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we're going to talk about why bitcoin's biggest threat just divided Wall Street. Of course, we're talking about Quantum, which has been the major topic of conversation over the past few months. There's been many proposals from the bitcoin community on how to handle it, but it's not just unique to bitcoin. JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs both have very different approaches to what's coming. With Quantum on a slower news day, perfect time to talk to Chris Tam, a Quantum expert from btq. We're going to dive into that right now.
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A
Go. Let's dope. That's dope.
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B
Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the show. Before we get started, like, and subscribe and do all the things that you're supposed to do. That's twice this month. I've now asked you. I'm supposed to do it like 30 times. Twice. I'm nailing it right now. I'm going to go ahead and just bring Chris on right now. Good morning, sir. How are you?
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A
Hey, Scott. I'm very good, thanks. Thanks for having us here.
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B
So there's a lot of things we could talk about. We can bloviate on the Fed or defi hacks or all the things that have just been exhausting. But today seems like the perfect day to zoom out and talk about Quantum. I dove into it pretty thoroughly on my show, the Daily Wolf on Yahoo, the other day, talking about the fact that Coinbase had somewhat entered the arena with their paper on it. So it seems like we have a very wide spectrum of ideas as to what's coming and what to do about it. Right. I mean, some people think it's decades away, some people think a decade. Google had the paper that set everyone on fire 2029. I mean, where do you stand first on the quantum threat generally? And then we can zoom in on how that, you know, affects bitcoin and what to do about it.
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A
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's a bit of an elusive topic. I mean, it's, it's sort of at the front of the headlines, but at the same Time, there's no real consensus or united thought and how to think about, and how to think about the solutions here. Because in one respect, it's so widespread. I mean, if we think about quantum risk in general, there's so many ways and so many really ways that quantum can permit into our cybersecurity. But as relates to crypto, even, you know, there's so many different blockchains. Bitcoin has its own model, Ethereum has its own model, Solana its own. And what we're, I know what we're seeing. And I mean, this past week, Solana released its quantum readiness report, sort of on the tail of Ethereum releasing it earlier this year. And sort of the bitcoin community has been sort of lackluster. They've, you know, Adam Back has tried to talk more and more about it, but it's, there isn't any real clear, sort of, you know, clear, clear solution on the table yet. Where does quantum stand? I mean, this is, this is, this is the position that we take, which is that it'll be around 2030, I think, is a decent benchmark. If you're looking at where quantum resources are at right now. We've seen the progress that they've gone through over the past three to five years. And if you sort of, you know, follow that, that trajectory onto the curve, it seems relatively plausible that it could happen in or around 2030. And then you had today, earlier today, Scott Aronson, who is sort of one of the more acclaimed and esteemed computer scientists by trade, but he's been really writing about quantum risk for a very long time. And his blog today, in sort of bold writing, said, well, you heard it here. Quantum risk is real and it's coming, and it's something that we definitely ought to pay attention to.
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B
It's interesting you talk about the multiple blockchains and their plan. So the best part about crypto is the decentralization specific to bitcoin. Decentralized, no, you know, CEO or founder impacting what's going on. But in a situation like this, that's also the biggest challenge. I know Ethereum has, you know, four full teams, I think, working on this. Like you said, Solana has a plan. I know, like Algorand was already quantum proofed or everybody has their own plan, but most of them have someone at the lead to handle it. And bitcoin, uniquely, which is, you know, a blessing and a curse really, like, get it done in the same way.
