Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Bitcoin is anti Fragile. It secures $2 trillion worth of value currently and there's a huge monetary incentive to maintain that security.
And there's a number of very intelligent people who are working on that problem of just making sure that bitcoin is quantum resistant. There might be a period of time where there's like, you know, a transitionary period that could be quite, you know, stressful. But once that's done, then we've hardened Bitcoin, you know, for the foreseeable future.
[00:00:48] Speaker B: What is up guys? Welcome back to Bitcoin Audible I am. Guys, Juan, the guy who has read more about Bitcoin than anybody else. You know, we've got a chat episode today. We've got a conversation sitting down with Hunter Beast and the intention was mostly just to talk about quantum stuff because they have put together bip360 basically as a framing for how to think about and so that, so that we basically have a plan. So there is a plan in place if the quantum problem ever becomes a problem. And I think that's a perfectly reasonable perspective to have on it is that well, we shouldn't have nothing because there is some sort of risk and we don't know the timeline, et cetera, et cetera. And we get into kind of all of that in weighing the the risks versus how big of an issue is this? Should we be worried about it? And we also kind of get into the nitty and gritty of what those trade offs and what the methods of upgrading and things like what our options even are, what quantum computing even is, multi dimensions angels and demons. And of course why wouldn't you round it out with aliens? So this is gonna be a good one and a shout out real quick to Fold for sponsoring the show, for being huge supporters and being just a fantastic way to stack sats. Fold is literally my banking and it is the way to stack. If you have a traditional crappy normal fiat bank. If you literally just switch this over to Fold and earn sats on everything that you do, the amount of rewards that you can get and bitcoin that you can save, that you can literally withdraw anytime into your self custody, you should really consider it. If you haven't and you can get 20,000 sats using my referral code link will be right there in the show notes. But then you should also check out the BitKit wallet. There are very few apps and wallets that have a combined self custodial on chain and lightning interface. And especially one that actually makes it really simple, intuitive and just Like a really clean UI. BitKit has that. BitKit is fantastic with that. Their design is phenomenal. But in addition, they also have little live widgets for just like news items. And the bitcoin price, that's actually one of the ones that I use. I, I find myself opening it just to check the bitcoin price on my little widget. But it's a great wallet for everyday use on mobile and if you haven't checked it out, you definitely should. And you know what? I'll have my public key in the show notes so you can add me, add me as a contact. But with that, let's get into today's conversation with Hunter Beast, talking all about quantum computing and how to think about the risk and how to prepar for the inevitable one day in which all cryptography has a shelf life and we should expect that it will be broken. And what's the framework for having bitcoin survive that next hundred years? And then of course, when you go down the quantum rabbit hole, you inevitably have to talk about angels, demons and aliens. So buckle up. This is Aliens, Demons and Quantum Cryptography with Hunter Beast.
All right, welcome back. Let's get into this. Hunter Beast, welcome to the show. This is a topic, we'll have a bunch of things to talk about, but in particular, quantum stuff is something that is probably one of the most frustrating topics to me.
And I think a lot of people talk about it who don't know what they're talking about.
Both sides, like just, yeah, like all over the place. Like people have no idea one way or the other, but they're certain it's the end of the world and they're certain it's nothing. So yeah, there's a lot of very.
[00:04:49] Speaker A: Strong opinions on it.
[00:04:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
So let's start with introduce yourself. You basically a lot of this will be about, you know, the bit that you wrote about quantum cryptography. And I am curious, your just like we just mentioned, is it your background, you know, what kind of led you to the whole quantum thing? Why are you interested in bitcoin in relation to that, etc. Etc.
[00:05:16] Speaker A: Yeah, so I started out like kind of on the east side in 2017 because I live in Denver and it's, it's just kind of like the thing here. At least it was during the time. And in 2021, I did myself the favor of reading the bitcoin standard and that.
[00:05:43] Speaker B: That'll do it. That'll do it.
[00:05:45] Speaker A: Yeah. Like if you like read it with an open mind and you're just like Intellectually honest with yourself. Like, you know, it's like a primer, you know, it gets you up to speed with that rabbit hole. And so I found it very valuable. And yeah, after that, it was like I realized I needed to dedicate myself to making Bitcoin a thing.
I felt it's one of the biggest problems that we could ever spend our time solving on, and we have a limited time on this earth. And so if I'm.
I could be working on. I've worked for Silicon Valley for much of my tech career. Worked on databases and things like that. And it's funny, when I first saw Bitcoin, maybe 2013 or so, I first heard about it, I just thought it was this incredibly inefficient database because I had a background in databases. And so I just thought it kind of is, though. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, it is, it is.
And so I wasn't wrong, but I. I also was like a bit of a socialist at the kind at the time, so I just didn't understand what money was. Yeah, like a lot of socialists don't understand the value of money, like what it. What, what role it plays in society. You know, like solving what Lynn Alden calls the. The coincidence of wants. Right.
[00:07:16] Speaker B: Mm.
[00:07:16] Speaker A: And so one thing that I focused on early on was the RGB project.
Yeah, I found that to be super inspiring just because their ambition is to add smart contracts to Bitcoin without needing to make any changes to it at layer one. And it basically just puts a smart contract on a utxo, and wherever you spend that utxo, it updates the contract. And so it's all off chain and peer to peer. And like, your, Your wallet is basically doing the accounting work that is normally being done by, say, EVM or something. And so, yeah, I thought that was like, really clever design when I understood it. And so I spent a good amount of time, like, working with Dr. Olofsky and people associated with him, and that was a lot of fun. Have you, have you interviewed Dr. Olofski, by the way?
[00:08:20] Speaker B: No, I don't believe I have.
[00:08:21] Speaker A: He is an amazing guy. You definitely should, like, consider.
[00:08:25] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll put that on my list.
[00:08:28] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's great.
And then I spent about two and a half years of my life trying to make RGB a reality, and it took.
