tell me what quantum is gonna do to bitcoin so there is an algorithm called shore's algorithm
which allows someone with a powerful enough quantum computer to essentially be able to reverse
engineer private key from a public key on the bitcoin blockchain sometimes when you just deposit
funds it depends upon the the actual scripts type that you're using to lock your money but always
when you are spending funds you are revealing that public key so the short version of the problem
here is that at the moment there's around 5 million bitcoin that have their public keys exposed on the
blockchain which anybody can download anybody can find and so if someone has a computer that's
powerful enough they can start looking at those keys they can see how much money is in them and
they could start running shore's algorithm on their quantum computer to get the private key which
would then allow them to spend the money welcome back to another episode of the financial fox show my
name is stefi and here every week we explore how bitcoin digital assets and merging technology are
shaping the future finance but also our lives right and our society and economy so i think the last few
months really focusing on digital asset treasuries we have said a lot about bitcoin and we are going to keep
doing it but today i wanted to bring a different topic that i'm personally very interested in and i think
everybody that is in this space should really pay attention to and that's quantum computing so quantum
computers use the principle of quantum mechanics to process information in ways that today's computers
simply can't obviously we know that companies like google ibm are making massive progress but people
still think that we are in very early stages but maybe we are not you know far off as we think so the
important things to remember is that quantum computing has actually the potential to disrupt
everything and when it comes down to bitcoin and crypto he raises serious question around encryption
security and the future of decentralized network so maybe we should pay more attention and maybe we
should do something about it in this episode i will be joined by jameson loop bitcoin security advocate
and co-founder of the self-custody platform casa so jameson was one of the co-authors of a new
draft the bitcoin improvement proposal aimed at protecting the network against the future quantum
trends when i saw the proposal in july i said definitely i want to get jameson on the show because
i think it will be very important you know first of all you know for myself to kind of hear directly from
him but also for you all and that's you know the main things while i'm doing the show is to share
some very important insights that anybody in crypto should pay attention to and i really enjoyed this
conversation i really hope that you do as well and also start thinking about important aspect of this
industry and where we are heading and the challenge that might come in the way as there is more adoption of bitcoin and digital assets
because with more adoption there are always more challenges and and a technology challenge like
onto could be yeah quite a big one so let's dive into it before we do that just i want to say a couple of
things first of all big thank you to our partner hive digital technologies one of the fastest growing publicly
is that bitcoin miners and good friends of us and also supporter of our shop they are becoming the most
efficient bitcoin miner in the industry and they were also the first crypto miner to implement an ai
strategy that's very important to remember because nowadays the bitcoin mining industry is becoming a really
an energy powerhouse attracting lots of attention from big technology companies looking and
developing ai solution now hide has data centers in canada sweden and paraguay that now has become
the big focus and they those data center are all powered entirely by green energy so that's a very important
aspect is the sustainability of the business and also their priority that is really to build and scale
i'll ensure all the focus company that also transforms the community where they operate so if you want
to know more about hive i suggest to visit hive digital technologies dot com to learn more and also
buzz hpc which is the ai subsidiary that now is making big moves in canada looking at sovereign ai so
definitely something that you are definitely something that you want to check out now before we jump into
my conversation with jameson a couple of other things remember that the content on the show is for
informational purposes only and not intended as financial advice so any opinions expressed by me or my
guests are ours alone and you should not act solely on the back of them as always do your own research
level up your skills and be accountable for your own decisions so that's maybe an unusual disclaimer but
it's very very important because those conversations can empower you but we will never tell you what to
do you are the one that is making your own decisions and you should always feel that kind
of responsibility is very important for anything that you do in life now the last things i'm gonna ask you
that is so important for us please take a moment to subscribe to our youtube channel if you are watching
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is so crucial for us to grow the channel and educate more people about crypto now let's get into my conversation
with jameson hi jameson how are you not bad security business always keeps you on your toes yeah well
