A Quantum Fork is Coming to Bitcoin | Alex Pruden & Philip Martin

This episode is brought to you by Fidelity Crypto. You'll hear more about them later in today's episode. Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice or necessarily the views of Blockworks. Our hosts, guests, and the Blockworks team may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed. All right, everyone, welcome back to Empire. I'm very Excited about this one. Really excited to have, uh, the Chief Security Officer of Coinbase, Philip Martin, as well as Alex Pruden, who's the founder and CEO of Project 11, with us. This is going to be the security podcast, but even maybe one step deeper than that. Um, I don't know if you guys have been reading Nick Carter's post about quantum and Bitcoin, and, you know, we're all screwed here. And I, yeah, I wanted to bring the two smartest security people that I know on to actually figure out what we're going to do about quantum and Bitcoin. So Yeah. Philip, Alex, welcome here.

Thanks for having us.

Great to be here.

Yeah, excited about this. I think maybe the best place— I'm going to ask like a ton of really dumb questions in this episode. Just be prepared because I'm way out of my depth talking about quantum. But I think I'd love to hear just from you guys about why is this the moment in time we're recording this, April 2026, like quantum, quantum. And then now it feels like boom, like we're walking. I think Nick said Bitcoin Core is sleepwalking towards collapse. Like, why is this? The time period when everyone is starting to talk about this?

I mean, I can take maybe just a first pass. I think the primary reason is that two papers came out a couple of weeks ago now, one out of Google. So Google Quantum AI Lab. And, you know, so they're building a quantum computer. They also have folks that work on cryptoanalysis, namely a gentleman named Craig Gidney. So this lab came out and basically said, hey, if you look at targeting elliptic curve cryptography specifically, you know, past kind of work in quantum and cryptography focused on an older crypto system, RSA. But Google said if you target ECDSA specifically and you, you know, you kind of layer on some assumptions about the type of computer we're building, then potentially this is a much more imminent threat than, than we potentially first thought. And there's a bunch of impacts across the cryptocurrency space. I think this was actually one of the more notable parts of this Google paper was, I mean, it was, it was like a one-quarter quantum computing paper and a three-quarters survey of the digital asset space and all the various ways things were vulnerable and really explicitly said, hey, there's an urgency to migrate to post-quantum cryptography. That was paper one. Paper two, uh, that was independent of this was a team out of Caltech, which, um, you know, really it was like the S-tier level physicists, you know, founded, you know, uh, the company's called Orotomic, um, founded by folks named that gentleman by the name of Dilith Glovestein, who's done a lot of really seminal work on, on quantum computing as well as John Preskill, who's probably the most prominent living American physicist out there. So they came out with a paper that said, hey, you know, Shor's algorithm may be possible with as few as 10,000 neutral atom reconfigurable qubits. And just for context, like the prior kind of state of the art was between 500,000 and 1 million was what people thought we needed. So you just took basically the bar that you had to clear to potentially break public key cryptography down all the way to 10,000. And, you know, just for context, IBM has a system that's around 1,000 qubits and they've entangled, you know, kind of systems up to around 7,000 qubits. So you're kind of like an order of magnitude, at least in terms of the number of physical qubits you would need to potentially be cryptographically relevant. So those, those two papers kicked off a press cycle that now I think suddenly everyone is waking up to and like, oh man, we should figure something out here.

Yeah, I think that's right. I think, you know, the interesting thing about this whole space is everything is so speculative, right? I think Alex very correctly said a bunch of like, it might, it could be, we think that maybe, right? And so that leads reasonable people to have wildly divergent views about what's true in this, in a way that I think I've rarely ever seen before.

Maybe before going too deep into Bitcoin, can we just talk about there's this system that every, like, cryptographic system that everything runs on, including our financial system. And it seems like that is kind of at risk. You know, we've kind of run on this for decades and it seems like that is at risk. By the way, not just with quantum, but, you know, we've been— Santi and I have been talking about, you know, Anthropic and, you know, OpenAI and what's happening with Mythos a little bit on the podcast. And so it seems like there's these two threats, quantum and AI. Maybe before going too deep into Bitcoin, Can you guys just like, what's your mental model for how you're thinking about just the financial system and the security of the financial system kind of getting upended right now?

Yeah, it's not even the financial system. It's, it's, it's modern cryptography is what's at threat, or at least a class of modern cryptography is what's at threat today with quantum computers. Um, which is, which largely led to the, I mean, I don't want to sound hyperbolic, but the ability to use the internet safely. Rests on modern public key cryptography, which quantum computers, which a cryptographically relevant quantum computer, which is the term that we use to talk about this, would break fundamentally. That's financial systems, that's government, that's basically everything. And Alex talked about cryptic agility a second ago, which I think will be important moving forward. But the thing of it is a lot of stuff that's built today is not agile and can't be agile. You look around your house and how many IoT devices are there? It's an open question. Is that stuff, are the chips in those devices going to be able to use post-quantum algorithms? Don't know. Maybe yes, maybe no. Are the manufacturers going to actually upgrade them?

Don't know.

Maybe yes, maybe no. And so this really, truly, when it comes to pass, will be— Y2K would be underestimated in my—

Wait, Philip, I have a dumb question here. So we have all these devices, like I've got this microphone, I've got the computer, I've got the IoT devices. Maybe someone has Amazon Alexa. Do you have to replace every single device? Is this a hardware upgrade or a software upgrade that will happen?

Depends how they implemented it under the hood. Um, it could be either.

Do you have a— yeah, Alex, go ahead.

Yeah.

