-offs, and doing what little I can to form consensus, and parse the complexities. Having a plan, and not needing it, is far better than needing a plan, and not having one. The truth is in the middle, and there is little benefit to debating in the quagmire of 'will-it, won't it' ever show up. A CRQC may never show up. In that case, the plan stays in the BIP repo as copy and unmerged, but fully reviewed code. What is a totally fucked result, is if we assume a CRQC won't show up, and then it does. Don't fuck this up, the middle ground is the correct path to walk. Probability x Consequence. Small number x 100% loss == take it seriously.

@dr_orlovsky @giacomozucco @_Checkmatey_ I’m just doing the best I can to work out what is true. I have no problem being wrong, just seeking truth. If you think I’m flat out wrong and can point me in the right direction, it would be much appreciated 👍

@giacomozucco @ben0000888 @_Checkmatey_ Unholy fuck, people believe that LLM trained on blogs, reddit and tweets can generate scientifically-correct answers to questions :) Idiocracy is coming…

@giacomozucco @_Checkmatey_ Problem is that existing taproot addresses expose public keys and are worse than standard Native Segwit. We need BIP360 (P2MR) which is basically taproot with a hidden public key. We don’t necessarily need quantum resistant sigs right away, but BIP360 lays the groundwork.

Just in case I'm not, feel free to move your savings to a taproot address with a script path. Then just wait for post-quantum-apocalypse devs to soft fork in a commit and reveal scheme to protect your tx moving your sats to lattice schemes from being frontrun while still in mempool. Easy. I'm not doing that and keeping all in keypath until I see at least a single reproducible logic qubit at the right error rate for being cryptography-relevant with circuits with engineering assumptions less crazy than a Dyson sphere.

@giacomozucco @_Checkmatey_ I really hope that you’re right 🤞

@ben0000888 @_Checkmatey_ Yeah, if LLM slop tells you to run some consensus fork, go for it. I'm staying with Bitcoin.

@giacomozucco @_Checkmatey_ I got Grok to do a deep analysis based on our conversation and it came back with this. I’d definitely feel a lot better if quantum resistance was more of a priority for Bitcoin. Something like BIP360 and Hourglass 2.0 would be a great start.

@ben0000888 @_Checkmatey_ Just talk with literally any expert who is not currently paid to hype some CRQC project. Like, a professor who's just teaching.

@giacomozucco @_Checkmatey_ It seems like you believe that a CRQC is so unlikely that it’s almost impossible. I would love nothing more than for you to be right. What worries me is that I am yet to find an expert in the QC field who thinks the same way.

>Risk is probability x consequence, and even if the probability is low, the consequence is 100%. Thus any sane actor should see developing a plan as worth the effort. This is an absurd sentence: if taken literally, if would mean you have to develop a "plan" for warp-drive-enabled miners in the center of the Galaxy, and for rogue nanobots out of control turning people into ASICs to mine, and for an attacker entering a bank vault via quantum tunnel effect to steal your hardware wallets. If a probability of something existential is *sufficiently* low, you just ignore it focusing on something equally existential but more probable, because your time and attention is scarce, and there's an opportunity cost in any SciFi story you decide to turn into a "plan". Your game-theoretical analysis of ShitCoinbase and RisingStarBoy is also broken: yes, shitcoin scammers keep most of the loot in sats, that's why they would not endanger Bitcoin long term. But the quantum scam is not about changing Bitcoin, it's about luring people into buying "quantum" shitcoins because Bitcoin will "do nothing", same as always.

@fiatarchive QC is a real threat and should not be ignored. Bitcoin will likely be okay with improvements such as BIP360 and Hourglass 2.0. The biggest threat is Bitcoiners denying the issue, and/or not coming to consensus.

MICHAEL SAYLOR: Bitcoin's quantum threat is still 10–20 years out. "By then, Bitcoin will upgrade like everything else." "We'll just upgrade the software, Joe."

For those of you tired of seeing Bitcoin sit around $69k for so long... just do what Tom did back in 2011. Take a loss and get your cash back.

@simanta @AlpenLabs Hourglass 2.0 seems like the best middle ground for handling lost coins.

CRQC is an important enough risk to warrant more attention & resources now we’ll do our part at @AlpenLabs to ensure bitcoiners will have options most critically: any collective action for handling satoshi-era vulnerable coins must not violate bitcoin’s core principles.

@ayebytes @EricSirion They allow a maximum combined total of 1 Bitcoin per block for P2PK wallets.

@EricSirion didn’t know about that proposal. how do they choose how many outputs can move per block?

if ECDSA were broken, funds in p2pk outputs and any outputs that have already revealed their public key in a prior spend could be stolen to mitigate this, where do you stand? a) quantum-unsafe utxo deadline / burn b) freeze vulnerable outputs, allow migration only c) let them be stolen (no intervention)

@CoachKorey3 @BritishHodl You just broke the second rule 😉

@BritishHodl What are the 3 rules? Buy. Don’t sell. What else

Bitcoin content is dead. And it's not because Bitcoin is dead. In-fact the HNW seem to still be buying. Or because the creators in the space suddenly became shit. Because some of them are really great. It's because - as I predicted a year and a half ago and was hated for - we have hit peak Bitcoin education for retail and they don't care anymore. Retail is utterly cooked, fried and has given up. Retail does not give a single damn about Bitcoin. They will be back to take an L when the prices get moving and momentum builds enough. But remember - there's still only 3 rules to Bitcoin. The question is will you pass the IQ test of market moments like these?