It took a little too long to finalize the protocol, so I overshot my Runway on that, so I had to go looking for honest work and I wound up working for Mara and so.
[00:09:00] Speaker B: Oh, the, the miners.
[00:09:01] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:09:02] Speaker B: Oh, sweet. Okay.
[00:09:03] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So they, they have a, they have a, like a, a team called Maritech and we're working on, on which is a sidechain project.
[00:09:17] Speaker B: I don't know about this.
[00:09:19] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, so it's like just another side chain. It's supposed to be like kind of multi chain. It has a, like an EVM chain that has Bitcoin as its unit of account and then it has kind of like a forked bitcoin core similar to Liquid that has a whole bunch of other features. And you're deciding what to put on it. But yeah, one of the things we're considering building into it is Qubit support, which we can go into.
[00:09:52] Speaker B: Oh, so you can basically prep the environment for that software or that signature type and stuff moving forward. Is it basically a federated thing?
[00:10:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:05] Speaker B: What's the bridge?
[00:10:06] Speaker A: Yeah, so it is a federated bridge. We're working on getting a diverse set of members to run the nodes. And what I'm working on right now actually is a technology called hsm. So it's a hardware security module and basically it's like this box where you can tell it generate some private keys for me and whenever I want you to sign for one of these keys, please like sign, sign like maybe for a public key, you know, and it'll, it'll keep the keys like kind of internal, like hermetic to the, to the box and it'll try to like keep these as secure as possible. This is like military grading security. And so hopefully we're, we're building with the best and that sort of thing.
[00:11:10] Speaker B: Dude, the, the like democratization I guess is the word. The. Just the accessibility and how things have changed in the HSM market, like because of Bitcoin, because of, I mean really the whole crypto environment, but just because of the way things are going is so crazy to me. And it's so bizarre that it has become like a consumer product. You know what I mean?
[00:11:36] Speaker A: Yeah, like type stuff. Yeah, I'm a big fan of the foundation passport. I have one I.
[00:11:44] Speaker B: That's a good one. I love a lot of hardware wallets, man. I am a. I'm. I got, I literally got my coal card.
[00:11:50] Speaker A: Oh yeah. Good stuff. Yeah, I played with cold card a little bit, but. But like the calculator form factor to me isn't as useful as the. Almost like a Nokia phone, you know, it's like, it has like a pad for. Oh, it's great. And also the camera and like QR scanning is just so good.
[00:12:14] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
No, Yeah. I love that. My. I haven't gotten to play much with because I've just been using my old cold cards. Um, I haven't gotten to play with the cold card Q much, but the best ones for the screen or the ones that I have that I really like for the screen are Keystone foundation, cold card Q and do I have another one? I really want one of the Spectre ones. I really want one of the Spectre, like, DIY ones. But I've never actually finally gone and gotten that kit and actually had time to. To work on it.
[00:12:44] Speaker A: But, yeah, foundation has a new one, actually that has, like, a bigger screen. Have you seen that one?
[00:12:49] Speaker B: Really? No.
[00:12:49] Speaker A: Yeah, it just came out, like, in the old December. Yeah, Middle of December. It came out. It. It. The only problem I have with it is it's. It's got Bluetooth on it. And I mean, some people. That's a plus.
[00:13:01] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:02] Speaker A: Minus. Yeah, yeah.
[00:13:03] Speaker B: I'm a. I'm a Bluetooth deactivator.
[00:13:05] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I slipped mine into, like, a Faraday cake sleeve, you know?
[00:13:11] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:13:13] Speaker A: Abundance of caution. There's.
[00:13:16] Speaker B: Well, sweet. I want to know about qubits.
[00:13:22] Speaker A: Yeah. So what we call qubit is with a capital B.
It's the name of the soft fork that we intend to push forward. And by we, I mean like my. My peers at Sermont Systems, which is a bitcoin initiative for quantum security. And we. We've just been working for the past half year on architecting and designing how, you know, we might add quantum cryptography, post quantum cryptography to Bitcoin in a practical. And how would you say.
[00:14:15] Speaker B: With the lowest barrier, the lowest disruption in how things work.
[00:14:21] Speaker A: The whole reason we want to have this is so that we have an actual plan for what they call Q day, right.
When we start to realize over time, it might take us a little bit of time to realize that bitcoin has been compromised from a quantum computer perspective, what they call a crypto, analytically relevant quantum computer. So once that's available, if that's available, if it ever works, you know, we want to just be able to have a plan we can set in an action that's concrete. And we're not starting from zero from scratch, right? From. From like, we're not scrambling, right. Like, ideally, we engage with the community, we engage with all the stakeholders, and we make sure that everybody's happy with the direction, at least, you know, happy enough. Right. So, like, the. The. There's always, like. It's all about compromises, obviously, because, like, Every like Bitcoin is just one thing and then there's like, you know, all the people who use it and need you need it and that sort of thing. And we obviously don't want to break Bitcoin, we don't want to introduce any kind of major attack vectors. And when you're dealing post quantum photography, one of the challenges is the signature verification time. And so if we make there's all these things we need to balance. For example, if it takes 10 to 100 times longer to validate a post quantum signature versus like Schnorr or ACDSA right then that is not only a potential attack vector but it's also an argument to not increase the witness or not increase the discount to those bytes to the signature bytes. So that's complicated. But then if you don't increase the discount then you dramatically lower Bitcoin's throughput, especially for these high value transactions that you might want to secure with at least two or three different post quantum cryptography algorithms. So there's so many factors to balance. And I did a deep dive into what a post quantum photography supporting transaction would look like and how many bytes it would take up. And I then modeled you know, potential increases in discounts for the signature data alone. And that resulted in about like maybe at most a thousand transactions per block.
And that's only using one PQC algorithm. And that's also assuming that each transaction is only one, one signature for one input. So basically like a thousand inputs signed into a block would be the most we could support with SegWit with if we were to store the signatures in a separate portion of the transaction we define as attestation in the, in the.