Uh, well, I wasn't going to make a comment on the hardware or software. I was just going to make a quick comment on the financial system point that you brought up. Um, look, I think it's true that there's a lot of, uh, there's a lot of risk to the broader financial system with that uses the internet, right? Like, you know, the vulnerabilities are kind of more around like how it you know, the financial system is embedded inside of the internet, basically, largely, not entirely. I think the one distinction between the broader financial system and what we're going to talk about, which is blockchains, is that, you know, these systems already rely very heavily on trust, right? So there's like a trusted set of parties that kind of maintain the ledger, so to speak, or data. Like, so in theory, you know, I think an attack could be very disruptive, let's say on SWIFT or something like that. But like, in theory, you know, just like a bunch of important bankers sitting around being like, hey, whoever did that last entry, erase that. And like, let's go back one, you know. And so I guess reverting, you know, or preventing, you know, an attacker from being able to profit from an attack on the broader financial system, I think is easier. Or maybe stated more clearly, it would be harder, I think, for someone to profit from an attack on the broader financial system. Not impossible, just harder. As opposed to blockchains and digital assets where it's like the authorization to move funds is entirely cryptographic and it is, it like has to be one factor, right? Like if it was multi-factor with trusted parties, then it's kind of hard. I mean, it's like less decentralized, right? I mean, that's kind of maybe an overgeneralization, but I think sometimes I think people overemphasize or kind of are hyperbolic around this like, Well, if a quantum computer comes out, like the world is going to end, like everything is going to fall down. I don't necessarily think that's true. Everything has to migrate. By the way, banks are already migrating, as is the broader internet, like 50%. I can't remember. Philip may know the exact number. You know, somewhere around half or a third of all internet traffic is already secured using hybrid cryptography, which implements PQC. So like the ball is rolling. And I think, I think it's blockchains are kind of in this unique position where they're super reliant on cryptography for their security. And migrating or mitigating a potential— migrating to a safe form of cryptography and/or mitigating an attack is just harder.

I mean, I guess on that point, I mean, as we're recording, there's been a spike in DeFi hacks that is unrelated to Bitcoin. But if you look at— they're not all the same, but this latest one seems like perhaps some stuff could have been avoided if you had timelocks or if you had a bit more of rate limits and stuff that I guess seems a bit obvious in hindsight. But one of the things that we— in crypto, you see a lot of builders be extremely philosophical and ideological and perhaps not too practical. The question is more around, I think, Bitcoin. This is the heart of the discussion of this pod. But how would you describe the sentiment out there around— actually, you talk about the traditional internet moving now 50% to kind of front this, or where are you in terms of sentiment of like, how's the community adapt? Like, is the alarm fully being sounded and are people reacting to this, or are they not moving as fast as you'd want?

Yeah, my opinion, and Alex may have a different one, is it's mixed. I think there are, you know, we can talk about Bitcoin specifically, although obviously this impacts the whole sort of spectrum of blockchains. Some blockchains are moving quite quickly, right? There's at least a couple, I believe, that have testnets up that are using post-quantum cryptography. Almost everybody has a roadmap with the exception, I would say, of Bitcoin. And I think there are a broad spectrum of opinions within the Bitcoin community on the timeline as well as the risk of quantum computers. I think Nick Carter has done some good stuff on this that he's put out around looking at where everyone stands to the extent it's possible to see.

I have nothing to add other than to say that I think Bitcoin, one of the reasons I think it's a hard topic in Bitcoin, and I'm sure we'll cover this more later, is there's this philosophical issue at play where, you know, a lot of the older, um, UTXOs, um, like Satoshis, are thought to be irrecoverable. So like, you know, Satoshi may be dead, so it's okay. So all that value is just— what do you do with it? Do you basically prevent a quantum computer from stealing it by burning it, or do you just let the quantum computer take it? And they're kind of like, you know, there's these two things about Bitcoin where that's like a really deep philosophical divide. One is this concept of Bitcoin is digital gold, right? So it's like the integrity of this supply should not be violated. So like, you know, theoretically someone could just go and steal and then re— and then sell on the open market, you know, a tenth of all gold. Like, that's probably gonna have a major price impact, impacting people's confidence in the future ability of this to be a store of value. So that's like one aspect. The other aspect though is Satoshi, right, created Bitcoin as a direct answer to what he saw was, you know, corruption and mismanagement and the broader financial system. And this This property rights, like, not your keys, not your crypto, was a deeply rooted philosophical thing. Look, I think this has made the conversation in Bitcoin particular. Bitcoin is kind of unique in this way. It has this uniquely large amount of value and it's been around the longest. So this is like a uniquely difficult conversation there that makes the conversation harder. I think makes people a little bit slower to want to recognize this is a potential threat.

This episode is brought to you by Fidelity Crypto, a platform built in-house with the same discipline Fidelity applies to everything. So you can invest in crypto confidently. Trade crypto backed by industry-leading security. Get started at fidelity.com/crypto. Crypto is offered by Fidelity Digital Assets N.A., is not insured by FDIC or SIPC, and includes risk of complete loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services LLC, member NYSE/SIPC. Yeah, let's go down the Satoshi rabbit hole. So to tee up this conversation, there's, you know, Bitcoin's— what's Bitcoin's market cap, like $1.5 trillion today or something like that? Satoshi coins are like roughly 10%. So that's— there's a hun— so I think the question in the quantum land is the Satoshi coins are— a lot of Bitcoin might get upgraded, like there might be a hard fork and there might be, you know, the Satoshi coins might get upgraded, but the or most of the Bitcoin will get upgraded, but the Satoshi coins maybe don't get upgraded. So then there's like this $150 billion pot that people can attack. It's like the biggest pot of money on the internet that you can go attack today. So the question is like, what do you do with these Satoshi coins? Philip, is that kind of the right framing?

Yeah, basically. Um, and I think, I think Alex is right that there's, there are basically two choices, right? You lock them in some way. Or you leave them up for grabs. And there are a bunch of different nuanced approaches that people have suggested within those two buckets, right? Lock but recover in some way if you can prove some knowledge, that kind of thing. And neither choice is obviously the clear winner.

I mean, let's go deeper. What do you guys think should happen?

Oh man, you're really just setting us up to get flamed by—

I know, seriously.

Right, caution.

Yeah, Nick can't take all the heat, you know, so go for it, Philip.

Look, I'll just preface this. This is like Philip's personal opinion, right? This is not Coinbase's view on any of this, but my personal opinion is it doesn't make sense to me that we would have that much value up for grabs by the first person who can break a key with a quantum computer. I think we have to do that in a way that, that respects the ability of the people who own those coins to actually come back and claim them if we at all can. Right. And so that may be— there have been, there have been schemes proposed on like proving access to seed phrases that I think there are some possibilities in that world. But my personal vote is I think we have to prevent a quantum computer from stealing it, and then we have to make some way for those coins to be able to be brought back to life in the event that the holder is actually able to recover them.

