[00:00:00] McIntosh:

Welcome back to Stochys Plebs for episode two thirty two. I’m McIntosh.

[00:00:05] Kenshin:

I am Kenshin. And in today’s episode, we talk about quantum computing and how it might affect Bitcoin. Okay. Great.

[00:00:15] McIntosh:

Great. Good to see you, Kenshin. We’ve chatted off and on quite a bit this week, and I think we probably need to talk about that maybe a little bit. I don’t wanna take it into the whole episode, of course, but, yeah, kinda where we’re at. We unloaded a lot of stuff last week. If you kinda wanna know where the podcast is going, that’s a good place to start. But, we’re gonna hopefully dot a few things here, cross a few what do they say? Cross the t’s and dot the i’s. Yep. As we start recording, though, we’re at Block Height 922,362, which brings me up to the question.

What are you up to, Kenshin?

[00:00:56] Kenshin:

Oh, it’s been a week already. I I’ve been,

[00:01:01] McIntosh:

Actually, it’s been six days. Six days. So remember we recorded on Thursday, and I got it right out of the gate. But, to we’re back on schedule this week. Yes. Yeah.

[00:01:12] Kenshin:

I’ve been in this journey with Claude, you know, that journey where you get Yes. Frustrated. Really frustrated, then you see a light in the end of the tunnel, then you get really frustrated again, never ending. Then it’s like, oh, okay. No. Now I made it through. So I I’m I’m going through this wave the whole week. Finally, I actually just paid for the higher tier with a $100 a month.

You did. Because I I was reaching the weekly limits. Do you know? Have you reached that before?

[00:01:45] McIntosh:

I have once. Yes. And it was very frustrating because, of course, you’ve got something to do. Yeah. And it’s like, nope. We’re done.

[00:01:53] Kenshin:

Yeah. For for a few days. So my my weekly limit would reset on Sunday. So and I would reach it to tonight or tomorrow. So I was like, I I I need to the next level. So I’ve been doing a lot. I I figured out a lot of, a lot of things to improve with, how React works. So I’m I’m starting to understand more also how React works because I I never studied React.

[00:02:24] McIntosh:

Ladies and gentlemen, if I can interrupt, here is what I hear.

Kenshin is becoming a great front end developer, and he needs to spruce up the website. Sorry. Please continue.

[00:02:34] Kenshin:

Yeah. Yeah. So and I’m actually figured out how to force Claude away from his way of messing things up again and again. Okay. And how to be more responsible.

[00:02:49] McIntosh:

So Don’t tell that secret. We should charge for that. At least $99.

[00:02:55] Kenshin:

Yeah. It’s nothing special. I mean, it just forces you to do follow best practices and Right. Tell it, it doesn’t matter how much time or co refactoring it will take. I want the best solution for React. And when you mentioned React, it’s like, oh, yeah. For React, we need to do this and this and this.

So, so it it it changed its mind a lot of times when I question back, challenge it all the time. So that’s so that’s what I keep doing now, challenge it and not just yeah. Let it do whatever it wants to do. Mhmm. So that works quite good now.

[00:03:32] McIntosh:

I wonder if these things are ever gonna change. Like, if we’re gonna get to the point where kind of out of the box, you don’t have these problems. I have actually been spending a lot of time working on kind of this AI stuff lately, and I’m going deeper and deeper down that rabbit hole, so to speak. And it’s just it’s interesting that things that seem trivial to me, they they it’s like, why are you doing why does it believe it why does it completely make up things? Like, I’ve just happened last night. I was working with either chat, g p t, or cloud, and it said I should write some salt this way. Salt’s a configuration code language.

And and I said, well, I’m not familiar with that. Can you point me to some documentation or something? I’ve learned to do this. And and it’s like and it thinks, and it’s like, yeah. No. I just made that up. I’m like, why would you do that? What you you don’t just make up parts to programming languages. That’s not the it’s it’s it’s, so frustrating. Anyways, all that being said,

[00:04:54] Kenshin:

we’ll see. Yeah. And I sent you last Friday, a Reddit post and a GitHub. Yes. And that has incredible

[00:05:03] McIntosh:

Yes. Documentation for how do you Clearly, that person had been working with LLMs for a long

[00:05:10] Kenshin:

time and made Yeah. That’s Lots of resources. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Good stuff. So I will try to implement some of them to have different agents and things that you don’t need to tell you to anything. It it will just

[00:05:24] McIntosh:

know how to do the right thing. That’s kind of the next step for what I want. So I’m gonna I’m working on a project where I basically create a semi custom LLM for my wife for some stuff.

I don’t think that’s gonna be too hard, but then I I wanna work on building agents that just kind of run continually and and process whatever it is that you need. You know? Right. Interesting. Very interesting. So Yeah. What about you? Here’s how my week has gone. I went to bed at 04:30 this morning. That that’s the sum total of my week. That’s basically all you need to know. I went to bed at 04:30 because I typically am in the middle of three different projects, major projects, not like minor things. And then what happens is they come along and they just kinda drop a fourth project, which is, you know, of course, it supersedes all of the other projects, and it has to be done tomorrow.

Yes. That’s kind of what happened. And then on top of all of that, there was a lot of miscommunication. There was no look. Documentation is important. Tickets, you know, as software developers, whatever, we tend to hate, like, Jira tickets and this kind of thing. But they’re invaluable for communicating information between people who are not in the same time zone. I’m literally talking to people who were, you know, twelve hours opposite me. Mhmm. So it turns out I did hours and hours and hours of work. And at 04:30 this morning, I said, hey. I’ve this is going on, and it’s still going and I have to go to bed. I cannot stay up any longer.