[00:17:48] Speaker B: BIP 360 basically do what SEGWIT did.
[00:17:51] Speaker A: The first time, do it again over except for Quantum with a substantially limited rule set.
[00:17:59] Speaker B: So like benefit would be that old nodes wouldn't really have to care about the signatures.
[00:18:04] Speaker A: Right. And also that is like the primary thinking behind that actually was that we didn't want to give a discount to anything that wasn't a post. Well that wasn't a signature a valid signature public key. And so we wanted to like take out the script requirement basically encode the public keys and signatures directly as fields within like a data structure that's very similar to the how the witness is encoded in the transaction.
It's just script can't go in there.
It's, it's like just very okay, so.
[00:18:47] Speaker B: It basically doesn't allow you to like it still just has to be a valid signature for it to be valid. And so you can't just like stick a whole bunch of JPEG in it to you. You have. It has to be, it has to be a signature relationship to the information in the transaction.
[00:19:06] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:19:07] Speaker B: Interesting. Okay.
[00:19:08] Speaker A: Yeah, that's why we call that the attestation, to distinguish it from the witness. And it allows us to play with, at least conceptually, with a larger discount for PQC signatures.
And so I, I modeled 16x and 64x discounts versus, like, you know, the 4x discount that we currently have with Segwit. And the discount only gets you so much.
There's kind of a transaction weight limit. You could set it to 100 and it still would only get us maybe 5,6000 transactions per block. And that's because we're discounting bytes, but we're not increasing the 1,000, you know, like 1 million. I should say like V byte.
[00:20:13] Speaker B: Yeah, the actual bite of transaction information. Of data. Yeah.
[00:20:17] Speaker A: Right. Well, not, not the actual bytes, but like, like what it, what it weighs into.
Okay. Okay, so like technically like the, the weight, like we, the. It's calculated by weight units. And so there's like 4 million weight units that can go into a block and some bytes count for more, some bytes count for less. Like things in bytes in the script pub key aren't discounted, but things, bytes that go into the witness are discounted.
So basically meaning that they count for one in the witness, but four in the script hub key.
[00:20:53] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:20:55] Speaker A: And so if we were to then discount like this, this again, we would say instead of 4 million, it would be like 16 million. And each byte in the witness would be, you know, worth four. And each byte in this, the script pub key would be worth 16, but.
[00:21:16] Speaker B: And then transaction data would be 1.
[00:21:18] Speaker A: What exactly? Attestation data. Exactly. And so, and if we did that, we would get maybe 3,000 transactions per block. And at like a maximum, if, which.
[00:21:31] Speaker B: Is about where we are, it makes sense that it would be roughly aligned. You get like 3,500, maybe 4,000 on a good day.
[00:21:37] Speaker A: Right, Exactly. I thought it was like a good balance between just keeping the witness discount and going like full hog 64, 128x discount. Right. That's essentially like the plan I would have for like the, the increased size of post quantum photography because the signatures and the keys are much larger, generally speaking, and they also take much longer to validate. And so there's another consideration is like, if we do increase the discount, then we at least for Those bytes, then we're discounting bytes that take longer to verify. And so we would then need to look into maybe acceleration. So one thing that I'm going to have some resources for is basically building a post quantum cryptography library for Bitcoin. And what signature algorithms we support are still up in the air.
We've outlined a few in the bip, but I'm starting to think that we should take that out because some of the signature albums I specified, like one of them for example, has this verification time that's like a hundred thousand times longer than ecdsa. Whoa. Yeah, but the benefit of it was that it would result in the signatures about 300 bytes long, which is like. Oh yeah, it's a huge improvement.
[00:23:33] Speaker B: There's a huge shift in storage versus.
[00:23:36] Speaker A: Various, like thousands of bytes. Yeah, thousands of bytes.
The trade off is computational complexity.
[00:23:42] Speaker B: So you're like running an AI model to get out.
[00:23:46] Speaker A: Well, so like what we were considering was like having GPU acceleration for signature verification.
Having like GPU accelerator, post quantum cartography could be like the future. Of course then you would need like an embedded GPU along with your CPU in any kind of node that might be validating these transactions. So like there's a lot of SBCs out there, small, small single board computers that are like, like, like the Raspberry PI that, that do include GPU in the SoC. And so making use of that or SIMD even could be like decent ways to accelerate signature verification in a way that plebs can still run their own notes and validate every signature and that sort of thing. The other consideration of course, with increasing the discount is like how many bytes actually go into each block. And so if I recall correctly, the actually let me just double check my math. I wrote an article on this, it's on X articles under my profile. It's called P2QRH, qubit slash, qubit chain growth rate calculations and yeah, sure, Qubit 16, what I called it, Qubit 16 is 10 megabyte blocks, 3,000 transactions per block, 500 gigabyte chain growth per year.
And that's like worst case scenario. Like, like, or maybe not worst case scenario. In many ways it's like that's if.
[00:25:33] Speaker B: It'S being totally utilized where like people.
[00:25:36] Speaker A: Are securing their transactions with post quantum photography. So like in many ways like that that's a good thing. But also like it's not always going to be necessary either. For example, you could for example like set a very high fee rate for your transaction and then like use classical cartography to secure it and then maybe take it privately to a miner optionally and have them mine that for you. Kind of like slipstream, if you heard of that for Mara.
But that way you're not revealing your public key went to the broader mempool and then when that gets mined you can actually mine your transactions pretty inexpensively.
So basically supporting classical cryptography still so long as like there's not a lot of like chain reorg activity and that sort of thing, then you should be relatively safe with smaller amounts. But like there's, it's all this like.
[00:26:48] Speaker B: I tend to immediately be afraid of the idea of out of band mining, but yeah, it's an interesting idea.
[00:26:55] Speaker A: Well like that's like that's essentially what QBIT is supposed to correct. Right? Like that like we can trust the mempool. Again, even if you do reveal your public keys to the mempool, they can't be.
