Should Satoshi’s Coins Be Frozen? | Rob Hamilton

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37:48That's blockwaresolutions.com forward slash WBD. This is exactly where I stand on this. 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 Bitcoiners, 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.

38:27Sure, 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 are looking at this too short term. I don't mind if someone wants to dump 2 million Bitcoin on the market. It's going to suck for a while, but we'll get some cheap SaaS. Yeah, there'll be cheap Bitcoin. And there are definitely secondary and tertiary impacts to that. There's also a big assumption. You're telling me the moment someone starts cracking 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 hand wave to explore this conversation.

39:12i don't believe anyone what 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 i if someone in like in the next four or five months is like here's the here's the code like let's update this like i don't think it's gonna 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 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 uh 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 keys since they They are public keys.

40:32They 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. One, 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, pay to script hash, came around, I think, 2014. That began with a three. These are like before SegWit, before the block size were. If you've ever seen a Bitcoin address with a 1 or a 3, it's a pretty segue. Because those addresses are hashed, a quantum computer cannot trivially reverse engineer what a hash is.

41:13It's a different problem. This is the computer science, like the algorithm is called Shor, S-H-O-R, like Shor's algorithm is reverse engineering public-private key cryptography, whereas reverse engineering a hash is called Grover's algorithm. And to my understanding, even though Growers 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 um i actually uh with my friend fundamentals uh started uh like twice a month math podcast called magic internet math we've done five episodes and we've only covered elliptic of cryptography and it's the the vibe is like at at the bar post bit devs if you want to talk about how this 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.

42:51But 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 like, 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 it's like a short and a long range attack with this.

43:23So 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 there's no time limit on that. But like if we get a quantumly a quantum relevant computer, quantum computer, then there's also the mempool 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.

44:00Because that's when you provide your signature and say, yes, this is my Bitcoin. It says, OK, 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 versus short range quantum attack, I'm not going to pretend to be an expert. From my perspective, long range versus 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 3rd, 2009. Since Bitcoin started, those public keys have been sitting there.

44:35Anyone 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 there 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 um He has new protocols called shrinks and shrimps, which are these new post-quantum proof signing algorithms.

45:41There'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 signing algorithms are like they're hashes you're like it's a you're doing a hash instead of it just being a raw public key now there's massive trade-offs with this stuff and it's a i would say a rapidly evolving and advancing field so in the next year there'll probably a bunch of 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 um 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 um you you would get a decrease in the transactions per second because yeah you the blocks are going to be fuller quicker.

46:51Now, 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 these signatures that jonas was demoing uh well he was presenting about and up 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 the the you know 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 um 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 like 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 yeah and like blocks are empty at the moment i know that if we get a quantum computer that are going to 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 they 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 a like an actual existential or is to Bitcoin?

48:41One, yeah, 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 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 utxos most of them are kind of omnibus aggregated thousands tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of bitcoin sitting at these addresses you can actually pretty move most of the economic worth pretty quickly without it being a massive headache um what i'm just thinking through the the other thing i guess to keep in mind is um actually before i get into that there was a really great talk from robin linus at the mit bitcoin expo last week uh where he talks about i'm gonna keep it at a high level uh without going too deep in the details but he has a paper called BinoHash.

50:07And 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. Hmm. and they're not standard. So like mempools by default won't broadcast them. But he did it on mainnet. It works. He proved that it works. That's very cool because this is one of the big things. Like 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.

50:55And obviously, like through the discussions you're having, devs are taking this seriously, they are talking about it. But one of the risks of rushing something through is that we get a suboptimal solution. And if we wait, 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.

51:30Yeah. out so like being pushed into executing and deploying something you could actually not have it be suboptimal it could just be rugging everyone's money right um so i think i encourage even if i disagree with people having a discourse and a discussion and thinking about and game theorying out and making prototypes and like proposals like 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 a discourse and this was bip 361 which got a bit number this past week um 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 um i think if bicklin were to go down that path you would have to be presenting that stuff now years in advance even before it gets like activated or implemented um to help with that discussion the the tedious thing is just from from my observation um everyone's just kind of throwing stuff against the wall right now and seeing what sticks right even uh like jameson lopp was one of the authors of bib 361 he was like i don't even like this it's just an idea right like yeah um 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 uh dissuade and well we're just not trying to like push something out that would just kind of like make the institutions happy even like peter willa um 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 said that in february 2025 and i find it interesting i have much respect for him uh 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.

54:10I 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, BIP340, which is Taproot. that are vulnerable to quantum 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 diligently move their coins to their post-quantum protected schemes.

54:46Saying 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. 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.

55:29Yeah. 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 AnchorWatch. 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.

55:58exchanges 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 an i could give you a legacy bitcoin address today and you could send bitcoin cash and bitcoin to that same address because it's pretty segway 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 um at first it took them a while to list bitcoin cash yeah it did that was not immediate um i had a buddy i got into bitcoin years ago held it at coinbase he's like what's this bitcoin cash i have in my account because he like bought it in 2015 and came back in 2020 to look at it right um 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 um 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 main 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 um 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 yeah i think that's a good point it also comes down to who gets the ticker btc yes that i think that's a really important one right so like you could easily just like say up this is btc and like i mean that happened all during the block size war, it was like Bitcoin.com or something, it was like all of the Bitcoin nomenclature when you click on the links went to Bitcoin Cash software, right?