And they’re like, oh, yeah. Did you do this thing? And I’m like, what are you talking about? So it turns out I had to do there was, like, multiple things wrong. So I basically to make this palatable and short, I had to scrap everything I was doing at that point and redo it. Wow. So, yay.

[00:07:48] Kenshin:

Good times. And you don’t get paid extra for all of that overtime. So

[00:07:55] McIntosh:

in Europe, you’re cultured. If you’ve ever had a croissant at a cafe in Paris, you know this.

[00:08:06] Kenshin:

I actually have it.

[00:08:08] McIntosh:

You should do it, and so should I, actually. You being cultured, you get paid when you do overtime.

The Neanderthals over here in The United States, we have this thing called a salary, and we get sorry. I know you know what that is. But, you know, we get paid a salary, and then we work. It doesn’t matter. I mean, it just it doesn’t. And and I don’t know. I had a discussion with our project manager this morning late this morning after I got started again. And he’s not happy about it. And I’m not happy about it, but I don’t know what to do because, partially, it’s not my fault. I don’t want, I don’t wanna defend myself, but I also don’t believe it was actually my fault. But I believe that there are things that I could have done to probably make it a little bit better. I’m not a very I am organizationally challenged. If you’ve known me long enough, you know that.

I go and if you’ve listened to me long enough, you might realize that because I go from project to project and, you know, maybe not even with enough follow through sometimes when they’re personal things. I have a hard time keeping track of things, and then I have I literally I’m not exaggerating. I’ll have, like, three major projects going on. And then this project came along, like, a month ago, and they’re like, hey. This has to be done by November 5. And I’m like, whatever. And go off and go on about. And then on November 0 Yeah. I think well, the fifth was today, except it was yesterday because they’re twelve hours ahead.

And they told me about it Monday. So yesterday was Tuesday as we record. So twenty four hours before that, they’re like, oh, yes. Here’s all the tickets. And the backup alone, the first time, took over twenty four hours. So, yeah, I I don’t know. I have attempted at multiple points in my career, my life to be better organized. Different systems. I’ve tried get things done. You know? Please don’t I don’t need boost or whatever to say this. But if you’re going to, please at least make it 10 or 20,000 sats. Okay? I’ve tried Get Things Done. I’ve tried notebooks. I’ve tried this, that, and the other.

And I I I don’t know.

[00:10:52] Kenshin:

But to Is that a procrastination type of thing?

[00:10:56] McIntosh:

Are we gonna turn this into a psychology podcast? No. It’s okay. I just I don’t I I wanna be mindful that I I to be honest, Kenshin, I’m, and I am self diagnosing because I’m old enough that back when I was a kid, these things weren’t you you didn’t talk about this. It was not but I believe I’m ADHD or ADHD or some variation thereof. I have learned to cope with it to an extent because I had to. Because in the eighties, you didn’t go to a therapist. I’m sorry. You just didn’t. And we didn’t have those resources and whatever.

But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve also realized that even though it’s given me certain I can get hyper focused on a project, and literally, I’ll wake up, not wake up. I will look up twelve hours later and go, I haven’t eaten. I haven’t thought about anything else, and I have all of this work done. But then there are times when I can’t I can’t concentrate. You know? And I’ve learned to cope with it, but this is an area where I haven’t I haven’t been able to really figure this out. I don’t

[00:12:25] Kenshin:

know. No. Yeah. I I feel you. I I am quite similar, actually. So sympathize.

[00:12:34] McIntosh:

And I I don’t have a solution either. Quantum computing. People don’t wanna hear about that crap.

[00:12:40] Kenshin:

No. Will quantum computing break Bitcoin? That’s the high hype sentence.

[00:12:51] McIntosh:

So I want I wanna lay the groundwork before we dive into this. Actually, even before we do that, let’s kinda give an update because it does tie into this. Kenshin and I have talked quite a bit by signal, and we got on before the podcast here today and talk some more. We’ve made a lot of decisions, and not all the decisions are made. But I do believe as we move forward, what we’re going to see what you’re going to see or hear as a listener, we’re somewhat gonna pivot.

Is that a fair statement, Kenshin? We’re going to pivot into more technical topics. We do not want to so we’ve done 231 episodes now, four years, going on, four and a quarter or whatever years. We do not wanna keep covering the same things over and over. We have all the episodes indexed on the web page. You can go there, look them up. You can a lot of them have transcripts, not all of them. If anybody wants to volunteer to do something fun, there’s a good task. There’s that information is available, and I think it’s probably time for us just to to kinda move on. We don’t wanna get bored, and we want to look at stuff that’s interesting to us.

And we want you as the listeners to grow along with us. Okay? And that’s actually what’s really most important here. Once you move beyond this is Bitcoin, this is why it’s important, this is how I self custody it, there’s a whole world of things beyond that, and we need to talk about some of those. And one of those is, what are some of the threats to Bitcoin? Well, probably the one that only this is the only one I know of that has any real teeth. It’s called quantum computing. And the concern is that there will be a day when quantum computers will be able to break, the private keys that we use to manage our Bitcoin, which would be, not a real good thing. So we’re going to talk about that. We’re gonna kinda lay a groundwork for that.