[00:27:12] Speaker B: Oh, you mean, I guess specifically in the context of if it become, if it comes at risk, if it becomes a. Okay, gotcha.
[00:27:21] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so like you'd essentially like need to trust like a miner not to reveal your public keys to like you know, people outside of the mining pool essentially or, or people who are like, like ideally they trust everybody getting the block template.
And so yeah like there's, there's just so many like it's such a complex problem and we've thought through, you know, like we try to put like a good amount of that thought into the bip like to encapsulate because it is the first post quantum cryptography BIP out there that is like submitted to the BIPS repo and gone through review. It's been over six months that we've been going through like the discussion on the mailing list and discussions delving Bitcoin and additionally just review on the PR into BIPs. And so fortunately we did finally get our bip number, bip360. So it's a good nice little even number, easy to remember. And also oftentimes the representation of a qubit, like the fundamental unit of quantum computing is like is a circle and so they have different probabilities of collapsing into a 1 or 0 and there's also kind of like a rotation vector.
So it's, it's pretty like complicated stuff that I've, I've dive in, dived a little bit into that too. I've read a couple books in quantum computing. But the thing about quantum computing is that it's been theoretical for you know, ever since I Think it was Richard Feynman. Feynman. He came up with that. Yeah, yeah, he came up with that in like the 80s. And then in the 90s, a guy named Peter Shore just like kind of put the pieces together and he came up with an algorithm that could potentially derive a private key from a public key and just basically break elliptical cryptography. And they knew that could be a possibility as soon as like 1995 ends or so. And so this was kind of like known within cryptography circles even back then.
And there's like always the possibility that Satoshi knew about that and kept that as a consideration in how he designed the original bitcoin clients that were mining to pay to public key addresses because the early block rewards were defaulting to just public keys. And Satoshi said that you're supposed to mine different public keys or at least use different public keys for every transaction so that you have better privacy. But an additional, like, consideration is that if you, if you mine two separate public keys, then a quantum computer can't just like get this giant honeypot, right?
[00:31:12] Speaker B: There's actually can't just like get one key and then wipe you of everything. You have to do every single key one at a time, and you have to do it over and over again.
[00:31:20] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And there's about 34,000 paid to public key like addresses out there that contain about 2, almost 2 million bitcoin.
And that's. That's about like a 50 bitcoin on average.
Each.
[00:31:42] Speaker B: Yeah. I think it's interesting to think about it just in the context of, regardless of when it becomes a thing, is that mining will come back. There will literally be like, like shipwreck sort of like gold recovery with bitcoin potentially in, in trying to brute force these public keys potentially in a, in a world where we actually have some sort of at least semi general quantum type of computation. Now, since we have kind of a general picture of how one might add quantum signatures and stuff to bitcoin, and we kind of have the segwit past soft fork as kind of a framework for how we might do that and lay out the discount and, you know, that sort of thing, how, how we would treat it or, or just kind of like do your best on laying out your perspective as to how big of a concern this is, why you think it's a concern on whatever time frame you think it's a concern on. Like, I mean, I'm 50 years, I think. Yeah, absolutely. But I am constantly back and forth as to whether the next decade Is anything to even like think about. I, I certainly appreciate. I much rather have bip360, you know, like, I would much rather just have it. And I totally like, you know, this needs to be nuclear grade software. Like if there is some sort of an attack vector, we need to at least have something laid out. And I. That's really cool. And that's also why I like having you on this show is because I think that's a. No matter what the time frame is, I think starting that conversation is not a bad thing at all.
[00:33:27] Speaker A: Right, right. And that's, that's what we want to do is just start the conversation and have something we can like kind of rally around and discuss, like from a, like a, an actual practical implementation level perspective, like how we might do this. And so what are the details?
[00:33:46] Speaker B: You know?
[00:33:46] Speaker A: Right, exactly. Because there's a lot of details we have to think through.
[00:33:49] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, we can always be like, oh, yeah, we'll just remodel the basement when we get to that. But it's like, okay, where the room's going to go, where's the bathroom going to? It's like, do we have a plan for the basement when we get there?
[00:34:01] Speaker A: And there's so many considerations.
[00:34:06] Speaker B: But actually I'll give you an easy place to start. Well, I mean, you may not even have any like concrete details on it, but I'll give you a place to target. That I've been thinking about recently is did you ever find. Because I have like a hell of a time and I'll spend like an hour or two every single time I find like, okay, I'm going to do this. I'm going to figure out, you know, what this is. I'm going to get into the knit and gritting of this and I cannot find it almost universally. And it's so frustrating to me what exactly the computation was on this. Most recent. I think it was. Was it Google or whatever?
The most recent, like the new Willow.
[00:34:41] Speaker A: Willow.
[00:34:42] Speaker B: Willow. Thank you.
Do you know what the computation was and what degree of relationship and virtual qubits in all of that stuff?
What's your general overview of the status of Willow and its relationship to this problem?
[00:35:02] Speaker A: Yeah, so one of the major problems that quantum computers have is their susceptibility to noise. And that results in decoherence of the circuit, the quantum circuit. And it'll basically make you have to do the calculation over again.
What they did with Willow is they demonstrated that they have a better approach to quantum error correction and that, um, I think they even Used neural networks to like, ex. Like optimize that and which kind of makes sense because both are like kind of probabilities based.
[00:35:59] Speaker B: So basically, I mean, this might be the totally wrong way to think about it, but some sort of concept of using like a neural network to probabilistically take noise out of the equation. Kind of like a law of large numbers thing. It's like, okay, well, yeah, if, you know, if I invest in these 100 different things, of course there will be some that spike on the high end and spike on the low end. But if I invest in a hundred thousand of them, I might know almost exactly what the end result is going to be because I've leveled out my, my successes and losses through the law of large numbers. You know, like, so there's. Yeah, and I assume some sort of model like that.