Yeah, maybe I'll preface my answer by just making one or two points and then I'll give you my answer. But I think first off, it's not just the Satoshi coins that are vulnerable. And you said something very important a minute ago that I think is worth clarifying. You said coins will get upgraded. I think this is the right verb is act. It should be the active form, right? You must upgrade, right? Not your keys, not your crypto. So anyone with a UTXO today, like to be quantum secure, you must like do something, right? So this is, this is the issue. It's not that like for whatever reason Satoshi's keys are like hidden by UTXOs or hidden behind some like wall of fire. It's that we think Satoshi is dead. So they just are not going to be able to do the thing themselves. But to be clear, you know, Satoshi's supply roughly equates to about 10%, you know, 10% of the overall. And there's spread across many UTXOs, by the way. There's about 35% of all Bitcoin today that is— has exposed public keys for a variety of reasons. And so, you know, potentially those are at risk too, you know, and there's, and there's, you know, some other exchanges out there that do not have as good security practices as Coinbase. as I would say, and, uh, that have left a significant amount of value that, uh, you can actually, by the way, if you want to see like all of the various, uh, Bitcoin that's at risk, we have a risk list, uh, on project11.com where people can enter an address or even just like scroll through like the top, you know, top, uh, top folks, right? So anyway, so there's, there's a lot of value and potentially people have to migrate it to Philip's point. Okay. What do you do? Satoshi's not going to migrate. So what do you do? Look, my view is there's going to be a fork here. I think it's, to me, it's inevitable. Because these philosophical issues, I don't really see how you resolve them. And, you know, this forking is a mechanism by which blockchains potentially deal with this divide. And it's not the end of the world, right? We had Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, irreconcilable divide between two camps around block size. I think it's not, it's not unreasonable to expect this will happen again. And ultimately the market will determine which of those is more valuable, or maybe both of them have some residual value. Um, I don't know, but that— I, I think whatever I think, I think it's going to ultimately just end up as a fork, you know. I don't— I, I would be surprised if it didn't.

Who are the major players here that could— in the conversation, right? Because 2017, there's— we've been here before, kind of like difficult decisions in the Bitcoin network, as far as I can remember. Who are the major players here that matter in the conversation?

I'll start with this one. Uh, yeah, I think, um, look, there's a historical group of core devs, uh, which just to be clear has, has kind of evolved over time. So I think if you go back to 2017 and the conversations of that era, the characters, uh, who participated in those, like many of them have moved on. So there are still some core devs, obviously Adam Back and Blockstream, and you know, Greg Maxwell's around, Matt Corral is around, like there, there are some folks that have been around for a while, but But there are not as many as people would probably expect core devs from the era of 2017, but the core devs certainly matter. I think there's obviously institutional adoption of Bitcoin is much, much higher than it was 10 years ago. So these institutions obviously have skin in the game, right? So they certainly matter. And I think those are probably the two primary groups, although maybe I'll add the third, which is miners. Miners. Oh yeah, mine, I guess I, but so miners and maybe the, you know, miners ultimately I think are going to do what they think everyone else wants, but you know, I don't want to, I don't know, maybe, maybe that's not true, but that's sort of my take. And then I do think there's like a, there are, there are loud members of the community that are not in either of those three categories that I think are kind of spoilers for doing something pragmatic. And I think, you know, and, you know, and to be charitable to them, they're, they're defending what they see as the core principle of Bitcoin, why they signed up to hold it. So I would maybe just, just say like the long tail of community members who really believe in these deep principles of Bitcoin in one way or the other, just, just, just have an opinion.

Which by the way, Alex, didn't they win the 2017 block? Like they were, they kind of helped win the block size wars. Like they were kind of outnumbered in capital, but they were kind of the, I don't know if that's the right framing on history, but.

I mean, you could argue that, right? Certainly the miners that, well, like this, the narrative is like the miners and like, you know, big bad corporations got together and tried to increase the block size and the community rose up and won. You know, that's like I think the popular narrative for obvious reasons in that community. But yeah, no, look, I think it's not that their voices are probably not to be underestimated. And again, this is why I think you can't rule out the possibility that ultimately there could be a chain fork and then the market will just resolve it at some point. I don't know.

Yeah. So is it the— is it fair to say it's the— it's the economic nodes, it's the— it's the exchanges/custodians, the ETF issuers and the balance sheet holders like the MicroStrategies are going to make this decision. Is that right?

Uh, uh, well, I'll, I'll answer and then Philip, you can decide if you want to take that as well. I think, look, I, I think they're going to make a decision around what they want to do with their assets. And that decision may, given how important stakeholders they are, that decision may, may influence which, you know, what everyone else does. But I don't think necessarily no one can decide for Bitcoin. Right. So I think, but I do think, look, if you look at the pure amount of capital it's, it's inarguable that the economic nodes have the most to lose potentially. So I think they're definitely going to be involved in this. And I think this is a different, this is a different thing. Maybe the last thing I'll say is, you know, compared to Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, there's kind of like that. In that case, it was kind of like, you know, like we're getting like everyone gets to, you know, whatever they had before. So it's kind of like only upside to do both. Whereas here, I mean, there's kind of, there's some potential real security implications. So I don't think it's quite as clear-cut. That everyone's just going to kind of go one way or the other. I don't know. Philip, maybe.

No, I think that's exactly right. I think no one can make a decision, right? And make it stick. I think it'll be a community-driven process. But I think Alex is also right. Like the economic nodes have the most to lose. Right. And so I think they are going to be, and I think, you know, we've started to see this, the ones who are most interested in driving a solution.

Yeah, to me it feels very obvious what's going to happen, right, where there's going to be a freeze camp and a no freeze camp. And the freeze camp is going to be the institutions and the ETF issuers and the exchanges and the custodians because they can't tolerate client asset— like, they can't tolerate this risk, right? And then there's going to be a no freeze camp, which is going to be the maxis and the community and the ideologues, and which is great. You need, you need both sides. But yeah, no one can choose. But if Coinbase says, hey, all of the Bitcoin that's held at Coinbase is now doing is going on this chain, then I mean, that— yeah, that's, that's basically your decision. So, Philip, I guess I know this is Philip's decisions and not Coinbase's. You're speaking for Philip, not Coinbase, but like, how do you guys make this decision at Coinbase?

You know, it's going to be— it's going to be really tough. I think we're ultimately going to do right. We're here because of our customers, right? We're ultimately going to listen to our customers, our stakeholders, and, and weigh that very, very heavily. I think that either way, once there's a viable upgrade path, we'll obviously upgrade all the keys that we have to make sure they're using post-quantum cryptography. But I think this will be something that we listen closely to our customers and stakeholders on.