We’re gonna talk about the hype, and there’s certainly a lot of that. We’re gonna talk about the actual reality, and we’re gonna talk about kind of what you need to keep an eye on as we move forward from this. If you get nothing else from this discussion, dear listener, please hear me. This is not an imminent threat to your Bitcoin. If you hear that, someone is trying to sell you something. It is potentially a threat. There is no reality to it being a problem right this minute. Okay?

[00:15:57] Kenshin:

Yeah. So Yes. That’s a very good point. You just start with that disclaimer because

[00:16:03] McIntosh:

I I personally don’t like those hype titles either and, hype topics and Is what did we use for the title? Quantum computing will break Bitcoin?

I sorry. What was our I’m just kidding. I try and avoid those.

[00:16:21] Kenshin:

So what what we have here, as a basis for this discussion is a research report from the Human Rights Foundation. It’s a newsletter, and they send this report in. And also this report is based in a lot of opinions and, and views from, a summit that was recently done. And this summit was called the pres Presidio Bitcoin Quantum Summit that was con yeah. It was, it had a lot of quantum physicists, Bitcoin core developers, cryptographers, wallet engineers, miners, open source educators. So it had a lot of different people in there.

I don’t know if you recognize any of them.

[00:17:17] McIntosh:

The people?

[00:17:19] Kenshin:

Yeah. No. Not at I can say some name. So the CEO of Block, b l o c q, Sho Suigara, CEO of Cyquantum, Bitcoin core contributor, Peter Weidley, Lightning Network pioneer. Anyway, a lot of people there, and they did a poll before the summit and the same poll after the summit to see if their views on the threat to Bitcoin has changed. And as a quick summary, we can say that, yeah, they enter the the summit with the view that, okay, it’s not such a big threat and then came out of the summit thinking that it’s a more plausible threat, more near Right. To us than than they initially thought going into the summit.

So and those are high knowledgeable people and engineers and stuff. So but as you said, it’s not imminent. Mhmm. It’s not in the next couple of years. What they were talking, it was, the poll was asking if it would be a threat, five to how many years? Oh, I lost it now. Five to twenty five years ahead. So that that that’s the time frame we’re looking at. Five, frankly, is being really generous. Yeah. Yeah. It is.

[00:18:46] McIntosh:

This is like when they say when I was in college in the nineties, I was in one of the first AI classes that they had ever.

And they were like, AI is, like, ten years away. And despite what you may know, I think large language models, they’re not AI. And they’re not the AI that we were if you wanna even attempt to classify them as AI now, they certainly were not what we were talking about in the nineties, where they think on their own, they generate they have a conscience. They have they can they can operate independently. LLMs are just fancy filters. Okay? Anyways, I think this is my point, though, is I think this is the same situation. Mhmm. And I have some figures here about kind of the current state of things.

And there are those levels, like what we were at in the nineties talking about AI right now with quantum computing, in my opinion. Now I’m not a professional on this subject, but that’s my fair thing? I think that’s a good thing to say. Yeah. We’ll call it that. Right? I don’t know. Yeah. But yeah. Sorry.

[00:20:19] Kenshin:

So the statistics, I saw them now. So before the summit, it was, oh, I lost it again. Oh, there it is. 49%. Before the summit, 49% said that the quantum computer relevant how do they call it this? Q c r q c. It’s a terminology, for I’m sorry. This report is really long.

Sorry. Cryptographically relevant quantum computers. Mhmm. So the development of quantum computers that could break cryptography, The question was, are they gonna be here in five to twenty years? The consensus before the summit was 49% and after the summit was 69%. So more and more people got, yeah, got convinced that Yeah. It’s possible to to get those computers within five to twenty years. And and the unsure group moved from 25%

[00:21:34] McIntosh:

down to 8%. So a lot less were actually unsure as well.

[00:21:40] Kenshin:

Yes. So it was a good summit in that sense in terms of talking about the technology and the possibilities ahead.

So what we say is that, yes, quantum computing that could break cryptography most probably will come eventually. And now what we will discuss is if that even matters to Bitcoin, how does it matter? Cryptography

[00:22:03] McIntosh:

because I think that’s a really important distinction. I don’t want people. There are solutions

[00:22:10] Kenshin:

to this. Okay? Yeah. Yeah. And we will discuss those. Yeah. So yes. Correct. The current cryptography we’re talking about. Because then we will still have cryptography, but it’s gonna be quantum resistance, cryptography and solutions.

Yeah. Should we get a bit into it then? Okay.

[00:22:36] McIntosh:

So can you I don’t know if this is even I don’t I don’t know if this is a valid question, but can you even can you tell me what, like, a quantum computer is?

[00:22:49] Kenshin:

No.

[00:22:51] McIntosh:

Not really. So they don’t operate the same way as a regular computer. And No. I’m gonna try and hold on.

[00:23:02] Kenshin:

They they do a lot of computations, much more computations than a normal computer. Right? It’s like processes that normal computer would take, like, a thousand years and they can’t do in a few minutes. Something like that. So they I don’t know how they’re built, but they can do a lot more computations.

So essentially how they would break cryptography is brute force it, not really break it as any other way, but because they can do so much more computations that can brute force it

[00:23:33] McIntosh:

in a shorter time. I’m gonna read you what this says, and this is probably as good an explanation as any. And, unfortunately, it may leave you kind of you may you still may not understand, and that’s okay. But just to give you an idea, with a regular computer, we use what’s called binary. It’s one or zero. That’s how everything is expressed fundamentally in that. Your process your information is actually processed sequentially. It may not seem that way, but that’s actually what happens through what are called logic gates in your, CPU.