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A
Yeah, you hit it on the head. That's been its entire value proposition today. Right. Which is that it's actually quite a slow moving machine. If you try to push and upgrade through Bitcoin, you're not going to see that happen overnight like you might see that happen in Solana, for example. Bitcoin's whole engineering apparatus is designed around stable and high guarantees that something will work. And when it comes to quantum risk, that's sort of the last thing that we get. Where, where, where, where we're nowhere. At least we don't have a sort of concerted thought into how to, what a solution might look like. And that really is sort of Bitcoin's Achilles heel when it comes to coordinating this, this massive upgrade. Because not only do you have to get consensus from the developers, but once you do, then you need to push out changes to all of the miners, anyone who's running a node, and of course all of the wallet holders, many of whom have not been active in over a decade. So that's the largest wallets are the
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main issue though, right? I mean, it's my understanding as a non quantum expert, there's no real threat to Bitcoin's existence. It's that 6.7 as of right now, I'm sure most of those will end up being quantum proof. But those millions of coins that are in wallets that may be lost, not even have owners, even have accessible keys to the ones who do have owners. Really our threat is that those will be hacked and sold on the market. I mean, that's kind of the worst case scenario, correct? It's not like Bitcoin.
- [06:45]
A
That's right. No, that's right, yeah. Bitcoin will exist, but the value of which, the value of which it will carry is sort of is up for question once, once you factor quantum into the equation. But you're absolutely right, there's been sort of, you know, two conflated ideas of quantum risk. One is to the signatures, the other one is to the mining of Bitcoin. And something that our team had done last month was show that the mining algorithm, the Shaw256 proof of work that secures Bitcoin is actually very secure and we anticipate will be secure long into the future, long into the quantum era. But it's really the signatures that are at risk. And when we talk about signatures, we're talking about people's private keys. And so being able to have the assurance that your private key is actually securing your crypto goes down significantly as soon as a quantum computer enters the sort of arena, because it's plausible that a quantum computer, a quantum adversary, will be able to take one of your signatures on chain and derive, reverse engineer your private key from it and therefore move Bitcoin freely as they choose to do.
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B
Before we get more deeply into Bitcoin, I want to dig into the title here because this was a headline this Week is Goldman JPMorgan show Wall Street Split in Quantum Computing Race. So effectively, Goldman was taking this very seriously for a while. They came to the conclusion that it was going to take them a million years to figure it out. I think that was literally something like the quote, and they gave up. Meanwhile, JP Morgan now has ramped up to 50 computer scientists and physicists that are actively working on the quantum problem. Can you put this in context of what a threat quantum computers are to all systems and not just Bitcoin? Because we have a lot of simple sound bites, I think, that are largely inaccurate. And I'm guilty of this one, by the way. This isn't a Bitcoin problem. They're going to hack our banks in the nuclear codes. Right? I mean, I don't say that anymore, but I used to say that. Okay, right. So is this a threat to everything? So our echo chambers really concerned about Bitcoin, or is it a unique threat to Bitcoin because of the structure and the decentralization we talked about before?
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Right, yeah. So quantum threat is to cryptography writ large. Writing by cryptography we mean encryption. We use encryption all day, every day in the technology around us. Governments use it, businesses use it. Encryption can, you know, can relate to transmitting messages over WhatsApp, over iMessage. But a lot of this cryptography, and really all of the cryptography deployed across all these different industries still comes from the same family of mathematics. And it's this family of mathematics that's particularly vulnerable to quantum attacks. And so quantum risk as a result is very much sort of, you know, relevant to all of these broader industries. It could plausibly break nuclear cloak nuclear codes, as you said, you know, hopefully the NSA is and you know, the top government agencies are doing things that are upgrading the cryptography to secure those. But, you know, as it pertains to more sort of, you know, commercial and everyday life things, things such as banking records, medical records, again, anything that's transmitted over the Internet where that sensitive data, all of that is at risk of being broken if we don't upgrade to post quantum cryptography. And it's really this migration that's the most important key here, because it's not like it's impossible to defend against the quantum threat. We have solutions and in fact several solutions on the table. Now we have the US government and cryptographics, cryptographic standards body coming out with algorithms that people can use and choose to deploy to upgrade to. So it's not like we're without recourse here. It's really just this process of migration. But it's that migration that's particularly hard for blockchains, and especially blockchains like decentralized blockchains like Bitcoin. Ethereum is decentralized to a degree, but it still has this relatively cohort of the realm where you have the Ethereum foundation and sort of led by Justin Drake and Vitalik and they're able to coordinate efforts down the Solana foundation you have a bit tighter of a chain of control. But for Bitcoin that's really the crux of the problem where it again comes back to their decentralization and their ability to coordinate a migration that's not a
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positive or negative for Ethereum. But if they could pull off the merge, I think they can probably pull off quantum proofing. I mean, if they made it from proof of work to proof of stake without something maybe not even unique to them, that means blockchains that have a plan and work on it for years can get massive things done. I guess that's sort of the example there.