I'm sorry, guys, but this doesn't sound any— I know we're here talking about this. This does not seem controversial at all to me. If you're Saylor, BlackRock, Coinbase, to your point, Philip, you're going to do this because it's sort of like the asymmetry of not doing anything and having someone steal Satoshi's coins is catastrophic to the network. To your point, it's not just Satoshi's point, Alex. It's, you know, up to what, 30% of the supply? Yeah, good luck. Like, not doing that is a Taleb turkey on Bitcoin. And it, it's probably attach any probability of that happening over the next 5 to 10 years. And you still get to the economical rational decision. If we're all here talking about game theory of upgrading now, question is who is, who is going to put forth this upgrade? And, and is that maybe more of the nuance? Like, do we agree that this is the best upgrade? Or are we going to field a couple of proposals? I just don't know much about what's going on under the hood.

Let me steelman it. So I think everything you laid out was very logical. Let me, let me steelman the other side a little bit from a maybe slightly different perspective, not as philosophical perspective. You know, Satoshi's coins are kind of obvious, right? We think they're dead, but about 15%. So Satoshi's coins make up about two-thirds according to Chainalysis of the lost coins. How lost are the lost coins? It's kind of a question. And so like when you cross that, you know, so Satoshi's coins, okay, maybe fine. But like, again, that only accounts for about a third of all the coins disposable keys. So then like, how do you— where do you draw the line on confiscating effectively Bitcoin that hasn't moved in a while? Right. Maybe it's—

maybe this is the way to wake them up, right? I mean, if we want to truly— I mean, if they're not dead or their hard drives in a landfill, like, you know, this is, this is actually a really fascinating way of understanding how many of these Bitcoins are lost or will come up. And maybe we'll find out who the real Satoshi is.

But now imagine you're someone working on this. Let's just say the core devs, such that they are, all come together and they said, we believe in this, we're going to do this. And there's a, there's a pull request. So BIP, uh, BIP-361, actually there's a BIP for this now. But let's say I want to name his name because he's getting enough flame on, on X, but the author of BIP-361, let's just say he is the, you know, he is the person to press merge, right? So it's like pull request is merged and, you know, and miners all agree and everything. So everything happens for this, you know, basically this freeze to happen, right? And someone wakes up someday and said, hey, my Bitcoin are no longer accessible. Do they have a legal claim against the author of that BIP or the person that pressed the button? I don't know, right? This is, there's a lot. So this is kind of like, and so then, so people have talked about, okay, well, there needs to be a timeframe, let's say, let's give people 10 years. That's all fine, of course. But, you know, 10 years from now, now we're talking about the real risk that potentially a CRTC exists. Right. So I think, I think the challenge is not so much the Satoshi's coins are kind of the straw man. I think it's more of like on the margin, you know, who is a long-term holder and who just lost their keys? It's, it's unknowable. Right. And I think that's, that's why it's tough. To your question of like, who does it? I mean, Bitcoin is also unique in the sense that there's not a foundation associated with like upgrading it, right? There's kind of this like never-ending political battle of who gets to be a spokesman for Bitcoin. You know, if the New York Times is to be believed, Satoshi Nakamoto, I mean, Adam Back, you know, may be working on something, but others may have ideas, you know? And so it's a bit chaotic. And, you know, there've been a number of proposals over time. We outline many of them on our blog. We have a whole like rundown, but you know, this is the been talking about for years. I mean, the question is who galvanizes— in my opinion, the relevant question is who is able to galvanize the effort and the resources required to take this from an idea to a reality, right? Because, you know, Santi, as you know, I've been part of a team that's launched a layer 1 blockchain. There's like a big, big gulf between like the white paper and the thing that is secure, that can secure trillions of dollars. And I mean, to me, right now we're in the idea phase and there are people that have ideas, but I think we're still pretty far from someone saying that they're going to do it. By the way, though, that's true of all networks. Philip mentioned, hey, there's people who have roadmaps. Those are all great. Very few people— there are a handful, but very few teams have actually gone and done any concrete steps into making the ideas realities. Although, of course, everything has to start as an idea.

Yeah. And it's very interesting because there's going to be— there's a whole separate— we haven't talked about this at all yet. There's a whole separate set of problems after you upgrade to a quantum-proof signature scheme. For example, these signatures are much larger. The smallest of the larger ones is, I think, 10 times, if I remember my numbers correctly, the size of the current signature of an ECC signature. That's going to impact throughput, or it's going to kick off another block size debate.

By the way, you mentioned, or I think what you want to do, you mentioned like the DeFi hack, that 10xX signature that Phil's mentioning, like that's a, that's a called Falcon or FNDSA is what it'll probably be standardized as. That is like Google wrote an entire blog post about the nightmarish complexity of implementing that. And so like you think DeFi hacks were hard now to prevent, like wait till people are trying to roll something like that. Into production. There's like a whole— it's as Phil correctly highlighted, we're going into a world where there's a whole bunch of painful tradeoffs that these protocol teams are really going to have to figure out.

I want to go to DeFi and stablecoins in a second, but one more Bitcoin question for you guys. Is there a third option here where let's say if so, it sounds like both— okay, Philip, you kind of didn't fully give— it sounds like, you know, Alex gave a very strong view of like we should freeze the coins. And I think you're, you know, maybe more in that— not in that— you are in that camp, Philip.

I think Alex didn't give his view on whether it should be frozen or not. He, he very skillfully sort of danced around that one.

Okay, you dodged. Okay, so you both dodged. Anyways, we've got the freeze and the no freeze camp. Is there a third option, like, or would your guys' view on this change if, let's say, I think what everyone's scared of is like, is China or like North Korea like going to, you know, win the quantum race and then like take these coins? But what if you guys knew that let's say, you know, Coinbase had developed a quantum computer, like the US government had developed a quantum computer and would get the Bitcoin coins. And now you kind of get like court-appointed receivership of how many Satoshi coins are there, like 2 million or like 1.7 or 1.8 million coins. And this turned into the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and they were like, we're never going to sell it. Is that option 3? And would you guys be okay? Would you guys be like, oh, Interesting. I'm kind of down with that.

That's kind of a sci-fi option, if I'm being honest. That's, that's— I think that's pretty out there in terms of, of, of reality.

I think Nick, Nick has written that. He wrote, he wrote a great, by the way, a really fun short story where he like outlines this. Also, Kyle Samani, formerly of Multicoin Capital until he retired. I think he actually also tweeted exactly this about a year ago. I agree with Philip. I mean, it's— there's just so many what-ifs, right?

Yeah.