It follows deterministic rules, same input. It’s always gonna give the same output. Somebody needs to tell that to AI. Anyways and it excels as everyday tasks like browsing calculations and running apps, the kind of things that we use computers for. Quantum computers, on the other hand, they use what are called qubits, which means quantum bits that can exist in superposition. They can either represent zero one or both all at the same time, which is kind of wild. In fact, it’s really crazy. They can process many different possibilities in parallel. They can leverage what they call quantum entanglement where qubits become correlated.

So measuring one instantly affects others, and they use what’s called quantum interference to amplify correct answers and cancel out wrong answers, which sounds highly like something that they would do in an LLM, which gives me great hope that it will never actually get anywhere because, man, actually yeah. So one of the things in reading through the literature about this as we were preparing, yes, they have quantum computers right now. They’re very, very expensive. Like, 15 to $4,050,000,000 dollars is what I saw. And they’re also compared to what they need to be, they’re very, very slow. They’re they they measure this. There’s a measurement for it. What was it called? I think I have it in our notes, of the speed.

There it is. But what yeah. Here it is. Okay. So they measure they measure this in cubits. What those cubits that I was talking about. They have error rates currently of about point one to 1% per operation, which is a huge amount. You need 1,000, physical cubits to make one logical qubit because you have to deal with all of this error correction and everything. That’s not what I understood. So when you say, well, this server generates a thousand qubits, that’s actually really only one logical cubit, which isn’t very much. These machines have to be cooled down to almost absolute zero, which is extremely cold, and it makes it extremely expensive.

They’re also not fault tolerant for, like, vibrations even or magnetism. So they have to do a lot of shielding, vibrations, isolation, magnetic shielding, and, of course, the refrigeration as well. The only things they can actually do right now are very, very small algorithms. They can’t do any real world cryptography breaking or cryptography or whatever yet. Okay? Right now, these machines that are so expensive are only a thousand, physical cubits, which means literally one logical cubit. To do what we’re talking about, it’s going to take many, many times, more of these.

Okay? The comparisons that I saw were things like, well, we’re at the Wright Brothers stage of airplanes, and you literally need, like, a seven forty seven type plane in order to break the current cryptography. Okay? So, again, anybody who says that it’s a threat right now, that is hype. It is not true. And we do not know when we will get there, if ever. So one good well, one good and bad thing about Bitcoin is it moves very slowly. There are proposed algorithms to solve these problems. So essentially, if a quantum computer could break the current algorithm, say the SHA two fifty six algorithm for mining, you would wanna replace it with something that’s more resistant.

We have the mathematicians have created these algorithms. They’re already available. People are basically sitting around arguing about which one we should use and the downsides of this one versus that one and so on and so forth before these get implemented. And we may be years from that implementation, but, frankly, I’m perfectly comfortable with that. I don’t know about you, but I would much rather this be a slow process than let’s rush something in. Sorry. I didn’t mean to take over. But Yeah.

[00:29:03] Kenshin:

And and inevitably, it’s gonna be slow even to get a consensus on what solution we implement, like the the Segwit example.

Segwit took a few years to implement on Bitcoin, and and that was not that dramatic of a change, let’s say. So this will take years just to get the right solution and agree and get consensus and

[00:29:32] McIntosh:

maybe have a fork of some sort. Yeah. My suspicion is we’ll spend the next few years, figuring out what to do, and then we’ll sit on it. And as soon as the computing gets quantum computing gets to the point where, you know, it’s kind of sort of starting to appear to be potentially a threat. They’ll do some type of soft fork or hard fork, whatever they have to do with just that.

We’re not gonna, you know, include a bunch of junk into this fork. It’s simply gonna be we gotta replace, if it’s mining, the SHA two fifty six algorithm with, you know, q two fifty six. I have no idea what they’re gonna call it, but whatever the new algorithm is. Right?

[00:30:26] Kenshin:

Yeah. And the there is already a beep three sixty proposal.

[00:30:32] McIntosh:

So and, actually, I did not look up. When was that one created? Do you know? Let me look that up. BIP 360. Which one? Let me see when that was actually proposed. What it why does it not say? Yeah. And and this is about

[00:30:50] Kenshin:

once you look it up, this is BIP three sixty is a quantum resistant Bitcoin improvement proposal, that provides a flexible framework for protecting Bitcoin against quantum attacks.

And this is a signature scheme agnostic Okay. Solution. So it’s not a specific, scheme. So it says it doesn’t look Bitcoin into one specific post quantum algorithm. Can accommodate various, cryptographic schemes, both the latest based and the hash based. And those two are the ones that they’re talking in this research paper. Late

[00:31:35] McIntosh:

lattice based and hash based. The stuff that I read seems to indicate that they don’t think that mining is actually gonna be a, an issue. The SHA two fifty six is actually reasonably secure for this. It’s actually the kind of the wallet address.

Right? The the the cryptography that’s used to to encrypt that. BIP three sixty, was actually only released in December, so 2024. I thought it was older than that. But yeah. So this is probably one of I would assume, that will be several proposals that will be viewed over the next few years, discussed ad nauseam on the mailing list. And then at some point, it will at least be and this is actually a soft fork, by the way. At least that’s what it says. You know, this will be included Yeah. As an option. So this actually brings up some kind of almost philosophical things. How do we deal with, well, let’s get the obvious one, Satoshi’s Bitcoin.