- [11:41]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think, I think that's, that's a really good point. I mean that is, that is a demonstrated track record of going through a large scale protocol upgrade. But I do think this quantum migration is a little bit larger than an L1 upgrade. Because think about all of these sort of derivative products, applications, chains on top of Ethereum we have this sort of layer two ecosystem where you have all of these roll ups and you have even layer threes roll ups on top of rollups. And when it came to the proof of work to proof of stake migration, you were really just upgrading that bottom layer, that core Ethereum EVM layer. And this was the security of all those other layers on top, the layer twos, layer threes. They all inherited their security from that proof of stake layer. But really what we're talking about for this quantum migration is we need to go into every wallet, we need to go into every application, every custody holder, every custody provider. And I've grabbed the cryptography there. I sort of analogize upgrading cryptography to thinking about it like a set of pipes underneath the city, sort of like a plumbing system where you need to, if we need to upgrade the Pipes, you need to dig up the roads and you need to. These pipes feed into different buildings. You need to upgrade. You need to go into different people's homes, into their bathrooms and upgrade all of them, you know, all of the, all of the infrastructure there. So it's actually a very sort of deep and non trivial task at hand. And I think it's, you know, compared to the proof of work, to proof of stake, I think it's actually a little bit more difficult.
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B
Okay. So obviously everything kind of happens on an exponential curve, which is why it's hard to handicap how long this will take. Right. It's just a matter of how steep the hockey stick goes. Right. Like, Quantum is obviously a massive threat. When I read about AI and Mythos and Anthropic and getting out of the sandbox and hacking everything, is that a more clear and present danger at the moment? And I guess as a corollary, as someone who watches this, what happens when Mythos just starts? Everything I see about quantum is what people are doing to develop quantum computers. What happens when this thing goes rogue and escapes the matrix and starts developing quantum itself? Like we're going to have quantum in 20 minutes and be plugged into the batteries? I don't know.
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Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we're finally sort of getting adjusted to thinking on these exponential timelines. Right. As you say, it's because, I mean, we're already experiencing it to a degree with AI and we're seeing all the things, all the incredible things that the AI is able to do. And there are real cybersecurity risks that, you know, that you rightly raised with Mythos that we should and ought to be thinking about in the, in really in every industry, including crypto. But when you sort of stack that on top of the computational speed ups and the gains you get in quantum computing, it becomes really, really steep really quickly. And, you know, there certainly is a world where, I mean, there's. I saw a couple of weeks ago, which a research paper that changed my perspective on the quantum AI world, which is where you basically apply quantum processors, quantum technologies to machine learning and building AI so that you're able to get the same speed up. And it actually seems like it's actually quite plausible now where for the past five years there was seen as this in the research field, there was always this sort of ceiling on how fast, on how much you can incorporate quantum into using it to process machine learning and AI, whereas now it seems like it's completely feasible. And so, yeah, we're on this really, this Steep trajectory. And there's almost no better time than ever than to start thinking about large scale cryptographic migrations and to try as best as we can, think about what different future scenarios look like and how do we put things in place today that can help us with that. And one of the things that we can do, for example, is we can start thinking about crypto agility, which is that this premise that you can actually start to swap cryptography on the fly. This is not something that we've done for the past 20, 30 years. We've always assumed that the same cryptographic algorithms would remain the same. And so this is one example of a new paradigm of thinking that we can start to engage with as, as we think about where the future will go and how to best protect ourselves from that.
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I would just like to go on record and say to our AI overlords, in case they're listening, that I am. I will not fight back.
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I always use please and thank you my prompts. I think I'm on the right side.
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Yeah, I feel bad about yelling at my AI now use all caps and using all caps because I feel like they're keeping a record and it's to be used against all of us when they, when they come to take over. Terrifying.