I do think, look, if you're going to pin it to me and say, hey, what's the third option that I think is viable? Look, one other issue that people talk about with Bitcoin is what happens when the security budget runs out and you run out of engine. So like one-third, it's kind of a confiscate option, but with a less, I mean, maybe less confiscatory is like you kind of roll Satoshi's coins into the back end of that. I mean, to me, that's like, if you're going to confiscate, that's probably the best, or, you know, some of that is maybe the best way because then you at least buy yourself time for this other really controversial conversation. I don't know. That's maybe—

is it—

are you saying the Bitcoin network is going to have stock-based compensation?

Uh, oh man, I'm getting enough as it is. Don't put that on me.

That is a— nobody—

so people should go listen to the episode we recorded with James Presswitch, who I think has been probably one of the strongest advocates of like putting in front— like discounting to today the security budget question. But I hadn't thought about this, but it's quite an elegant solution where If in the window of statute of limitations, like you have like 5 years to claim, then you have that in treasury and then you disperse those to fund the security budget after all the emissions kind of dry up, which is actually a really elegant solution. What, like, what probability do you ascribe to that mechanism actually going into production?

I probably low, mainly because it's like, I think this is just a huge controversial rat's nest. And I think when the fighting is all over, people will just be happy to be done with like whatever simple thing. So I think it's just— I think it's elegant, but I think it may just be too much for people to accept all of this in one change, right? There's already— you're already asking them to accept a lot of changes. And so I, I think that the lowest— the— yeah, I, I think it's relatively unlikely, but I agree with you. I think it's a somewhat elegant solution.

One follow-up to this, as you think about— so say this is actually viable and gets traction, how would you think about the period by which holders can upgrade? Because You kind of don't at the pace. It's sort of a function of how quickly do you think we're going to get to quantum state, right? Because if it happens and you still have the claim period, that, that could be a risk, right, in and of itself, right? If you give 10 years, that's probably too much. If you get 5 years or 3 years, like, I guess, how do you think about that time frame?

I mean, I think, I think it's gonna be less about the time frame and it's gonna be more about how do you get the message out. Broadly and aggressively. I don't know there's a big difference between giving 1 year and 5 years in terms of the number of people who are actually going to take action. But it's going to depend. And what we're going to see, because we always see this, is 90% of it'll happen within the first month or something. And then there'll be a super long drippy tail of of stuff that'll last probably forever, right? Or for at least as long as the window is open. The hard part is not setting the window. It's figuring out, hey, how do we get in front of everyone who needs to take individual action, right? For everyone who's not on an exchange or custodian or something, everyone who has a ledger in their home safe back in the corner somewhere, how do we make sure all of them know that they have to do something.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. I think one important thing to note is we've kind of in this whole discussion here, we're sort of baking in the, the assumption that, that quantum computers are going to be so-called slow clock systems. Right. And let me just quickly define what this is, because this, this was relevant to the Google and our atomic papers. There's this concept of a slow clock quantum computer and a fast clock quantum computer. And basically the idea and one of the reasons the Google paper was potentially quite disruptive, or, or, you know, uh, yeah, potentially created disruption, was they posited that their machine could run in 9 minutes, right? So theoretically, the machine that they, that they laid out, if we built it, they could run in 9 minutes. Why is that a problem? Well, Bitcoin's block time is 10, right? So you basically now have a situation in which, Santi, you put a— you're, you're doing everything right, your, your public key is not exposed, but now you want to send some Bitcoin to your mom or something like that, and now I can front run you in the mempool and with a higher fee. Right. And so there— and by the way, like once you get to that point, migration is kind of just going to turn into a giant bidding war of fees if you think about it. And so I think it's maybe just important to call out that I personally believe that the fast clock architectures are going to follow the slow clock architectures for a variety of reasons. However, I don't know. I think no one really knows how long— for how long that will be true. And that's really related to the question of how will quantum computing evolve. It's kind of an unknown. But certainly we have to ultimately add in all this post-quantum cryptography for everyone to leverage. And then there's sort of like the additional question is like, you know, for people who aren't going to move at all and maybe that's the first thing that gets affected. But, you know, that, you know, there's both aspects to this, right? It's not just Satoshi's coins. It potentially is everyone's.

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Impossible to know what Satoshi would do, but I would say he would probably want to see the network live. And I guess, are we all in agreement that if we don't do anything, there's a higher probability of Bitcoin fading into irrelevance if you don't do anything? So the action sort of dictates you have to address this and you probably have to address this within 12 to 18 months.

Why, Santi, why do you think it fades into irrelevance? I feel like there's— I think the worry is like someone, let's say some China gets 10% of the coins, they dump the coins and the price would get absolutely decimated. But I'm not— I think it might be a setback, but I'm not sure fade into irrelevance.

Yeah, you're— I'll say this. Maybe I'll, maybe I'll make this point. I so I think it will fade. I mean, this is like kind of we're kind of wargaming. I will say this. I think there are there are, there are networks out there and protocols that see an opportunity to differentiate themselves by having this postmodern cryptography first. And therefore, Zcash is one that I think has leaned into this, right? And it's definitely a narrative that a lot of folks around the Zcash community are pushing. And I think there's a lot of truth to it, right? And there is this. And so there's this, there is a sense of opportunity, I think, from other protocols.

And I don't think that can be But let's go to that extreme, Jano, because I actually think it's a good question. Like, what happens if we don't do anything? Because what is the status quo? Like, you don't do anything, 30% of— or what is it, between 10% and 20% of the supply potentially is someone get access to that and dumps it, or I don't know what they do. As soon as those coins move, it will wreak havoc, you know. But once that is sold or whatever, like in my mind, I was just thinking that that's probably pretty detrimental to the network, but I don't know if it survives. Maybe it does. I hadn't thought about that. Philip or Alex.

Yeah. I mean, that's certainly fear, right? Is it, is it, it does, there's two things. One, there's the obvious economic impact of selling that many Bitcoins, but two, like there's the impact on the trust of the network that I think is actually the threat, the long-term impactful thing that happens. And I think it's just really hard to know in advance what that impact will look like practically, right? How much trust is lost and breached there? Does this mean that institutions can no longer touch the asset? And if so, what's that going to mean for the future of Bitcoin. I think that's all open questions.