that's for sure oh well let's start with that tell us who are you uh well i'm a computer scientist by
trade i've been building software as a service for nearly 20 years now and i've been building on top of
bitcoin for over a decade specifically i've focused on self-custody multi-sig products so just trying to
help people be better at being their own banks and back in 2018 i co-founded casa and we've really been
providing a platform software and advisory services that are really targeted to high net worth individuals
really anyone who has a lot of bitcoin i would say like if you're a whole coiner then it makes sense to
to give us a call and look into our offerings and we just try to protect people from all the bad stuff
that's out there and also protect them from themselves because once you get into self-custody
the the chances that you screw something up go up quite a bit yeah interesting because obviously self-custody
has become a kind of hot topic as more people adopt bitcoin and one of the things that i always kind of
ask myself and other people are we really ready to self-custody our assets i mean some are but not
everybody is and you know and obviously self-custody is an important piece of the future of finance and you
you know ownership but i feel kind of us as human you know human beings and and maybe how society and
economy has been developed before you know the last hundred and hundred years maybe we are not ready for
that or i mean i would really would love to know from your perspective because you know you are working
with clients corporation do you think are we ready at a societal level no because it is such a massive
paradigm shift really like what you're referring to is the way that human civilization has evolved and
progressed over millennia is through specialization of tasks and when you're taking advantage of
specialization what you're really doing is you're outsourcing major aspects of your life to trusted
third parties under the assumption that they're going to be more effective at accomplishing that
task and that's great we don't have to be subsistence farmers anymore right we don't have to spend
a large part of our lives worrying about where the food is going to come from because somebody else
takes care of that and we just go to the market and pick up what we want but that becomes problematic
when you have your really important aspects of your life like your wealth that are now being
outsourced to trusted third parties that can they can screw you over they can um be infiltrated
they they can be pressured by governments there's many different things that can go wrong that then
results in you getting locked out of your own money so obviously self-custody from our perspective
is one of the greatest offerings that bitcoin really made to the world and it's very empowering to be your
own bank the part that people aren't ready for is the responsibility that comes along with that and
there's so many traps out there because it's deceptively simple to go install a software wallet or to to buy
a single hardware device and move all your money onto it and then just completely overlook many different
security aspects and things that could go wrong that you should prepare for and if you aren't prepared for
them and that thing goes wrong you know there's no way of getting your money back so that's that's really
the main thing that we're providing at casa is we are making it easy for someone to get into a self-custody
architecture that is already by default set up in such a way that you can be human you can make mistakes
you can even have failures happen whether it's like natural disaster or even an external attacker
and if a failure happens there's redundancy built into the system so that it's not a catastrophic loss
so you can actually recoup your digital assets if you are with casa if you lose the keys yeah that's the
idea is that because you have multiple keys if something goes wrong with one of the keys or if
you're in a higher number of key setup potentially even multiple keys can be lost or compromised or
destroyed and you you still have enough key material that is distributed around that you can then recover
from it and basically recreate your vault with a new set of keys that's fantastic i mean it's just so
interesting because this is exactly the point of banks right that you have described that's why
banks exist to hold your money well they don't actually hold your money funny enough but yeah it
makes us think really are we ready for you know a new paradigm where actually we are going to be
responsible for our own assets and also make you think what's the future of banking really because i think
banking obviously is going through that uh kind of journey itself um i'm gonna ask you a question that
just came up because we have been doing a series on bitcoin treasury companies and and obviously the
first things that you know be having somebody that can provide services like that and maybe you know
seeing what you have seen over the last year if i'm a publicly listed company and i'm building a bitcoin
treasury strategy probably makes sense to also look at different ways to store the bitcoin that
is not on an exchange or is in a custody i would say eliminate single point of failure is really what
you're looking for especially when you are dealing with shareholder money because that's not just your
own company right you are adding different type of responsibility that is not just you it's actually
your shareholder and i know that many investors many investors many seo maybe you know they think more