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I think it's. I think it's seen so much of the Internet at this point that whatever you're saying, it can't possibly be as bad as what it's already seen.
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Yeah, way too much content on me. There's nothing I can do. I'm so. Listen, I guess maybe it's worth talking about what the actual solutions are, right? I mean, you alluded to the fact earlier that Adam Back is talking about it. I think he was one of the very dismissive who has now somewhat come around, which it blows my mind that people give him so much shit. And anyone who changes their opinion, but, you know, strong opinions loosely held, you can think for a while something's not a big deal, and then be presented with more information and change your mind. I know that's crazy to people, but I give him, I credit him for changing his mind. Right. We obviously have the. I don't know that it's quantum adjacent. I'll say E Cash, right? Where we have a bitcoin developer who's been trying to fork, I guess bitcoin for years, basically floating that they do a fork and you have a fork called Ecash btq. You guys obviously have your own sort of theories on what's to be done. My view is probably try a whole lot of things.
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Yeah.
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If you're going to fork it and if that's the ultimate answer, we should also be trying to quantum proof wallets in the meantime. Right. I mean, because even if bitcoin gets forked that the original bitcoin doesn't go anywhere, right. It's still there and there's a religious belief surrounding it, so it's not dying. So I mean, what's the solution here?
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Yeah, I mean, I fully agree with you. I mean, just my personal perspective is diversity of thought is probably the best way to approach any solution. Right. You want to sort of take every angle possible to think about a problem. And that has really sort of manifested in the way that, that we've gone about building our solution. What we're building is we call it a quantum canary network for Bitcoin. Sort of alluding to the old canary in the coal mine where, you know, these, these, these coal miners would send out a little bird into these caves and figure out, you know, which parts of the, of the coal mines would contain toxic gases. And it would essentially serve as a, you know, sort of future warning, future indication of risk to come. The same thing can be said about solutions. You deploy a solution, what you think is a good solution, and you actually battle test it in a live network and you realize that it has some problems. How often is it that we get a solution perfect right on day one? It's not often at all. The idea behind this quantum canary network is allowing us to have this deployed, quantum resistant version of Bitcoin that people can interact with today, that anyone in the world can ship and try solutions on and for that will plausibly be quantum resistant and gives us sort of this open environment, this playground for us to collaborate and experientially trying to find this elusive solution together. Because again, it won't happen overnight. This will take many years of putting our heads together and collaborating and thinking between many groups of people, miners exchanges, everyday people. And so, yeah, there's a lot of work to be done and our belief is that we shouldn't be sort of constrained by whatever politicking is going on in bitcoin today. As you said, it's always going to be around. So let's, let's spin up a new environment and start experimenting there.
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B
Yeah, the satoshi coins are the biggest question, right? Or I guess satoshi era. There's probably a lot that qualify, but we just had Adam back, was supposedly satoshi again, according to a New York Times article. Then the moving side Satoshi just came out and they said it's how Finney and Lens assembly, which actually was a really good movie, I would say I really enjoyed it and makes a decent argument those guys are dead. So that's a very convenient choice. But there's really no solution for those coins in the current environment. Right. So I guess we have to talk about the worst case scenario is that someone hacks those, which by the way is illegal. It's not like you're just allowed to hack them, but you know, hacks those and sells them on the market. Right. And there was an article that sort of said, you know, $150 billion problem or whatever it is. And it basically pointed out that if we're down to 1.6, 1.7 million tokens by the time quantum hits, assuming that a lot of those have been quantum proof, our worst case scenario isn't really even as bad as some previous bear markets where over 2 million coins were sold into the market. Right. I get that as a bitcoiner, I'm like, hey, sell those coins, crash the price 80%. Let me buy it. We move on from the quantum. Life is good. But I'm just trying to kind of figure out what happens to those early tokens that are definitely assuming that Satoshi doesn't come back and quant approve his wallet like this is. There's no full solution to the wallet side, I guess is my point.