[00:36:45] Speaker A: And what Google was able to do is they had basically one chip with 105 qubits and they were able to demonstrate, I think, just one logical qubit out of those 105 qubits, which physical qubits. And so with logical qubits, you're able to like, create a more reliable and like, useful quantum circuit. And so if it only takes 105 qubits to like, as like this, like, you know, building block, this like, fundamental building block.
[00:37:31] Speaker B: An abstraction of qubits on top of an abstraction. Yeah, yeah.
[00:37:35] Speaker A: It's almost like we went from like vacuum tubes to a transistor, but just one transistor. And so they, they showed us like, what a quantum version of a transistor would be like and how you'd interact with it. If they can scale that up, which, you know, we've seen other companies like IBM scale their qubits up to thousands and at least many hundreds. And then you, you see, you know, like silicon can, you know, silicon chips, they can, they can scale to many billions of transistors. So it's a possibility they might be able to scale this up, you know, within the next few years, maybe five years, I don't know.
But there's also the concern of, like, that's just what we know private industry is working on, like commercial industry. Right. Like, there's also defense contractors like Raytheon working on this problem as well. And I also know that Ink U Tel has invested in a few different quantum computing companies. And so for those who don't know, in Q Tel is the private arm of the CIA.
[00:38:50] Speaker B: I was about to say, they fund CIA.
[00:38:51] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, so there, there's definitely like some spooks who are looking into this problem as well and have been for a very long time. And so it's, it's hard to know what they have and there's the remote possibility that they already have that capability.
So there's a spectrum of, you know, like how concerned we should be. And my default personally is that whatever time frame we have, ideally it's as long as possible because there's still a lot of developments that need to happen in post quantum photography for us to have like, kind of like the optimal solution that's going to work for Bitcoin forever. Right. And so ideally Cubit is just the starting place. Right. And like we'll evolve it hopefully over the next few years into something practical that can be put into practice and, and adopts, you know, more reliable forms of post quantum tortography things. And ideally PQC goes through a lot more review than it already has been.
And any kind of libraries we come up with for the implementation of those PQC algorithms get a lot of eyes on it, especially as we secure trillions of dollars worth of value.
We need to be able to trust what we're like, maybe not trust, but have confidence in the direction and validity of these algorithms. And so that's one reason why I actually don't exclude SEC P256K1 signatures from the design of Qubit.
We actually call it hybrid cryptography. So it uses Bitcoin's current signature algorithm along with post crime photography. So it's, I don't think we'll ever really replace classical cryptography, but I'm not.
[00:41:22] Speaker B: Sure it might need to be augmented, so to speak.
[00:41:24] Speaker A: Exactly. With the signatures that go into the.
[00:41:27] Speaker B: Attestation and wouldn't change addresses at all. Right. Because they're just hashes.
[00:41:32] Speaker A: Well, so that is a good question. So the bip360 is actually for a new, what they call output type, which is like essentially an address. Like when it gets encoded it's, it's, it's when a script pub key like witness program is, is encoded, it's a, it looks like when it's encoded in baker32 it looks like BC1. And for native segwit it's BC1Q. For taproot it's BC1P. And for qubit we're hoping to introduce BC1R.
[00:42:17] Speaker B: Gotcha.
So it would just be another iteration of a new quote unquote witness type or address format. Excuse me.
[00:42:26] Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. And so, except they don't like me using the term address format for the bib. Like I've gotten a number of people like, no, this is an output type, but nobody calls it an output type.
[00:42:41] Speaker B: Shut up.
[00:42:43] Speaker A: I mean, like, only, only bitcoin devs call it an output type. You know, like, like people. Yeah, like users call it an address.
And that's one reason I wanted to be able to make the BIP easily understood by ordinary people. Just plebs trying to determine if this is something they should worry about or think about.
The way that BIP was originally written was just address concerns and like, you know, explain the motivation, rationale, that sort of thing.
Hopefully we still did a decent job at it, but there was just so much feedback that like, it's, it's a completely different document than what we started off with. So to answer your question, like, like, is it a hash of the public key?
In many cases, but in Taproot it's actually the public key.
[00:43:40] Speaker B: It's the public key itself.
[00:43:41] Speaker A: Yeah, which, that's a good point. Yeah, which is not good. And that's an argument for maybe another BIP that I've had under consideration of writing, ideally writing like one BIP at a time, but one of the bips I'm thinking of pushing forward as kind of maybe an alternative or intermediary between P2QRH, which is the address format that I'm introducing for QBIT, would be a P2 taproot hash. And so instead of quantum resistant hash, it's a taproot hash. And so it's basically like taproot but just instead of having just another layer of hash.
[00:44:31] Speaker B: So the pubsky is not visible.
[00:44:32] Speaker A: Exactly, yeah.
[00:44:34] Speaker B: And is there any, there's not even any reason why we couldn't have done that with Taproot from the get go. Right.
[00:44:41] Speaker A: Technically, the consideration there was that it was kind of nice to be able to include just like a 32 bytes public key in the script pub key. And then you'd include the Schnorr signature in the witness. Right. And that's 64 bytes. And so that's like a total of 48 weight or 48 V bytes because you discount the signature and the witness, but you don't discount the X only public key. And so that's 48V bytes. And so that's pretty good. But if you had to commit to a 32 bytes hash, you would need to also include the public key and the witness. And so that gets you.
[00:45:31] Speaker B: Your witness gets bigger because you have to.
[00:45:33] Speaker A: Slightly bigger.
So instead of being 48V bytes, it's more like 64V bytes. And that kind of cuts down on the narrative that taproot is more efficient. Is more. Yeah, is cheaper.