about how we get the share price up but really the most important thing is building value for shareholders
so tell me about what have you seen in the last year from that angle did you get in back you know
requests uh the are you actually services any bitcoin treasury company i don't want to obviously know
details that you can't disclose but it would be interesting to understand if self-custody solutions
are something that public listed company are looking and then your your view should they do that yeah so
it's interesting from a regulatory perspective um the traditional custodians who are actually storing money on
behalf of their clients directly are often required to use a qualified custodian in order to store those assets
but that's only for the custodians where they have a client who comes to them and says either gives
them bitcoin directly or says you know here is my fiat now buy the bitcoin and that's going to be my bitcoin
but treasury companies are not in that category while while you know ostensibly the the funds and
the treasury are kind of owned by shareholders because shareholders you know equity holders have
ownership in the company and all of the assets of the company it doesn't fall under that specific
financial regulation where you have to use a qualified custodian so you have some optionality
now as far as i'm aware currently all of the publicly listed companies that are touted as
bitcoin treasury companies are using some trusted third-party custodian to actually handle the funds
but at casa we do have a number of bitcoin treasury clients though these are generally privately held
companies or smaller companies and and so i think that you know really any company that has a bitcoin
treasury regardless of whether or not you're marketing yourself as a bitcoin treasury company
that it does make sense to set it up in such a way that the you know the executives or other key
personnel at the company have a shared ownership and control over the funds so that you aren't having
to outsource to a trusted third party but of course you can do it either way there's pros and cons to each
but i think anyone who has read the bitcoin white paper should understand that like the fundamental
value premise that satoshi said you know the reason that bitcoin was created was due to all of the
problems inherent to trusted third parties so it seems pretty silly to just throw that uh fundamental
value right out the window it's very interesting because this is so important the ownership the
ability to be your own banker but then people like to have somebody to blame isn't it so that's why
they may want the third party oh it's the custodian they got hacked or you know that's not really my
fault you know but definitely would be interesting to maybe look at how a bitcoin treasury company could
you know could set that up maybe we can have another another conversation about it now i really wanted to
do this interview to talk about quantum but obviously security is you know at the at the base of this
conversation anyway so it's good for you you know it's good for you to kind of give us some background and
tell us about what have you seen the last question that i wanted to ask you before we go into the content
how this cycle has played for casa i mean give me some insight on you know the company's activity where
you're more busy are you more busy in the back market what kind of challenge do you get when bitcoin
price is going up just just give me some uh yeah give me some insights i think the the simplest way
to describe sort of the busyness of the company is that it's effectively a derivative of the exchange
rate so if the exchange rate is going up then we get really really busy that's generally because you
know people are getting wealthier they're looking at their holdings and they're realizing the value has
gone up a lot and perhaps i should improve the level of security that i have for these holdings
on the other hand you know if the price is going down or if the price is just flat that's when things
get pretty quiet so for the past few months it's been a pretty quiet summer we've we've been just sort
of going up and down a little bit but generally staying flat and you know right now everybody's
wondering is this cycle different everybody's sort of pulling up the uh previous cycle charts and
overlaying them on top of each other and saying well is it is it the four-year cycle and we only have a
few months left or is all of the new institutional capital that's starting to flow in going to lengthen
the cycle obviously i think we're all hoping for the latter uh that you know we have a bit longer and
that the the floodgates haven't fully opened yet what do you think about because you have been in crypto
for long enough to kind of analyze these cycles see there is definitely a pattern but
obviously this cycle is different than the others where do you think we are right now i mean we've
been in a bull market for like a year and a half now it's definitely different so on one hand i i track
a lot of different metrics around just activity interest sentiment so on so forth and one thing that's
different about this cycle is that there's no real retail participation like we we haven't really seen
the sort of fomo and hype and massive amounts of regular people getting into the crypto space like
like they did in 27 20. wait a second on that what about the meme coin mania what about um uh i mean
ordinance was specifically on bitcoin but it was kind of like a new wave or artists just getting involved