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A
Yeah, I mean, I think, I think that the sort of best and safest assumption to make, the most conservative assumption, would be to assume that those are gone, you know, that, that, that, that they will be hacked at some point. And as we think about what are the implications of that is as you point out, if $150 billion problem, it's not the end of bitcoin. But that assumes that the rest of bitcoin was able to fully migrate to be post quantum. And I think that's sort of where the challenge is. So when it comes to Satoshi's coins, I mean, there's been some recent VIP 361 which talks about perhaps sort of shaving it off, severing it from the existing supply. Some people have been talking about, do we sever it off? Do we print new tokens into existence? I mean, I don't think either of those are very plausible just because it breaks sort of first principles in bitcoin, which is a fixed, a fixed supply of 21 million. And I mean, sure, maybe you can try even severing it off sort of impacts the supply. So I think sort of the best way to think about it for now, the one that will likely prevail is just assuming that those will be lost forever and will be sort of susceptible to quantum attacks. And there's sort of enough problems to think about outside of that, where we still need to have this large concerted effort to migrate the rest of the bitcoin.
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B
Okay, so there's a lot things that are going to be proposed for bitcoin by the developers and such. What can I do as a person holding bitcoin right now who wants to continue holding it 30 years down the road?
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A
Yeah, well, I mean this comes back to the idea of grassroots activism. You know, it's. But it's like if something really matters to you, then then you can start best be vocal about it. And if you care about your, your tokens, if you care about your coins, cryptography is really the only thing that's securing them. Even if you're hiding it in the best, best place in the world, it could be 10,000ft underground. If a quantum computer comes, it'll still be able to hack it. And so advocating for post quantum migrations and also participating in them I think is probably the best way to go about it.
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B
Post quantum migration, a fork. I mean bitcoin quantum is what you guys are developing, right? I mean, is it effectively a fork?
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A
Yeah, so exactly. So what we've done is it's a code based fork of Bitcoin, so it doesn't fork the state. So it's not like, you know, it's not like we branch off at the current block of bitcoin.
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B
Different than ecamm.
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A
Exactly. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So ours is a code based fork, which is that it maintains the same history of code. But what we've done is we've replaced all the vulnerable pieces of cryptography with post quantum cryptography. And so in that sense it sort of, it is the exact same protocol, but just one that is quantum resistant.
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B
So in theory have to quantum proof their own wallets. If that was the solution, because everything would be updated at the protocol level. Is that accurate or would you have to do both?
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A
Well, yes. So this bitcoin quantum wallet wouldn't be compatible with existing sort of bitcoin legacy Bitcoin as it stands today. Yeah, exactly. The best sort of. Or maybe not the best, but one approach there would be. Okay, well why don't I just sort of hedge my risks and whatever 1% or whatever I hold in bitcoin diversify into quantum safe assets so that if Bitcoin doesn't get its stuff together and the value is ever adversely affected, you have basically a quantum hedge in order to offset that risk.
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B
Really interesting. So how can people. Well, first of all, I mean, so btq, obviously you're working on specifically Bitcoin, but you guys are a publicly traded company, right, With a significant market cap. So obviously it's bigger than just bitcoin quantum, I would imagine. I mean, are you guys effectively working on post quantum cryptography for all of these systems that we discussed?
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A
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, exactly. So this is sort of a. I mean, it's a wonderful project of ours, but it certainly isn't the extent to where the bulk of our company spends our time and energy. Where we do spend a lot of time is in actual hardware. So we've talked about how cryptography is everywhere and really, whatever you're running, whatever software you're running, whatever application you're using, and it always boils down to hardware. No matter what you do, there's some computer, there's some server, there's some chip running in some place in the world that's actually hosting the application that you're running. And that's really where we're spending a lot of our time, which is developing quantum secure hardware that has a lot of these interesting properties that we think will make it sort of dynamic and adjustable in the future as we're on this exponential curve in order to adapt to changes in technology, changes in regulation. Being able to devise hardware that's performant and agile enough in order to keep up with this changes is a very large task. And that's what we spend a lot of our time doing.