So I was going to say, yeah, this naturally takes us to DeFi because for me, these are protocols that have more freedom to upgrade, but they have probably challenging issues in their own right. Some of them don't have as big of a security budget. They have way more surface area. I go back to like, um, is the solution— I guess in all this discussion, given what's going on with quantum, with AI, stuff like Mythos, are you on the spectrum of super ideological to more permissioned? and more controls and guardrails, has your position changed one way or the other? Because I mean, Philip, you said something that's important. You ultimately, Coinbase, wants to protect your customers. Like, no one likes to see these $200, $300, $400 million hacks. And every year we kind of have close to a billion in customer funds lost going to Lazarus, open it.

Yeah, I mean, I'll put in quickly, I look, I mean, Santi, you and I have known each other for a long time, and you may remember that I got interested in this space working in the Middle East with Syrian refugees. And I think an aspect of cryptocurrencies that really appealed to me and led me to want to work in it was, um, the ability for people who didn't have any other option to be able to transact or save or transfer their value out of a war zone or out of a, you know, hard situation. I think so there's this element of financial freedom that is just a really powerful part of the narrative that has brought many of us to work on this. Um, that said, the freedom cuts both ways, as you just pointed out. It's also freedom for North Korea to fund its nuclear program, and there's nothing we can do about it because, again, if we wanted to do something about it, well, then we basically are going to revert to the exact same financial system that maybe excludes the people that I wanted to help. Um, again, this is a tough philosophical question. I think practically though, um, you know, ultimately we live in a world, uh, of nation-states with, uh, sovereign governments. And I think, I think it is a little bit, um, uh, optimistic, maybe overly optimistic, to assume that there's just going to be some supra-financial system that every government just agrees to be a part of and not wants to— doesn't want to try and control in some way. I mean, a government, the US government can throw me in jail if they want, right? And, you know, but, but the Ethereum network can't really do that to me. So I think, I think for, for that reason, the reason that we all live in a world of sovereign nation states that can exert the rule of law over their borders, I think you're just inevitably going to see more permissioning. And what I think that also implies is you're going to maybe see some fracturing across geographical lines. For these various systems at some point.

I think that's right. I think that's exactly right. I also think that the thing that I've always been interested in is people are always going to write insecure code, right? It's never going to stop. And they're going to write insecure code. They're going to put it in a smart contract. They're going to toss it on a network somewhere. Where that starts to become a problem is where there's real value in that protocol. Right. So how do we get better at, at, you know, not preventing people from writing bad code, but it, but it flagging it when it gets on a network, but making it very clear to people who would interact with that, hey, you know, you might want to tread carefully here because this is, you know, whatever the problem is with it. Right. It's vulnerable. It's new. It's untested. It's, it's, it's, it's a, you know, it's a rug pulling, it happened, whatever. Like that to me has been very interesting because I don't want to live in a world where we have, you know, a bunch of heavyweight permissioned DeFi blockchains. I don't think that's the spirit of crypto and I don't think it's fundamentally going to result in a better system than what we have today. But we do need to make sure that we can cut down on tax. Losing a billion dollars a year to these things is just, it's just untenable.

Might there be a nuance where, like, I think of crypto as lowering the barriers to entry and the switching costs, even though you are not fully permissionless, but you have some guardrails. I mean, look, like USDC and Tether both can freeze your assets and the consumer just goes to where the, the most liquid coin or the coin that has the most brand. And there's a very small subset of people that actually truly care about philosophically. There's a whole subset of people that are unbanked and don't have access to the dollar. And, you know, for better or for worse, the dollar continues to be the most sought-after store of value. Um, but if people are gonna— if we agree that like digital systems like DeFi are interesting to people because they make it more accessible You ought to layer in some way more protections, way more, because the end user is unsuspecting. It's just not as sophisticated. And, you know, but the threats are only going to increase far more than the end customer can catch up to leveling up their OPSEC. So to me, that always forces back to if we really want this industry to grow, you have to assume that people are not going to level up. Their OPSEC and just assume that you're going to get hacked and work backwards from there. And that takes you to a more permissioned system, right? Where you can, to your point, Philip, like you can freeze stuff, you can roll it back.

And I hate to say it like that, but it all, yeah, Alex, I think, yeah, no, I think that, look, I think everything you said is right, but I think there's no one size fits all. Right. I think there is a lot of, it really depends on exactly how much and who and what, and, and, you know, how important And I still like to believe that even, I mean, USDC is kind of a good idea, right? Or a good example in the sense that yes, they can freeze your assets, but it's by exception, right? Like you have to basically be proven wrong. Like the way bank accounts work is kind of like you have to prove you're not guilty to get one basically. Whereas like, you know, to freeze assets, really these issuers, practically speaking, they, you know, they do it if you are guilty. Look, that just, even though it seems like a small difference, I think it's actually, it's quite important and impactful. And it's one of the reasons why you've seen stablecoin transactions really take off. And so, you know, I think that's an example of how you can kind of have a maybe best of both worlds potentially. And then also, I just wanted to point out one other thing, which is that, you know, we're still in the pretty early innings of people really interacting with finance via cryptography. Right. And obviously the cryptography we're going to use is going to change, you know, post-quantum, etc. But like, you know, I still think there's a lot of really low-hanging fruit to improve security on the UX side. Right. One great idea that the, that the EF folks or folks from Ethereum came up with was this concept of account abstraction. Jason Yanowitz, right, where you, you know, you basically just separate, you know, kind of authorization at the chain level from authorization at the wallet level. And you can create much more complex authorization flows that, you know, maybe are a bit, you know, it's kind of that maybe that part is like semi-permissioned. But, you know, you get what you do for your grandmother could be different than what like, you know, someone who is an entrepreneur somewhere wants. Yeah, I know there's like a whole bunch of flavors of this. And it doesn't have to get baked in necessarily to each app and get baked into these various wallets. I mean, that's a broad generalization, but I'm confident that we will continue to get better as a space at this, or I'm hopeful, maybe.

Alex, you guys dedicated a whole section to stablecoins, and Philip, I think you guys didn't focus on that as much, more, maybe more focused on just like the industry and Bitcoin in general. Curious why. Yeah, curious how you guys think about just, yeah, stablecoins at risk here.