and creating stuff on chain so was that not the retail involvement or you thought that maybe kind of
let's slow down now and yeah that was a little bump it wasn't like insane levels um you know i think that
that was still it was kind of an echo of crypto degens that had still hung around since the last cycle
instead of yeah yeah you know people who there's still plenty of people hanging around who are like
win alt season win alt season and and i've been telling everybody no it's it's actually suit coin
season right it's it's yet the year of institutional capital and treasury companies and so on and so forth
and and so that makes it even harder to predict for me that's i think the big question with regard to
the cycles repeating is that the cycles have always been retail driven before so it started to become
really obvious when you're getting retail mania and your cab driver was telling you about crypto and
so on and so forth and i think that's the open question is does a sort of blow off top for a cycle
have to be retail driven or are we going to see a blow off top that is institution driven um i don't know
that's that kind of arrangement wanna raise another question we are not gonna get into the course for a bit
let's go back to the dots the digital asset treasury companies and exactly what you're saying there's
going to be maybe there's going to be an institutional blow up right could that be in the digital asset
treasury field and if that is the case bearing in mind maybe what are your views or or you know sharing with
us your your views on where we are with these industries what are the red flags or the things that
make you you know maybe worry you a little bit more when it comes down to you know public listed company
building a bitcoin treasury strategy that i mean it's good that there is a treasury but then what's the
strategy it's just accumulating forever yeah that's the question i would think that the the risk when
it comes to treasury companies is mostly going to come down to leverage and so this is where different
treasury companies are going to have different risk profiles so i would be less worried about a like
2017 style uh blow up and more worried about a 2021 2022 blow up which is more leverage based
the question is do we get to a point where the sort of market of treasury companies becomes so large so
saturated so competitive that some of the companies probably the smaller ones start taking on more risk and
more leverage in order to jockey for position to make their equity look more tantalizing to the
market and if they end up you know taking on too much risk and they perhaps have a bunch of
loans or or other relationships set up where they have actually lost or given up you know control of
some of that bitcoin in order to try to earn money on it if if those contractual relationships start blowing up
due to whatever the the uh lindies are doing you know that could be potential for a cascading collapse of
at least some of those companies essentially going bankrupt because they they took a bit off more than
they can chew and i think a lot of people are expecting at least some of the smaller companies to
fail obviously micro strategy is the gold standard and everybody looks at these different equities that
they're issuing and what the terms are and how much optionality strategy as a company has over kind of
pulling the different levers there and manipulating them and i think that strategy has been quite
conservative you know when they've um when they've taken on leverage and you know taking out loans and
stuff uh they they tend to only do it on really really long term you know like four year and and longer
terms so you know it makes them a lot less exposed to the short and medium term volatility yeah obviously
we don't know where what can happen in the next five years i mean bitcoin is definitely for now i think
there is general consensus that is on a trajectory that is going to go up but you know you never know
what's happening that's why i want to come back to quantum because you know i share with you before um
that you know i talk with different people in capital markets and obviously you say you know
um what about if there is a challenge to bitcoin where the price for some kind of reason goes down
substantially and one of the things that are brought up is what about quantum and the answer that you get
is mainly no you know what you're saying we are kind of like 10 years away it's nothing gonna happen i know
a bit about it but not enough to kind of build an argument around around it and and definitely you
are somebody that knows more about the subject as you know you are being proactively putting together a
draft with some other guys about how bitcoin can actually the bitcoin community can take action to make
the network more resilient so first of all tell me where we are with quantum and are we 10 years away
or you know is that something that people should worry about yeah uh it's it's tricky because i am not
a quantum computing expert or a cryptographer but i've been talking about this and investigating
researching talking to quantum and cryptographic experts about it for about a year now and i think
yeah we probably have 10 years maybe longer i think it's highly unlikely that a cryptographically
relevant quantum computer appears in the next five years but even if it is 10 years away i think that
means we need to start planning for it now and really the the primary problem is that it's very very
difficult to change bitcoin and this would be unprecedented in the sense that we've never had an upgrade to