And so that might be one reason why they were like, we want the public key in the pokey. But and also being able to like disambiguate between, you know, a public key versus a public key hash is just, you know, it, you, you need, you need to have probably a separate appetite to like disambiguate. And so that's, that's why, you know, it might make sense to just introduce.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
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It's funny that you like mentioned that, you know, that could have been related to that Tapper thing, because I remember I've read conversations or whatever on the amount of arguments people have had about just like what to do with 20 extra bytes. It's like, how, how can we not put this burden on the network? And then the whole idea of cubits and, or, or quantum cryptography or whatever is that the signatures are just kil. Massive. You know, it's just like not even 20V bytes isn't even part of the conversation. Right, right.
So what's, I mean, aside from, you know, the discount and making a new signature, is this something that you expect to change? And maybe, maybe if, you know, kind of the history of quantum, quantum resistant cryptography is. Has there been consistent advancements in more efficient quantum cryptography?
[00:48:05] Speaker A: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. So like kind of historically, we started off with lamport signatures in 1977 and those are about 64 kilobytes in size.
And that's just a signature. I think the public key is 16 kilobytes as well. So yeah, both those together and and, and like Adam Back is all like.
[00:48:32] Speaker B: 10 of those in a block, man.
[00:48:34] Speaker A: Yeah, Adam Beck's like whole like answer to post crime photography is that we can already do Lampard signatures in Bitcoin and it just takes a lot of space. And so he was like, well just add an extension block or something and have those go there. And that's similar to Qubit, except Qubit. We want to introduce new novel cryptography that hasn't, that isn't just like 50 years old, you know.
And like not saying that like a lot of people like leopard signatures because they've had eyes on them for like 50 years.
[00:49:22] Speaker B: Because they're 50 years old. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[00:49:24] Speaker A: But they're also enormous. And then there's also something called a Winternet's one time signature and that came out a little later I think during the 80s. And that's much smaller, but it doesn't have as good security guarantees as newer signature algorithms like xmss.
And both of those I think are hash based.
There's also lattice based algorithms, those are a bit more recent. There's one called NTrue or NTRU. And then Falcon builds on top of NTRU and makes signature sizes more like.
Let's see here. Let me just. I don't want to be inaccurate. Yeah. So public key would be 1280 bytes and the signature is 1793 bytes. So total of 3178 bytes. Divide that by 16, you get a almost 200V byte attestation along with 140V bytes for the other parts of the transaction. So that would be a total of 338V bytes and you could fit about 3,000 of those per block.
[00:50:53] Speaker B: Yeah. Is that the one with the highest computation cost?
[00:50:56] Speaker A: It's, it's with. No, actually Falcon's not so bad.
[00:50:59] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:51:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
The highest computational cost one is called ski sign, which uses an even more novel form of photography called single super singular elliptic curve isogeny. And what that does is it puts elliptic curves at higher dimensions. So more than just like an X and Y coordinate, but more like X, Y, Z and. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so like the idea is to like make it much, much harder for quantum computers to solve that kind of problem.
[00:51:36] Speaker B: That's, it's put another exponent on it basically.
[00:51:38] Speaker A: Right, exactly. And so I mean, is that generally.
[00:51:42] Speaker B: The, the thinking behind quantum proof or quantum resistant cryptography is just like stick another, another layer of exponential on it and, and is that really what it is or is it like a fundamental change in the algorithm the reversal harder in a different way.
[00:52:03] Speaker A: Yeah. So not every algorithm, like, for example, ellipse cryptography, if we were to just double how many bits there are in SEC P. Right. Instead of it being 256k1, it's like 512k1, then that is only a little bit harder for a quantum computer to solve.
[00:52:26] Speaker B: It's not exponentially harder for a quantum computer, it's just exponentially bigger for a conventional computer.
[00:52:32] Speaker A: It's a very low polynomial number.
I generalize it in the bit, but I just say it's only maybe twice as hard.
But that's just like a generalization technically. But, yeah, just to put it in layman's terms.
But that said, like, there are other problems that are higher dimensional that allow you to make it, we believe, significantly more difficult for a quantum computer to solve. And like, there's been a theory as to how they work, and it's actually put out in the Google white paper, is that they, for Willow, was basically, quantum computers work in multiple dimensions or multiple. How would you say? Multiple universes, I should say. And multiverse theory. And so whenever you have a certain problem space, what they call a Hilbert space, it creates this window into multiple universes and runs all those calculations in parallel. And. And then the wave function collapses into the single most likely state.
And so if we're talking about multiple universes and then multiple dimensions, then maybe that's like, that's why those problems are so much harder for quantum computers to solve.
[00:54:02] Speaker B: Interesting. Yeah, I had heard that, and I remember I was trying to trace that back, and I can't. I wish I had, you know, said, remembered or thought about that, so I could have had that in front of me.
But that. That was a.
Somebody basically posited that theory. I think it was, like, in the late 90s, if I'm not mistaken. And it's kind of like held on because people. Because there's still not like, really a hard explanation as to why, you know.
[00:54:32] Speaker A: Well, there's just so much we don't know. Yeah. Like, it's. It's very humbling, actually. Like, when you look into, like, theoretical physics and like, I don't know if you ever listen to Matthew Pines talk about theoretical physics, but not at length.
[00:54:47] Speaker B: But I've been. Actually, you're the third person recently. I've been like, you should listen to more Matthew Pines on. On some stuff like that.
[00:54:54] Speaker A: So I love that guy.
[00:54:56] Speaker B: I'll have to put that in my list, actually. I should get Matthew on the show.
[00:54:59] Speaker A: You should totally Should.
[00:55:01] Speaker B: That would be a fun rabbit hole.
[00:55:03] Speaker A: Ask him about aliens.
Yeah, it's funny, the first podcast I ever saw with him on was like, basically, maybe right before the government had like this like, panel with David Grush and a few other whistleblowers who are like, you know, testify. Testifying under oath that there are non human intelligence from north origin. I'm just like, the what?