Right? So there’s 1.1 or 1,000,000, whatever it is, Bitcoin sitting in an an older wallet address that everybody knows about it. Everybody’s aware of it. He left it. He’s not touched it for, you know, more than ten years, I guess, at this point.

[00:33:05] Kenshin:

Yeah. And before before that, I mean, because for us that we have, let’s say, our our wallets, our addresses, etcetera. So for us, there’s the the consequence of all this. Once Bitcoin implements a quantum resistant, scheme, we just move the Bitcoin from our addresses to a new address that is is resistant to those attacks. And that’s it. Nothing else to do. Nothing to worry about.

But what you’re start to say is what happens to those coins Right. That are lost or abandoned or locked forever, and no one will move them and remain in those addresses that are

[00:33:52] McIntosh:

vulnerable to quantum attacks? Kenshin, I’m not moving mine. I only have 500 stoshis in there. There’s no way that they’re gonna use one of these they’re not gonna use the supercomputer to break that. Not gonna happen.

[00:34:07] Kenshin:

Yeah. Yeah. Me neither. I mean, there is no point to move something that you don’t have. Right? But yeah. So it is

[00:34:14] McIntosh:

these, you know, lost, whatever you wanna call it, coins.

How do we deal with those? Do we mark them somehow and then mark them unusable if they show up in circulation? That’s probably been proposed. I don’t know offhand. Do we just leave them? Do we just let, you know, the whoever creates the clever program that breaks these gather those up? I think it’s a fairly substantial in total, it’s, like, less than 2,000,000, but it’s close to 2,000,000, if I remember correctly, of these, addresses that are lost and whatever. Point seven. That’s a lot of Bitcoin in one place.

[00:35:02] Kenshin:

Yeah.

So there are those two camps. They call it the burn it or steal it type of camp. So burn it would essentially make those Bitcoins unspendable, but it would require some sort of Hard fork, or soft fork? Hard fork, I think. Migration sort of periods. And and it says here, unmoved Bitcoin would be become unspendable after this migration period. So I think no one would even be able to get it in any way because it would be unspendable. And then and then there is the other account that says do nothing,

[00:35:50] McIntosh:

and then it’s fair game if those someone gets them, they get them. You know, it’s interesting. If something sits there let’s say it sits there for twenty years and it’s never moved, and we assume that it’s unspendable, and we mark it as so we burn it, so to speak.

So now we go for and let’s say there’s 2,000,000 of those. Now we go from 21,000,000 to 19,000,000 Bitcoin, which that certainly should make everyone’s price go up and at least in the long run. Right? The price of Bitcoin, I should say. Now on the other hand, I promise you if Satoshi’s Bitcoin were to move today, even if it didn’t get spent, it just moved. The world would freak out. Yeah. And the price of Bitcoin would crash probably $2,030,000 dollars in the space of a few minutes.

[00:37:01] Kenshin:

Yeah. So so, essentially, what you say, and I agree, is that we’re pretending like there is 19,000,000, basically.

[00:37:09] McIntosh:

But I don’t think we do because we all talk about 21,000,000, and I’m just as guilty of this as anyone because that’s how many are being made, 21,000,000 Bitcoin. I I typically don’t think about the fact that there’s roughly 2,000,000 that are lost or not moving or whatever. It doesn’t enter into my calculations.

[00:37:33] Kenshin:

The economists they’re not in circulation.

[00:37:36] McIntosh:

Well, okay. Fair point. I guess that means that it affects the price. Yeah. No. It does. You’re right. You’re right. Gosh. What kind of Austrian economics guy do you think I am?

I should know that.

[00:37:52] Kenshin:

You’re right. Yeah. They’re not part of the supply and demand every day. A 100%.

[00:37:58] McIntosh:

I I had a Keynesian moment there. I’m sorry. I’ll do my penance after we get done.

[00:38:07] Kenshin:

Yeah. Another good, quote or good. I don’t know if it’s good, but it’s it’s it’s interesting to me. I didn’t think of it that way. The the camp that says do nothing, they they say, like, it’s like lost coins or unclaimed property. Yes. So then essentially, you’re free to claim unclaimed property in sort of way. I don’t know if I agree, but I I think it’s an interesting perspective because, of course, someone had those coins. Yeah.

[00:38:40] McIntosh:

To be honest, I don’t think it’s fair.

I’m I’m I’ve I’ve not thought this through, so I kinda wanna think about this for just a second. But I don’t feel like it’s fair that someone with a quantum computer can crack Yeah. Some coins that have been laying there and take them when, for example, me as a miner, I have no ability to do that, much less a node runner. It almost seems like those should be recycled somehow. And I’m I’m not saying that’s possible. I have no idea. I don’t think offhand, I can’t think of an easy way to do that, certainly. But take those 2,000,000 coins and kind of recycle them back into the, to the pros the mining process.

I I don’t know. It would be nice if they were available. It would be nice if they were available. I mean, I know that, you know, we can we can use Mila Satoshis, for example. We got a long way to go for that, but I think one day maybe we’re gonna want those 2,000,000 plus tokens.

[00:39:47] Kenshin:

I don’t know. Yeah. I mean, that’s a big topic. I mean, they were talking about this in the summit. One person says, the lightning network pioneer, Tatkia Trivia said, who wants to be the person to push the button the button to merge the code to steal Satoshi’s

[00:40:09] McIntosh:

coins? You know, it’s, yeah. I saw that quote.