bitcoin before that required people to move their funds and that is going to take a really long time
because you can't force anybody to do anything in bitcoin so you know first of all it takes generally
several years and that this time frame is getting longer and longer due to ossification and network
effects but it generally takes several years to get a bitcoin proposal adopted and activated and that's
just at the protocol at the network level even once that happens it usually takes several more years for
those changes to matriculate out throughout the entire ecosystem for all of the the wallets and the
custodians to update their software to take advantage of the changes and then the the thing that would
be different in this case is that there is a third stage where you need to actually get everybody to
move their money from a quantum vulnerable locking script into a quantum safe locking script so i
expect that would take several more years so you can see already like it looks like it would probably
take seven plus years to actually get all the way through that process and that's why i'm i'm saying we
should start planning for it right now i think the best case scenario is that we can continue monitoring
progress on the quantum computing front of progress both on their the software efficiency level and
the hardware computational power level and we we hope that that continues to progress in a somewhat
predictable linear pattern so that we can see we have many years ahead of us but we can see that we're
getting to the point where it should be concerned the sort of black swan event would be if there's some massive
breakthrough that increases computational power by orders of magnitude so right now we are several
orders of magnitude away from anyone having a quantum computer that's powerful enough to actually
crack the elliptic curve algorithm that bitcoin uses so there will have to be multiple major breakthroughs but
we are seeing massive breakthroughs happening so there have been like order of magnitude improvements for
example in error correction handling which is one of the several variables that quantum computers have
to overcome in order to actually get more powerful but um you know it's something that we we all just have to
remain vigilant of and i think that having multiple plans in place for multiple different scenarios of quantum
quantum computing approaching slowly versus quantum computing approaching very quickly and surprising us we
can have plans in place for a number of these eventualities tell me what's the vulnerability i mean what
quantum is going to do to bitcoin so there is an algorithm called shores algorithm which allows someone with a powerful
quantum computer to essentially be able to reverse engineer a private key from a public key and on the bitcoin blockchain
when you sometimes when you just deposit funds it depends upon the um the actual scripts type that
you're using to lock your money but always when you are spending funds you are revealing that public key so the short version of the problem here is that at the moment there's a round five
million bitcoin that have their public keys exposed on the blockchain which anybody can download anybody can find and so if someone has a computer that's powerful enough they can start looking at those keys they can see how much money is in them and they could start running shores algorithm on their quantum computer to get the private key which would then allow them to spend the money so so tell me who has this publicly available key
i mean it's anyone anyone who has been using bitcoin especially anyone who has been using bitcoin especially anyone who is reusing their bitcoin address has uh exposed their public keys it's also anyone who was using bitcoin back in the first two or three years where they were actually the the only address type that existed back then was this raw public key address type and so anyone who put funds or was mining back then and never moved the funds
removed the funds to a newer address type all of that bitcoin so you know some some people say well we we think that satoshi likely has a million coins and uh so all of that for example is exposed
is exposed okay interesting okay so that makes sense i mean it just makes me think right now that we get nation states they are building pile of you know strategic stockpile and that there might be a reason why another country should try to do something with quantum computing to kill another nation if that nation has built up a substantial
yeah yeah yeah so like we really learned i went to a quantum bitcoin summit a few months ago in san francisco and we were told by several people who are building quantum computing companies that it's really an arms race between china and the united states and so you know china has historically been very fickle about bitcoin or they've banned bitcoin many different times in many different ways over the years and it wouldn't surprise
surprise me at all if someone higher level in the chinese government decided hey we've got access to this quantum computer now
let's destroy bitcoin for real so okay let's look at that scenario what's gonna happen it really depends on a number of different variables if a if a quantum computer is built and we have no protection whatsoever in the bitcoin protocol that's a really bad situation because the only place that you can really
a place that you can really run to safety is moving your bitcoin to an address that you've never used before