And so then I realized that there's like this whole new rabbit hole that I've never gone through and never even considered. And like, they call it ufology. And like, like, I kind of consider it analogous to bitcoin, at least like bitcoiners, in terms of like the depth of the mythology and all that. In. In fact, it's even older, but like, there's just so much depth to it. And one good primer for that is a book called In Plain Sight by Rous Kohlhar Kothar and Matthew Pines.
[00:56:07] Speaker B: Also, I'm actually just finishing up Turtles all the Way.
This will be a good one to add. What did you call it?
[00:56:15] Speaker A: In Plain Sight.
[00:56:16] Speaker B: Yeah, In Plain Sight.
[00:56:18] Speaker A: Yeah, it's. It's a good like, like, kind of primer to the whole like, rabbit hole, basically. And I've also got into like deep woo territory with.
[00:56:34] Speaker B: This is perfect. Aliens is perfect combo for, for quantum.
[00:56:38] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I saw this rabbit hole. I was, wow.
There's another couple books by a professor of theology, her name is Diana Walsh Pasulka, and she goes into how UFOs may be technological angels and how angels might actually be a real thing and how they might be involved in people's lives. And that's another, you know, dude, you.
[00:57:10] Speaker B: Know what rabbit hole that I, I went down? It was actually, I had started down it one day and then it wasn't until years later I had watched the Mothman Prophecies, that movie that kind of got me going back down that rabbit hole. And I kind of revisited it. But that whole thing. Have you, have you dug into that whole. The concept of. Basically there's a. It's the idea of extra dimensional beings or whatever.
It's something like that. Yeah, there's like, there's like a couple of different, like, framings for like, how to imagine like, what it is or what they are? Yeah, but the, the level of like, coincidences and like, people knowing things ahead of things actually happening. I mean, obviously in retrospect, it's like one of those things that's like, really easy to like, oh, I can identify this, this and this, but some of them are Very striking. And there's like hard evidence that like. No, that is exactly what happened before this happened. If only they had put it on the blockchain and you know, we could have time stamped it. But I like it was, it was still really kind of crazy. There are some serious coincidences. And it also just kind of makes intuitive sense that like there would be the nature of a, some sort of a web or a network over another dimension just because we see and witness them in all the others. You know, like why, like why would our perspective be the last one? Like it almost seems necessary that there would be another.
[00:58:44] Speaker A: Yeah, so like actually there's this guy, this name is uh.
See, I'm trying to remember his name is one moment.
He was in the recent panel on non human Intelligence.
He wrote a book recently and he was in like the military under like just working for the Department of Defense on all kinds of weird stuff. And one thing he goes into is remote viewing and how it's helped him throughout his career and something that he had been involved in early on during, I think during the 80s.
[00:59:40] Speaker B: I feel like that went some, something in that actually made the rounds recently and I watched something about like remote viewing and stuff. And that's like one of those things. Like there are so many. I try to find like some sort of intuitive explanation for some of these things. Especially when somebody starts calling it angels or demons or whatever because well, they.
[00:59:58] Speaker A: Talk about like a thread that they pull on that they, they can kind of sense remote viewers and, and they have like a protocol for like getting their head in that. Right, in the right like space to interpret what their seeing. And you're actually not supposed to interpret what you see in the moment that you're observing. You're actually having to just observe but not interpret, right?
Because that just breaks the link. And you're also not supposed to do anything evil with it. You're not supposed to do anything that's morally just bad. And so like that's, that's, that's an interesting stipulation, right? That like, you know, there is the concept of evil and there's fundamental forces in the universe that like could be put like, you know, like make that value judgment. Right?
So that's, that's interesting.
Big if true, right? And you know.
[01:01:07] Speaker B: Well, I think in a natural sense you can think of good and evil is that which is in align in alignment with life and that which is not. And if there is some sort of underlying force or, and, and which may literally just be like another layer of something that tends toward inanimate physical world to organize into life.
Well then it would also be something where there is clearly resistance if you are out of harmony with whatever, whatever that force is. Just like if you try to push on gravity, you know, you try to do the opposite, it's harder to do.
And it, the idea of, you know, some sort of additional dimension, I guess, you know, people always think of different dimensions is like I'm transferring to another planet or something, you know. But I just conceptually, just from the simplest idea that there's another dimension of some sort of interaction that we just aren't aware of, which I, I feel like intuitively is always the case, you know, like, I mean when was go back 50 years and we found them, you know, like we now we have new dimensions that we interact on and we can study and we can see that we didn't before, you know, 200 years ago it might have made sense to think that, you know, while you're outside doing hard things or whatever, you pick up demons from the world and if you rinse your hands off with water, the demons go away. And then, you know, 150 years later you get a microscope and you've got all of this understanding and like, sure, maybe it was true, but we found out like now we get to see the bacteria, you know, like there's reality.
[01:02:50] Speaker A: That we was, we weren't aware of because we didn't know how to look for it. And like having that kind of like consciousness could be something that is like something that academia has difficulty exploring to begin with, you know. And so it's funny, there's a theory and by the way, I remember the name of the, the author of the book, his name is Lou Elizondo.
Elizondo, L U E. Elizondo L U E. Yeah, and there's also a theory by Roger Penrose, if you heard of Penrose. He's like this famous physicist from kind of like Feynman's era. And so yeah, he came with like a bunch of black hole theories and stuff like that and which is like, like very novel physics and science during the 1970s and we're only just now validating those theories using LIGO and these laser interferometer gravity observatories.
And I think they're about to put a satellite based version out in the space. They call it Liza. But yeah, just being able to measure gravity waves and then like observe mergers of black holes from, you know, vast distances across space time, that is cool as heck. And then we just like validated all those theories about black holes, like, we can observe them.
[01:04:30] Speaker B: And so it all starts with imagination, man. You got to. You got to be okay with sounding bonkers or you're not on the edge of understanding. You know, like, there's. There's no forward progress without imagination first.