Yeah. I don’t know. I feel like we either need to distribute it to the common good, so to speak, and which, to me, I guess, the fairest way is through remining it essentially. And I have no idea how we would do that. I’m please don’t. I’m not saying we do this. Oh, no. Or somehow just mark them completely dead. Like, you cannot spend those like, burn them, essentially, which we we have proposals. Yeah. Exactly. Burn them.

[00:40:43] Kenshin:

Yeah.

[00:40:45] McIntosh:

But what about the poor dude that’s I guess he gave up, but, you know, the dude trying to find his hard drive with the thousands of Bitcoin on it. You know?

I mean, what happens if he suddenly found it and his girlfriend didn’t throw it out and they broke up for nothing? And now he’s a billionaire Except, no, we burned those. Sorry. I don’t know. Okay. We’re not solving all the world’s problems here. I did wanna make everyone aware of what was going on in quantum computing and how that intersects with Bitcoin. So the short version is don’t worry about it. You know, be aware of it, just like a lot of things, but don’t don’t sweat it. There are people who are talking about it, who are deeply interested in this.

They feel like it’s five to twenty years off. I don’t see how five years five years on vacation. Yeah, that that’s, yeah, There are plans in effect. So you just keep doing your thing, and you continue to be sovereign and stack those sets. And and don’t worry about this.

[00:42:02] Kenshin:

Yeah. And it’s technically already we know how to solve this issue. It’s just to put all the pieces together and and do it. Terrific. And and one more thing one more thing, how this would also impact Bitcoin once we have a solution like that. Most probably any of those solutions would increase the size of the transactions. So from 10 from 10 x to 38 x Yeah. The transactions would I guess it makes sense. They’re obviously, they’re more

[00:42:33] McIntosh:

complex computations or whatever, so it does make sense. But 10 to 30 whatever x is a lot.

That’s a big increase. So, you know, why are we worried about it, man? They’re throwing cat pictures on the main net. So

[00:42:49] Kenshin:

Yeah.

[00:42:51] McIntosh:

So some more things might need to change if that’s the case. Alright. Right. We’ll see how But we do have plenty of time. So Yeah. We do. Hey, guys. I hope you took last week’s episode in the spirit that we offered it. We obviously are looking to do some changes here, and you will see those coming over the next few months, as we really try and secure the long term viability of this podcast, we wanna make sure it makes sense to, you know, keep going forward. That being said, Kenshin, we didn’t have any supporters this week. No.

[00:43:32] Kenshin:

Okay. I have a question. I have a question before we move on to the topic. Okay. What the audience think should vulnerable coins be burned or left alone?

[00:43:46] McIntosh:

Is that gonna be our question of the week? Yeah. Okay. Should vulnerable coins be burned or left alone? Great. And it’ll be fifty fifty, and we won’t know anything. But no. I am curious to know what you guys, think about that. You can you can boost us on a podcasting two point o app and let us know. You can post on our Nostr setup as well. By the way, I think Nostr is something that we’re kind of gonna be I don’t wanna say promoting more, but we’re gonna be leaning into.

I don’t think Nostr is the answer to everything, but as a decentralized social media slash Swiss army knife platform, I think it’s very useful, and I would love to see more people involved in that.

[00:44:39] Kenshin:

Yeah. And I would like to know what people are using for Nostril nowadays. I’m starting to get frustrated with, Amethyst and with Primal. Is there any other, app people use? Yep. I mean, Wackehone and what’s the other one? Yeah. There are a few. Well, Domas,

[00:45:01] McIntosh:

but you you that’s iOS.

[00:45:04] Kenshin:

Why?

[00:45:05] McIntosh:

What’s your name? I know. Dirty old iOS. Alright. Bitcoin, software updates. I didn’t really have anything specific this week. So, Bitcoin price at time of recording, 104,436 US dollars, cookbooks, greenbacks, Fiat, whatever.

[00:45:30] Kenshin:

€90,800.

[00:45:32] McIntosh:

Okay. We really gotta work on that. There’s gotta be something besides euros. I don’t know. Alright. Digital euros. Digital digital euros. Our price last November 5, $69,359, which means we’re up almost exactly 50%. Go ahead and do the gold there, sir.

[00:45:57] Kenshin:

Gold is our market cap for Bitcoin, 2,100,000,000,000.0. Gold’s market cap, 27.6. Bitcoin versus gold is at 7.5%.

[00:46:09] McIntosh:

Okay. Both of them kind of stalled out, and that’s kind of by the way, I didn’t mention this, but in case you don’t check the price constantly like certain of us do. Not you. I’m not talking about you. It’s it’s me Mhmm. Just in case we’re unclear on that.

The price did dip. Of course, we’re down from last week. We actually, yesterday, dropped to just below a 100,000. And if you remember, I said, if we break that 100,000, and and I do believe I specified, you know, we might dip below it briefly. But, like, if we stay down below there for a few hours or half a day or a day, certainly, if we close below that, I could definitely see going down. But we held. We went down to, like, 99,000, and then we went down very briefly to, like, 98,900 or something. And then jumped back up above a 100, and now we’re plowing ahead. We’re at a 104. So that’s not advice, certainly.

As we always say here at Stosche’s Web, your best bet is simply to DCA. Just set up strike, do a daily or a weekly buy of what you’re committed to at your level of understanding of Bitcoin, and carry on.

[00:47:36] Kenshin:

You you know what I find fascinating? Is we couldn’t imagine a 100 k Bitcoin.