and that is not revealing the public key so taproot addresses for example are not safe they automatically reveal the public key but even then it's not a perfect security solution because when you eventually go to spend that bitcoin you do have to reveal the public key and you could be exposed to something called a short range attack
which is basically if someone has a quantum computer that's fast enough that it can reverse engineer the private key in the amount of time that it takes for the next block to get confirmed
they can swipe the money right out of the mempool and basically redirect it to themselves so basically either you just don't move them
becomes a lot useful a lot less useful if you can't even spend it so that's do you see this
happening i mean in your scenario that you have considered as like a bomb right boom one go or
there will be different attempt that maybe erase awareness and people panic and you know it's gonna
be all happening in one go or not so there's many variables right partially it depends on is it is
it a good actor or a bad actor who achieves quantum supremacy and what will their thought process be
around how they're going to do it if it's a really really good actor it's actually possible for them
to to prove to us that they have a quantum computer you know without stealing any money and and you
know that could you know essentially kick us all into gear into actually adopting a solution much
faster but if it's if it's a bad actor or just really i would say a self-interested actor then
i think what you start doing if you're trying to get away with it for a really long time you would
start cracking a lot of the the smaller addresses that are likely lost that that nobody is going to
be complaining about if if the money moves and you know we would see these movements happen but we
wouldn't know for sure what was happening if you were just taking a little bit here and there but if
you if you really wanted to hurt bitcoin there are addresses out there with over a hundred thousand
bitcoin in them like binance bitfinex a number of different exchanges and large custodians have
almost all of their money in one address that has the public keys exposed so if you swiped those that
would you know create massive market panic and obviously if you tried to liquidate hundreds of
thousands of bitcoin that would crash the market pretty substantially it's like a bank run basically
everybody wants to get out to the price yeah and then like once people are fairly confident that there
is a quantum computer that is attacking coins then really the only logical thing to do is to sell all of
all of your bitcoin so that would create i think a cascading a market effect i mean we have seen that a
lot because i remember so well in the previous cycle when uh i think was blockify or you know and the
census and blockify they kind of started to to have problems and and people were just moving assets
quickly and you know selling and you know selling and that kind of showing the price when there is you know
panic then you see the assets going down quite a lot and obviously if you are not sometimes like if you are
just a retail player you guess you get damage even more than you know the one they've got access to the better
trades and stuff like that well that doesn't sound really good so what was your proposal what did you propose
with them with the guys think it came out in july wasn't it yeah so my proposal is not about the initial
quantum safe signature scheme because i'm not a cryptographer i'm not really going to weigh in on that
there's a number of different algorithms out there they all have trade-offs they're all terrible
for bitcoin and different reasons because they tend to have huge data footprints my improvement proposal
is actually focusing on the actual migration the sort of game theory and incentives of under the assumption
that we have a best case scenario where quantum computing is slowly improving and we can see it coming
and we want to adopt a a new signature scheme we get consensus for that then how do we actually
get everybody to migrate their funds over and how do we protect everyone once that's done and so
essentially it's like a three-phase scheme that i've proposed where you activate whatever the new
quantum safe cryptography is and when you do that you then stop accepting transactions
that are sending money to any of the old address schemes that are quantum vulnerable and the idea
there is that this is how you notify people that something has happened because there's no way to
you know email or contact every bitcoin user it's just not a thing obviously we can spread the word
on social media and companies will contact everyone that they know of but there's no reliable way to
contact every bitcoin user but i think if people see that their bitcoin transactions are not confirming that
will really spur them to look into the cause of why that's happening so with that next phase then
hopefully that will get more people to actually upgrade their wallets move their money into quantum safe
addresses and then the next phase we're talking like several years for each phase because it's a very slowly
moving ecosystem and then the next phase several years later is to just completely reject any spins from
quantum vulnerable utxos which is basically saying okay you know we've given people many years to migrate
and now in order to actually stop any future quantum attackers we're not going to allow for funds to be spent from
from vulnerable addresses because we no longer have any assurance that they're being spent by the actual