You're talking about the quantum on the quantum. Yeah. So I think it's, uh, okay, maybe it's first off, like, as we move from Bitcoin to everything, I want to be clear. I think, you know, I don't, I think every system has its risks and I don't know, like one is not better than the other. I think there's just a different set of risks. Okay. So stablecoins are permissioned in the sense that, uh, or maybe less at risk from a quantum attacker in the sense that money sits in a bank account. And so like a quantum computer can't like reach into the bank account and like manifest the dollars in someone's hand across the world. Right. So like the bank account is safe. What is at risk is potentially the on-chain stuff. What is— so what would happen potentially? Well, you know, you could do the same thing you would do in Bitcoin or another network, which is like steal someone's USDT or something. But I think the real challenge for the custodial style stablecoins is these admin keys that we're talking about. right? Because I think those are, uh, potentially, uh, they, they're definitely critical infrastructure and potentially could be nation-state level targets, right? If you have a quantum computer that you're not even looking to steal Bitcoin with, but you maybe want to mess up, you want to mess with the US financial system, especially as more and more dollars go on chain, you know, that would be a way to create chaos. And given how much DeFi, I mean, one of the big selling points of DeFi is you can have, you know, transparent contracts all over the place interconnected and, you know, you take down— I mean, it's just like we saw with the KelpDAO hack that you're referencing, Sonny. Like, KelpDAO bridge got drained, ripple effects across a whole bunch of other DeFi protocols. And I think you can imagine a world where, let's just say, someone mints $300 trillion of USDT, and they're just— or USDP or something, and then breaks a peg somewhere, and then there's a whole bunch of ripple effects that ultimately maybe won't— won't be— they won't have like real financial impact, but they could still be incredibly disruptive and still cause the loss of billions of dollars of value. So I think, I think for those reasons, we think of stablecoin issuers as having maybe a unique, or maybe I'll say it this way. I think there's a, there's a special urgency for them to maybe consider how they're going to protect those keys from a quantum attacker. So yeah, that's my view.

I don't know if Philip has more to add to that. I know, I feel that, I think that's great. I totally agree.

Yeah. Philip, maybe from the Coinbase view, what are you most worried about? This idea of Bitcoin or just like you're running an exchange or stablecoins or DeFi, like on-chain stuff, what are you most worried about?

Oh gosh. The answer is all of it is really the honest answer. Or my— fundamentally, my job is about protecting Coinbase and our customers. And so my focus is always going to go first to how do we make sure that Coinbase from an internal systems and practices perspective is ready for this well in advance of us, of there being any risk. And then as a person who's been in this industry for a decade as of last week, I really, really care that the blockchains evolve to get this right and make good choices in terms of and good trade-offs in terms of not just the quantum algorithms they choose and how we deal with throughput, but also how we deal, how we do all that while retaining the sort of the core philosophy that makes this space not just, you know, Banks 2.0.

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I, and so this is hyperbolic.

This is hyperbolic.

Yes.

Why do you say that? Two things. One, Mythos is a huge bot. Hardcore, right? That requires an incredible amount of resources to run. It is not practical in the next 12 months, in my opinion, that we are going to have open weight models that is going to be runnable on reasonable hardware. Now, we will eventually, right? And so perhaps this is a question of timeline rather than destiny.

Estimation.

And I think that Mythos models like it are going to favor the defense versus the offense. I think that's true because as a defender, I have so much more context on how my systems work than attackers do. And I think that's going to let me get a lot more out of that model than an attacker is going to get pointing it at an API and and saying, go forth and hack. And so as these models become more accessible, you have to make the assumption that there's a reasonable security team on the other side. So maybe the non-hyperbolic version of that tweet is make sure you know who your counterparties are, where your data is, and where you do not believe them to be good custodians of that. Yes, you should absolutely take action to remove that your data from those, uh, uh, from those hands.

Yeah. Alex, in your personal life, do you do things that maybe the normal citizen would say, you know, that's, that's a crazy level of precaution?

I mean, I used to work at a privacy protocol, so I obviously am passionate about personal privacy. Um, and I, yeah, I do a number of things, uh, in my own, in my own life. Um, I, I run a bunch of stuff locally instead of relying on services that some people may would pay for from the cloud, for example. But look, I think the other reality is like, like read the Elizabeth Holmes tweet. Like it's just not— first off, it's not even possible to like delete all of your data. Like, how do you— where do I even get it? Right. People and people have written whole articles about like these dark web brokers of people, you know, like, you know, I had a security clearance when I was in the military and like my fingerprints were stolen, I think in 2011 as part of the OPM hack. So I don't know, how do I delete my fingerprints? That were stolen in 2011. I mean, it's just not, you just can't, right? And I think moreover, like we all lead increasingly digital lives and there is like to Philip's point, I think it's absolutely right. We need to be, you have to try and be responsible with who your counterparty is for your data. But I think there is also just some degree of acceptance that is like, there's some part of your identity that's going to get out there. And, um, you know, and this is why I think multi-layered security architectures are just the best way to go, right? Because like theoretically, if you have a failure on one layer or a breach of one system, it doesn't break everything else or it doesn't mean all of your accounts are therefore pwned, right? So yeah, that's probably the most— I guess there's practical advice here, you know, for it's like multi-factor authentication. No, you know, no one single point of failure to the greatest extent possible and then minimize if possible your exposure. But I mean, there's just no way you're going to avoid all of it. Probably.

Yeah. Can I push you guys to get a little more specific on timeline? Because reading both your papers, I think you might disagree on this, right? Philip, you said, uh, or the Coinbase paper called the timeline, I think you said like largely irrelevant, or it's maybe not, yeah, not, not as important. I actually, I do think you use the words largely irrelevant, whereas Alex, you actually had these like, I think it was, you know, 2029 optimistic case and 2033 was kind of the base case and 2042 was the pessimistic case. So Can I push you guys to tell us when does this really actually matter?

So the reason we say it's fundamentally irrelevant is because this process takes such a long time and we have so little clarity that it doesn't matter to me if a quantum computer shows up in 2030 versus 2040. We have to start the work today. Right. And so in that sense, maybe having a definitive timeline is better from a motivating people perspective or gives us a goal, but in my view, it's like trying to chase a date, sort of a red herring.