[00:47:43] McIntosh:

And And now we see a 100 k and we think, oh, that’s that’s a buy opportunity. Yeah. Yeah. It’s so low. Exactly. It’s really it’s the deep 100 k. There’s like a psychology term for that, but I don’t know what it is. So it’s I don’t know. The mempool, remains low. 40,000 unprocessed transactions, one SAP per vbyte for those transactions, and about a 116 megabytes.

Okay. Before we wrap up, you got anything else, Kenshin?

[00:48:19] Kenshin:

Yeah. A bit for European news. I saw Yes. Relay. It’s a European exchange and wallet up in Europe, and they got their MICA, license. Okay. One of the first companies to get their MICA license. You talked about MICA months ago, if I’m not mistaken. Yeah. Yeah. It’s it’s this that introduced in the end of, December. The markets in cryptoassets Yes. This weird name that Europe has implemented to very strict regulations for cryptocurrencies. And so really want us to get their their license, which means they are free to do business basically in Europe, without, yeah, fulfilling all the regulations.

I don’t know if that’s good or bad. I know a lot of Bitcoin businesses closed down when this came up. Mhmm. So I don’t know if that will require more KYC. That’s that’s what I mean. I don’t know if it’s good. But it it’s good in terms that okay. Some companies, you can still use them now in this regulatory thing without feeling that you’re doing something illegal or come back to you. But, I don’t know what they had to do to comply. And I also know days later, Revolut also, announced, that they also got their MyCar, license. So Okay. Good, but I don’t know. Neutral. We’ll see. I’m gonna talk about Semrai Wallet for just a minute.

[00:49:59] McIntosh:

I would like you to look at that second link as well because it’s an EU thing. I don’t know if you saw that, but, there’s a second thing there. So Samurai Wallet is, the developers got in trouble with the US government a while ago. It’s not something we’ve really talked about. But, basically, on Twitter, on social media, these guys are out there making statements that did not make the government happy. They were talking about, hey, use our service. Look, this is not an exact quote, but it it got really close to this kind of thing. Hey, you money launderers should use our service. Not what you want to be saying in public. I believe in the right to privacy in my funds, but you are just inciting the government at that point.

And it was not wise, And now the government has come down on them. We can make arguments about code of speech and freedom of speech, and, yes, that’s all true. But they’re in a lot of trouble. The government is seeking the maximum sentence for them. I guess we will find out, and that would be five years in prison. I guess we’ll be finding out about that soon. But one of the things that the prosecutors brought up in this trial, and I verified it to make sure I have a link to The Rage, which is a legitimate journalistic website. I know the name is stupid, but whatever.

I don’t always agree with them, certainly, but the information is there, and this is not actually where I heard about it in the first place. Basically, the samurai system, which includes a CoinJoin privacy tool. If I see anything wrong, Kenshin, that you know, please stop me. But, you know Yeah. As part of that, they were they they say it was necessary to gather xPubs, which are basically all the information about your wallets, your transactions, everything. And they would only keep them for a short and this was necessary for the coin joint itself. And then they would keep them for a short period of time, and they would discard them.

The prosecutor is saying, essentially, that this is not the case. So they have people’s information. It sounds like that I would not want them to have my ex pub. I’ll tell you that. So ladies and gentlemen, this is an example of a centralized service. Now since all this happened, they’ve made changes. I don’t know. They’ve done some things, to try and decentralize it. But the way that they had it set up, it was a centralized service that was dependent upon two people, and they both got in trouble. And, in my opinion, this was not a good setup. What are your thoughts, Kenshin? I know you haven’t followed this very closely, but

[00:53:15] Kenshin:

No. Every time somewhere it comes up, I’ll weirdly, I was not so interested because I I never used their services or their apps.

But, yeah, leaking expub, I I I mean, XPubs are really important because if if it leaks, it means all your addresses can be Yes. Tracked. All your wallets. I mean, I have a wallet. I have a XPub that has sub wallets. I mean, it’s a lot of address in there. So it’s a huge, huge issue. So, yeah, it’s not it’s not good in that way. This is

[00:53:56] McIntosh:

something to think about. This was not an ideal situation. And in fact, I believe if these two guys had just kept their mouth shut, they would have been fine, first of all. You know, look, you can argue very easily. Freedom of speech, blah, blah, blah. I get it. You’re right. But when you make the government mad, they are backed by all the power of the government, which in this case is really well funded.

And they’ll just smash you like a little bug on a windshield. And you need to think about that. So these guys were, from all accounts that I’ve seen, they were making a lot of money off of the service, and they got made an example of. They should have had all of this be just open source, anonymous, out there, available, decentralized, vetted. And I’m sure if this podcast got to a wide enough audience, there would be some samurai people out there going, no, no, no. You’ve got it all wrong. And I may have some details wrong, and I’m sorry if I do. But an expub is not something you wanna play with. You need to be very careful about that. It is the fundamental building block of your addresses and all of that.

And that data just does not need to be out there available for everyone. That’s just my opinion. Yeah. Your mileage may vary. The

[00:55:33] Kenshin:

the there were there are services that you give the expub willingly where when you buy Bitcoin, they automatically send it to your next empty address. So expubs can be used in a good way. You still need to be mindful that

[00:55:53] McIntosh:

if it leaks. Yeah. Yeah. Except they’ve if they keep them, and you have no proof of that. That’s the problem. You are trusting people who can be not trustworthy or get in trouble as in this case. Maybe these two guys, and I don’t know them.