legitimate owner you know it could just be some attacker with a quantum computer and you know this of course is
quite controversial because if someone's not paying attention they're not going to be able to spend their money
you know it is effectively burning a fair amount of coins like all of those lost coins we would expect would just
get permanently locked and in order to try to alleviate some of those objections this is where more research
is required but it should be possible to then create a quantum safe recovery scheme for people who have funds
in those locked scripts but that's going to be more complicated and it's going to require coming up with a
new proof system you know perhaps some sort of zero knowledge proof system where in addition to providing
the cryptographic signature that corresponds to the public key that is protecting those coins you would have
to provide additional information such as your extended public key and your derivation path that your wallet used
that is essentially showing that you don't only have the private key because a quantum attacker
would have the private key but a quantum attacker would not have this additional wallet information
to show that they can deterministically derive these keys from some master key
so i'm just going to ask you a question you might think is a dumb question but if we don't know if we don't
have a quantum computing that can break bitcoin right now how can we put in place a framework that will
protect us from something that is not here yet well i mean we can implement whatever rules people agree to i think
that this is really the question that was like you don't want to implement something preemptively like
too early if if it if it turns out that quantum computing hits some sort of unknown limit of physics
that makes it so that we then find out later that oh okay it's actually as far as we know it's physically
impossible to create a quantum computer that is powerful enough to crack this cryptography then we we you could
argue could have caused some harm to bitcoin by making it too complicated and
making these transaction sizes larger than they actually needed to be so i think that's going to be one of the
massive aspects of the debate is like when do we actually do it like when when does it look like
it is really going to be a problem and that it the cost benefit analysis it causes us to agree that
we need to actually take action to do something but you don't want to be too late because that's when
you're going to have the massive market liquidations it's it's interesting that because it kind of like in
my head i immediately think about personal data i immediately think about bitcoin is all about you know
ownership personal ownership so what about linking the owner data as another within the security and the keys so it
becomes really pretty much like my bitcoin is me if that kind of makes sense and so a quantum computing can
get some of my data but not really all of them unless that is powered by ai and then you know maybe could
but i think as a human beings we still retain certain level of data set that you know are not publicly available
well i think that if anyone was proposing to like tie other sorts of identifying information to your
bitcoin i think that would get rejected pretty much outright because one of the primary things
of bitcoin is you should be able to operate pseudonymously like all you should need is to have that
cryptographic data to be able to prove ownership it's a it's a difficult it's a difficult things right and i and i
understand that it's not something straightforward why you decided to uh work on this proposal uh because
i think it's one of several like really long-term concerns that i have um and this this is actually
a natural evolution of like before i was talking about quantum stuff i had spent the past year or two
talking about ossification and ossification is basically it's basically its own kind of law of
network physics in the sense that as a network grows as the number of participants within a uh a peer-to-peer
or a network protocol grows larger and larger it naturally becomes more and more difficult to coordinate
any changes across all of those entities because you're essentially a protocol is a type of language
it's a computer language and the value of the network requires that everyone be speaking the
same language but if you grow to the point where you have millions and millions of people you there's
no way of coordinating amongst all of them to say hey we all need to to update to this new version of
the language it just becomes too difficult and like we've already seen that play out with a number of
internet-based protocols that are sort of lower in the stack i like to talk about the email protocol a
lot because i worked on email software for a decade a long time ago and it just it's it's because of that
and and the fact that bitcoin is getting slower and slower to be able to evolve that i think that you
you know we want to get as many improvements in as quickly as we can before we reach the point of no
return and no one will know when that is we might already be beyond the point of no return when
no other changes will ever happen to the bitcoin protocol but i think we have to keep trying should be
the custody providers be the ones they start to build something quantum resistant quantum
resistance self-custody wallets i mean i'm i'm just also a custody solution and then you know give the
option to to individual corporation whatever whoever is holding bitcoin to to to bring their assets onto