- [27:37]
B
Man. If it comes by 2029 or 2030, I have very low confidence that there's going to be any consensus or that this is going to get done. Listen, I said to me, I'm a glass half full kind of guy, so from a bitcoin perspective, I just think, okay, so someone might hack them and they'll sell a lot of coins and it'll be a really rough bear market. Eventually it goes back up. So. Okay, but I don't think people want to hear that who are buying Bitcoin in general.
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A
Yeah, but it'll expose a crack and a flaw that will I think really adversely affect people's perception on the store of value.
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B
Yeah, crisis, exactly right.
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A
I mean, because this was an asset that has traditionally been talked about as being something that you could pass down to your grandchildren. And if it's Even if there's a sort of mild blemish, which bitcoin actually has an excellent track record so far. But if you talk about a sort of a mishap as large as not being able to adapt for this sort of Q day, this quantum event, people's confidence will start to dissipate and I think that will be negative for crypto at large because I mean this is still today the best sort of sovereign sort of free form of money that we have. And to see it go down in a way like this would be super unfortunate. So I think it's really on all of us to help find a solution. It's really, that's the beauty of this type of thing. We can all chime in sometimes.
- [29:19]
B
I look over at the comments, which is rare. This one's funny. Why can't we just tell Claude 4x my USDT in 10 minutes? Sounds like an easy prompt to me. Use this quantum tire advantage. Well, surely plot them into my Claude and print some money.
- [29:36]
A
Yeah, I think inflation will be pretty tough to deal with, but absolutely, let's do it.
- [29:44]
B
So we got big problems, man. So are you guys testing this? Can people try it? Is there a test net? I mean how can people, I guess touch and feel what's being built over here at btq?
- [29:56]
A
Yeah, absolutely, yeah. So we have our test net up and running. We have about 160 people on it right now. If you go to BitcoinQuantum.com you'll find all the information with our testnet and how to start a miner, how to create a wallet. You can find us on XPTCQuantum. And yeah, I mean really, we encourage anyone and everyone to get involved. We're at this point now where we've been running testnet for over four months and we're progressing well. We actually, a couple of months ago we, we merged bip360 which is sort of like the hottest and really, actually apart from BIP 361 which just came a couple weeks ago, up to then it was the only quantum related bip, but we merged that into the code base to allow people to actually again feel and experience what these quantum upgrades can look like to bitcoin. And so now we're able to transact using this keta Merkel root and everyone's actually not everyone on the network because we don't force quantum, we don't force quantum secure signatures. But if you want to use quantum, which it's strongly preferred to, you can and you can experience in real time. What it's like to transact, how fast it is, how expensive it is, what mining is like. So yeah, we would love for more people to come on board.
- [31:15]
B
I'm glad people are working on this because I'm way too dumb. These conversations do not make me feel like a smart person in my head, but some confidence that somebody's working on it and that there will be some fixes. But man, I watch bitcoiners argue over the dumbest things and it definitely concerns me how big of a problem this
- [31:35]
A
could potentially be and how hard it's
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B
going to be for them to come together.
- [31:39]
A
Yeah, I mean we got. We got 99. We got 99 problems and Quantum's probably the biggest one.
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B
99 problems in Quantums. All of them.
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A
Yeah.
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B
But lacroix. Lacroix ain't one got that.
- [31:53]
A
No, that's. That's gold.
- [31:57]
B
Great conversation. He told you guys where you can check out what they're doing. It's down in the description as well. So if you want to check out what Chris and beats you are up to, we'll look forward to having you back on soon. As quantum continues to eat the world, we'll need good updates on how we can protect ourselves. So thank you very much for joining for your time, man.
- [32:17]
A
Yeah, thank you, Scott. Keep doing what you're doing. It's an essential piece of the puzzle. So we appreciate it as well.
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B
And otherwise got Twitter spaces, crypto, town hall, 10:15, and then of course the daily wolf on yahoo. Finance at noon. For those of you who can still tolerate looking at my face, another time today, thank you, everybody. We'll see you tomorrow. Later, Chris. Thanks, man.
- [32:37]
A
See you. Thanks. Let's do.
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B
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