Yeah, I don't think I disagree much with that. I actually, I think part of the reason why we put timelines in our report is partially because I think it was to push people. Well, there's two reasons. One is I think people are kind of lazy a lot of times with their estimates for these things. And they're just like, it's 20 years away because it's always 20 years away. It's kind of like that. And that's like as deep as they ever get. And I think the reason why we put kind of these, these predictions in our reports is just because we have these various, you know, aspects of the analysis that we try and rigorously, you know, distill into a real timeline. Now, that said, I think, you know, there's a lot of uncertainty as, as Phil mentioned. But I think there is like an aspect of wanting to just show people that there is a trajectory for quantum computing to develop. And I think the question is just how quickly will we go along it? Now, I think the other piece is, and I think back to kind of dovetailing back to Philip's point, there's a great framework that I really like called Mosca's inequality. Michelle Mosca is a quantum cryptographer at University of Waterloo. And one thing he points out is like, hey, look, you can't just consider the timeline for the attacker to get this capability. You have to to consider the defender and how long it's going to take to prepare for that attack. Right. And so you kind of have to like consider both things together. You can't just consider one in isolation. And exactly echoing what Philip said, I don't think there's, you know, just to be on the safe side and not end up in a scenario where the attacker has this capability before we're ready. Like we probably just given the uncertainty here, it probably makes rational sense for everyone to prepare, start preparing today. It doesn't mean we have to panic. but it means we should start preparing.

Yep, exactly right. It's in my, in my experience with this, once you start throwing dates around, you start to argue about the dates.

Yeah.

And, and, and that it just, if I get fundamental, it doesn't matter. Um, the, the discussion is about what to do about it.

Yeah.

Is there, is there going to be a ChatGPT moment for quantum going to be?

I think it'll probably be in the, um, in the simulation space, where we will see somewhere around drug discovery, something like that will be a use case where there's like some element of useful quantum supremacy shown, as opposed to the toy stuff that has been shown so far.

Well, I may, I have a different take. Maybe we'll get an opportunity to disagree here. I think you're not going to see, you're not going to see it. I think real quantum development, probably from this point forward, as it pertains to cryptographic relevance is very likely to, to happen behind closed doors. The Google paper even hinted at this. In fact, they— the circuit that— or sorry, the— yeah, the circuit, their Shor circuit, they explicitly didn't reveal. They proved in zero knowledge that they— that it had, you know, it only consisted of X many operations. And they explicitly said, hey, this is because we don't want this knowledge to be out there for the world. If you look at the funding for these quantum companies, I mean, look, practically speaking, there is like they sell services for like optimization and there is like some stuff that look, the vast majority of funds from for this industry comes from the government and like DARPA and by the way, the equivalent agencies around the world. I think so. I think the vast majority of money going into this space is for crypto analysis. And I think obviously that is a capability. Is something that the funders of these things would ideally like to keep a secret for as long as possible. So it's not that I necessarily think we won't see evidence in the simulation space or otherwise that, you know, that there is progress, but I just don't know if we can count on it. I think there's, I think there's also a lot of reasons to believe that it's possible that these thresholds get crossed effectively behind closed doors and we don't ever know that they do.

Yeah, I agree. That's absolutely possible as well.

Just going back to something that we touched on, the security budget, it factors into the timeline a bit too. And I don't want to make this whole pot around that, but I mean, I think it's quite a bit of a threat. Like, how does Bitcoin continue in the absence of block rewards. And, um, what's your guys' take on that?

Um, I— my personal view is I tend to agree with you. I, I've, I've always kind of believed that at some point 50 years from now, when like, you know, mining is just truly unsustainable, where there's so much like demand from data center, you know, AI type use cases that like, you know, obviously below a certain below a certain security budget, you're not going to have the same trust that you would want for a system that you claim is digital gold. And so I think the natural solution is just to tag on a tail emission, have inflation as a percentage trend towards zero over time, but maybe have a constant inflation so that way there's like a way for miners to plan. I mean, that's, that's kind of a controversial thing, obviously, in many, in many parts of the Bitcoin, uh, community. I think ultimately it's not going to be for any of us to decide, probably. I mean, unless this quantum thing ends up being part of that, but like, you know, us leaving that, assuming that doesn't happen, then I think, you know, the future generations of Bitcoin are going to have to grapple with this. It's hard to say, but I kind of agree with you that ultimately the trust we have in Bitcoin is kind of dependent on the security budget. So either you have to assume that the coins just keep going up in value and the hash rate stays the same, or you have to assume that there's some continued emission. I don't know. You don't really get both. So, I mean, however that happens, I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Yeah, I don't disagree with any of that. I think the original theory was there'd be enough value in the fees at that point that it would take the place of the block rewards. But I agree with the assertion that it's very, very important to Bitcoin's continued trustability.

As we tend to close out the episode, What is the best way for Bitcoin holders or to follow what's going on? And we haven't talked about Saylor, we've talked about like who matters here, but who are like the folks that haven't been as vocal that you think are going to play a bigger role going forward?

Well, in terms of how to sort of stay abreast of this, I don't know that there's any one simple answer to that question. I think what you're going to see from Coinbase going forward is a lot more about the quantum risk, both from a technical perspective, like the paper that we released, as well as from a non-technical perspective and really talking across all the chains, not just Bitcoin, because the whole ecosystem matters. But like, you know, today I don't think there's a place that we could just— that anyone can just go and be up to speed.

Yeah, I think a lot more people are starting to talk about this, which is great. I want to particularly call out Coinbase and the work that Philip and his team is doing. I mean, they're leaning forward into this, whereas a lot of other exchanges are not. For example, they have this, you know, Quantum Advisory Council consisting of a lot of really impressive folks, um, you know, and they're doing research that, you know, on this topic, which is amazing. And I, and I hope that encourages other stakeholders, um, to do the same because ultimately, you know, if we believe kind of in the, in the philosophy of decentralization, like to some extent it's, it's incumbent upon all of us to contribute. And so I think Coinbase has just done a really good job leading the way here. Obviously Project 11 is like, this is our whole MO is this whole thing. And so People can, you know, certainly read up a lot of what we've written. And but yeah, I'm encouraged that the dialogue is starting to really take off and I hope it continues to. And I think people shouldn't shy away from this topic. They should embrace about learning more about it. I mean, obviously it's pretty dense, but I think it's, it's one of the most important topics of our time in crypto.

Before we drop, do you think Satoshi coins move?

I, I, I think no.

I think maybe I'll say this. I know there are, uh, there are people building quantum computers that would be interested in potentially— there, they may, but they view it as like lost treasure, right? There's like, oh, is this like lost treasure that we could get And, um, you know, whether or not that's like a good legal theory, I think, uh, I, I think there is like discussion about that. And I think I, that's sort of why I don't think this risk is entirely just like in the abstract. I think people have to grapple with this as a potential tangible, you know, tangible possibility. And so therefore we just need to account for that in our, in our plan. So I don't know. Um, but maybe.

Cool.

Philip, Alex, thank you guys Thanks, appreciate it.

Yeah, thank you.