that i mean because you at casa you could do that i guess kind of there are best practices that we can
implement in the wallet software to try to prevent people from reusing addresses and having long-term
exposed public keys but fundamentally you need an improvement to happen at the protocol layer otherwise
you're you're going to end up even if you're protecting against long-range attacks you're eventually
going to be susceptible to those short-range attacks when people are spending their coins so what do you mean
by that what needs to happen at the base layer we need to implement uh an algorithm that is quantum safe
that is not elliptic curve digital signature algorithm that we're using right now that means a lot of
work who is going to do it well this is where the bitcoin improvement proposal and the consensus you could
call it governance process of bitcoin comes into play you have people who are technical and who care about
a given issue and they work on coming up with the draft proposal and get it peer reviewed by as many other
interested technical people in the space and you just keep talking about it keep iterating and try to
keep driving it forward to the point where we can get a rough consensus that this is what needs to be done but
it's a difficult process i really think that you know talking more about it is definitely one thing it will be
interesting to to get the quantum people you know on the side maybe the one that you're working on
these technologies i know the uk is quite advanced on the quantum computing technologies and having my
friend at the quantum vc fund so maybe maybe also see their perspective they're not really crypto people
that's the problem it's not easy maybe for them to kind of like dive deep more into what is the impact of
mean coin specifically but i guess that you know we won't be so difficult to kind of bring the two
things together but i definitely think talking more about it getting more people aware maybe getting
the key player on boards get michael sailor to kind of pay attention i think that's definitely important
well it's a very pressing topic for my perspective because i think if we are not 10 years away and like we
said maybe from a geopolitical level something is going to happen obviously the u.s doesn't have
yet a stockpile that is you know relevant enough for for china to to to you know consider about an attack
but you know as they are moving quite fast so maybe it is in five years and we don't know what has been
happening in china or somewhere else you know we are always in china but it might be another country that we
never expected but anyway yeah that's definitely something important to consider well listen thank
you so much for coming on the show and sharing that with us if there is anything that we can help to
raise awareness and yeah more than happy to support yeah it's uh it's a weird issue because it's
simultaneously not an issue but also a potential existential crisis so like the issue in and of itself is
kind of a quantum state it's very difficult to tell but i don't think it can hurt by trying to be
prepared for it no but but also understand you know like the best practice like you said you know before
when when you are handling your assets there are certain best practice that people don't know you
know people just the majority of people is going to buy the bitcoin and coinbase leave them on coinbase never
move them and then you know maybe even show up you know the private key to their mom or the or you know
friends i don't think people that's why you know we come back to the beginning of the interview when i said
are people actually ready to sell custody their own assets and it's the same things that comes down when we
talk about private data you know with social media just people give away all the data for free just to have
access to something i think we are still not at a at a stage where we really understand how important
is privacy is not telling everybody your own stuff yeah yeah so um at a societal level people just don't
think adversarially and they aren't used to having to take on this level of responsibility and think about
everything that can go wrong but you know there are plenty of people in the space especially those who have
been around for a while people who have a significant amount of their net worth in bitcoin who put in the
time the effort to educate themselves and to be able to navigate the space safely listen let me know the
progress that you are making and maybe we need more events gathering where you know we raise awareness about
that and get those people to talk about and you know drive the the discussion because i think that's
it's all about awareness right so well i mean you know the the major the institutions the nation states
uh like there are people who are aware of this they're tracking it kind of like you have relationships
with people who are doing quantum vc their institutions have investments in companies that
are doing quantum and so they're getting reports from the people who are making advancements on quantum
and then of course they're serving a lot of customers who could be negatively impacted by this so
yeah there there is an awareness at a really high level even if like maybe the average bitcoin investor
isn't clued in i think that you know the stakes are high enough that you know people the people
who have a lot to lose are going to be paying attention yeah true true jimson thank you for
coming on the show it was a great chat thanks for having me