57:56Yeah. My core concern around all this, and 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 V2. 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 miner 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 team A says, oh, I'm going to take one Bitcoin, send it to myself.

58:46And 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 miner, then the miner's 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.

59:08These are all, I think it's good that's in the discussion stage and trying to figure this out. My concern though, is just basically Bitcoin losing its own sense of purpose in a sense of kind of like bending the knee to large interests in general it's such a mess um and i think the interesting here is that like 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 um with a huge caveat of the potentially side but um 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 i think decades the right timeline for this to all get played out um 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 the 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 how do i break it into pieces oh it's five and three the larger the number gets the more complicated it 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 256 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 um 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 um 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.

1:01:40Like 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 like the engineering part may be 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 du 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.

1:02:18But 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 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? Do they care about the property rights part? And how does that skew the argument?

1:02:47No, 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 that custody bitcoin they'd be more ideologically aligned and read in on it right and short of like a tax advantage play they'd be holding it in self-custody so all that to say

1:03:12this 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 fairy 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 constantly 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 i found out it came 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 uh 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 and so like if you do that then you have to start having these conversations um i'm not saying that i believe this is going to be a threat in five years time.

1:04:50But 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, I've just been thinking about this over the past couple of days since I got back from Upnext, what I would love, and this is putting my cards out on the table of 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 um on the technical side what this means is that uh bitcoin nodes have default mempools if everyone followed the bip 110 stuff bitcoin core changed the relay rules for transactions to go from 80 kilobyte sorry 80 byte op return to 100 uh 100 100 kilobyte op return right was it 10 or 100 anyway um and because of that you have this big change in what the miners naturally propagate all the bino hash stuff is not natural to like propagate in the default rules but if you're telling me today that i could spend a hundred dollars to basically do the pre-compute work of bino hash it's actually a proof of work puzzle and how you create the transaction you have to spend a bunch of gpu cycles to create a proof like you're brute forcing hashes so you spend a hundred bucks and if i could just click a button spend a hundred bucks 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're you have a path to independent autonomy and agency to be able to secure your money if you want to.

1:07:08And 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'll let someone in their basement do it, which is important for the network being fair and distributed and 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 can if they want to handle it in the background without any extra overhead.

1:08:02See, I love that because in 2017, when Bitfinex 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.

1:08:41Agreed. 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 final 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.

1:09:17One of the things I've just thought about during this conversation is the pressure that freezing Satoshi's coins puts on Satoshi. So just for this conversation, let's assume he's alive. um it's taken insane um discipline for him not to sell those coins in the last 17 years um 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 i would assume that he plans to never sell those coins because it's already more money than you could ever wish for like if 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 uh quote unquote like good good bitcoin robbers um and if 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 i think the pressure that that adds is unfair and again like it's coercive behavior on property rights that's a great point that uh 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 gotta right um and satoshi is like coins were necessarily required to be mined because when bitcoin first started there were no people mining bitcoin we'd still be on block long right the network never would have went and actually the first positive difficulty adjustment doesn't happen until December of 2009.

1:11:18And if you look at the strength of CPUs at the time, you needed like seven computers mining Bitcoin. You needed like seven to 10 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 ASICs, not 10, like 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.

1:12:05To me, like, I don't think that's, 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 they're saying they're saying mark capellas did a pull request to unfreeze those coins a couple months ago i think on the when you when you try and think of the motives of satoshi you have to in my opinion think that the the person that enshrined the property rights on bitcoin would want to retain the property rights on Bitcoin.

1:12:47I would like to think so. It's going to be a mess, man. Oh, it's going to be messy. And here's the 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 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 um 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 um 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 um 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 mindshare 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 to do these computations then 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 in that potential for scenario would Do you think it would be the Bitcoiners that care about property rights or the BlackRock's, the Coinbase of the world with the economic weight?

1:14:42My 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, then, like in price, then they may not mine on it anymore, which then causes a lot of headaches for the propagation of the network um it's funny because in 2017 going into i was like oh i cannot wait to sell my coins cannot wait cannot wait i'm gonna sell my bcash and i'm gonna get more bitcoin and at least as of right now i don't know where it falls yet but it's so pretty like 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.

1:16:06Never better against Bitcoiners. I did the same in 2017. It sold way too early before Bcash had its final pump. But still, I think it's much higher than it is today. Rob, this has been awesome. I'm going to see you in a week. Tell us in a week. Anywhere you want to send anyone. We've not even talked about Anchor Watch. 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 Rob1ham 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 like white label access for people who want to be able to add uh 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 uh 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 your own keys on your own infrastructure.

1:17:32But 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, hero's journey. This is going to be a huge topic of 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.

1:18:04Just add this to more first 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 the scene very first turning, but we will see. Awesome, Danny. I'll speak to you soon, mate. See ya.