Maybe they’re perfectly trustworthy, But the government came down on them and grabbed their computers, and now those are you know? So there you go. But should you trust, though? Well, it’s no. You should not. I but I literally I am I’m I don’t know these people. They could be extremely trustworthy, but, yes, you’re correct. That doesn’t mean you should still trust them simply because you don’t know what will happen to them. Enough about that. There did you grab that third one? Or yeah. Well, the third one. The second link.

[00:56:49] Kenshin:

Yeah. Yeah. Did you wanna talk about that?

Yes. The chat control. Yes. The chat control. Yeah. That’s very interesting. Came up, a few days ago. So we discussed before that in EU, they were trying to push this chat control in quotes and for for, basically to to how do we say? Chase against child, and Right. Sexual abuse. Or it was called child sexual abuse regulation, CSAR. And this essentially wanted to make all private communications, without encryption. So, basically, signal would not be allowed to have encryption in WhatsApp and things like that. So they would be able to snoop into all our conversations at any moment. Yeah. Right.

[00:57:47] McIntosh:

Or a backdoor. Right? A government mandated backdoor. So, oh, you peons can have encryption so you can’t see each other’s communications, but we need a backdoor so that we can see everything.

[00:58:02] Kenshin:

Yeah. So they would require tech companies to scan all private messages, including Looking for chats. You know, stuff,

[00:58:10] McIntosh:

obviously nasty dirty stuff, but there’s always side effects to this stuff.

[00:58:19] Kenshin:

Yeah. And even AI powered filters they would put to search automatically

[00:58:24] McIntosh:

for child abuse

[00:58:27] Kenshin:

abuse. Sorry. Yeah. It’s similar to a story I remember where a father had his photos uploaded to Google Photos, and his whole Google account was was, blocked and went to police. All the information went to police because he had photos of his Right. Son in the bus Right. Or something like that.

So and he got in big trouble because of that. It’s like, it’s my son.

[00:58:57] McIntosh:

It’s like One of my kids used to fall asleep because he worked so hard. He was only a kid. He was very young, and he would work very hard helping us. We were doing a construction project. He was literally three and four years old at the time. Okay? And I’m not exaggerating. He would work with us all day, at the level that he could. But, anyways, because of that, like, he would fall asleep while we were eating lunch, laying over the table. He would fall asleep in the most random positions, and we would take pictures of him. And I don’t know how many times he fell asleep in the bath at night because he was so tired.

Right? And I’m sure there’s at least one picture, and it was not we’re not showing anything or anything like that. But, obviously, he’s naked. He’s in the bath. And, you know, if they were to grab a hold of that, they could accuse me of the same thing. And it’s just so maddening. Okay. Yes. So thankfully,

[01:00:05] Kenshin:

that hasn’t passed, and it was the decisive vote, was Germany’s. So I think all the European Union members voted. Some of them were undecided, unfortunately. I think 12 were supporting it and eight opposed it, and they needed 15 to get a majority.

But Germany was a decisive vote, and they said that this would raise constitutional concerns. Yeah. There was a a quote from the German Federal Justice Minister, Stephanie Hubig, and she said random chat monitoring must be taboo in a constitutional state. Private communication must never be placed under general suspicion.

[01:00:56] McIntosh:

Right. So that’s good. But Gee, that sounds like our, what is it? The First Amendment?

[01:01:02] Kenshin:

Yeah. But they took a long time to come to this. So I don’t know. Yeah. It’s amazing.

[01:01:07] McIntosh:

I I don’t know, man. But I’m glad it didn’t pass Yeah. Or at least that part.

Alright. Great. Okay. Yeah. Sorry. I skipped the news. I was so anxious to move on. Alright. Do you have anything else you wanna talk about before we wrap up? No. Anything you wanna say about this change? I I know it’s I I don’t wanna harp on this, but it it is gonna be a change. Oh, I have one thing I’d like to say. One of the things that we have discovered as we have kind of pawed through our data trying to figure out how we can kind of move forward. I have come to you a number almost every week saying, hey. The best way for you to support us, like, write a review. Right? Tell a friend. Well, that’s usually what I would say. But another way to do it would be write a review, whether that’s on Fountain or one of these other platforms.

I have discovered in looking at our data that literally only 5% of our listeners are listening on Apple Podcasts. And in four years, we’ve only had two reviews on Apple Podcasts, and they’re both five star reviews. Thank you very much to whoever that was that did that. But what I would respectfully come to you and ask is, write us a review. And I would prefer if I could ask this favor of you to write it on Apple Podcasts. I am not telling you what to write, and I’m not telling you to give us a five star review. If you don’t think we’re worth it, then you give us an honest review.

But that alone will help us. Is that good? Yeah.

[01:02:50] Kenshin:

Great.

[01:02:51] McIntosh:

And Satoshi’s Plebs is a value for value podcast, supporting podcast podcasting two point o. You can check out the apps for, podcasting two point o over at podcastapps.com, and you support independent Bitcoin media by using those apps. If you’d like our content just like I do every week, I would tell you, I would love it if you would tell your friends about the podcast and write us a review. Thank you. That is the best way for us to grow, and we do need to grow, by the way. It is actually quite important that we grow. We cannot well, thank you.

This week’s music is The Jetsons by Joe Martin. Any boost for streaming of sats during that song will go straight to the artist.

[01:03:41] Kenshin:

Yes. So thank you for being here. We hope this has been helpful, and we would love to hear from you. Find all our contact info at satoshis dash plebs dot com. Stay humble. Do see those ads, and have a great weekend.

[01:03:57] McIntosh:

Sorry. We’ll talk to y’all soon.

[01:03:59] Kenshin:

Bye bye