[01:04:41] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Like. Like expressing the idea that if matter is condensed to. To too small of a volume, then it. It goes like, if you. If you push it past what's called the Schwarzkale radius, then, you know, like, it. It turns into a singularity, collapses, and it. It, you know, becomes this, like, amazing, mystical, wild thing that, you know, like, if you had went back 100 years ago and explain to people maybe who are familiar with general relativity or special relativity, it might have raised some eyebrows.
But Roger Penrose, he later worked on this theory called orchestrative objective redundance. And it's basically this idea that. So there's this bonkers hypothesis and then there's this way of validating this hypothesis that he came up with because, like, he knew it was bonkers. And so we wouldn't, like, don't just verify. We wouldn't validate. We couldn't, like, science couldn't validate it unless we had, like, this, like, like, rigorous mental framework for, like, you know, figuring out if this hypothesis is true. And the hypothesis is basically that human consciousness is tied into quantum effects that are manifest in microtubules in the brain.
Have you heard of this?
[01:06:10] Speaker B: No.
[01:06:10] Speaker A: I don't know.
[01:06:11] Speaker B: So it sounds like something I would enjoy reading, though.
[01:06:17] Speaker A: It's fascinating. Orchestrative objective redundancy. And the first thing Wikipedia says about that is it is a highly controversial theory.
[01:06:29] Speaker B: Orchestrated what? Redundance.
[01:06:31] Speaker A: Objective redundance.
[01:06:33] Speaker B: Objective redundance.
[01:06:35] Speaker A: Reduction. Reduction.
[01:06:36] Speaker B: Reduction. Reduction.
[01:06:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:06:37] Speaker B: Sorry.
[01:06:39] Speaker A: And, yeah, so orchestrated objective reduction and highly controversial.
[01:06:46] Speaker B: Sounds exactly like what I want to be reading about.
[01:06:49] Speaker A: Oh, it's. It's fascinating. And so, like. Like what's neat is that it. It theorizes that, like, there is a quantum basis for consciousness and it.
Which might actually be something I've always wanted to ask Matthew Pines about. So please ask him about the quantum nature.
[01:07:09] Speaker B: All right, I'll put that. I'll put that in the. Ask Matthew Pines about this.
[01:07:14] Speaker A: Yeah, I would definitely watch that episode of tftc. Yeah.
Like, the implication there is that there's entanglement occurring inside the brain and there's a collapse of wave function.
There's also an implication there that having ungodly amounts of AI compute power is not enough to achieve artificial general intelligence. We may need to actually accelerate this with quantum computers. And there are actually machine learning algorithms for quantum computers that, that run on them. And so it really is one of those optimization problems through probabilities that quantum computers are capable of solving at much faster rate than classical processes. And so similarly with the human consciousness, the brain is already a very efficient, very efficient computer. And one reason why it might be so efficient is because it has like this, like wetware, like quantum consciousness.
Yeah.
[01:08:24] Speaker B: So the idea, let me, let me see if I can wrap, wrap up some of this theory in a bow here and how to connect quantum to this. So just the general idea of quantum is that, you know, the, the explanation that I've heard that has stuck with me, whether or not this is a proper mental picture of it, is that there is a.
Clearly with the computation, there is a clear path through all the different circuits and all the different like ones and zeros that take you from a private key to a public key.
[01:09:00] Speaker A: Oh, the other way around.
[01:09:04] Speaker B: No, I mean it just in general. Just in general, when you were, when you were doing a computation, there is a certain elaborate path of things that take you from one to the other. And it's extremely difficult to go the opposite direction because, you know the algorithm that pushes you to the public key. Yeah, but the public key is deterministic and not known ahead of time. So the idea of a quantum computer is that if you can remove all of the noise, all of the heat, all of the, the general influence of it from the physical world is that the last resistance will be between that public key and the private key will just be the tendency for energy to flow from that public key back through the path to the private key. And so part of the idea is to remove all of the noise of the three dimension, the universe that we are in, so that just the energy itself can tell us what's the easiest path. Like, like, so like, you know, think about it. Like water flows through the lowest path in a trough, in a valley, through the mountains, is that there is that quote unquote with energy passing through this huge, elaborate billion piece circuit. But there's too much noise. There's too much stuff in the, in the, in our universe or whatever, so to speak, that's making the energy want to do something different. So if we can remove all of that, it will just find the troughs in between all the mountains and the hills that will realign it and kind of reverse that. That is what I have heard about quantum is that like you set it in that, that space between 0 and 1 and get rid of all of the other noise. The energy will tend toward one direction and it will fall zero or one a billion times. You know, to, to rebuild the circuit. That takes us back to the private key.
Is that a sensible picture to have for how that kind of works?
[01:11:08] Speaker A: One part of it I'm not sure about is the energy part. Like the way I always imagine it is like a collapse of a wave function. So like you mentioned the peaks and the valleys. Right. But there's the probability that this might collapse into one or zero is just like it's a compression of those possibilities. And so it becomes the most likely possibility that you get from that computation.
That might be one way to conceptualize it. I also think of it in terms of Hilbert space, which is the problem space that it needs to search through.
Like you basically, by entangling all these qubits together, you enlarge the size of the problem you can solve. And so you're maybe adding another universe to being able to listen to another universe just through this one.
Like fundamentally entangled.
Like, you know, in, in superconducting quantum computing, I think they call it a.
Well, they have Josephson junctions and I think they call it a, a phonon. I could be wrong, but like there's like, like this like entangled phonons. I, I could be wrong though. But yeah, put that down on my.
[01:12:50] Speaker B: List to dig into.
[01:12:51] Speaker A: Yeah. How. How do Josephson junctions work?
[01:12:56] Speaker B: Joseph junctions. Okay. Okay.
[01:12:58] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
Those are like, kind of like, like a fundamental part of superconducting quantum computing.
[01:13:07] Speaker B: But how many logical qubits are necessary that you know of to basically put ECDs at risk? So with Willow, it's 105 virtual qubits create one logical qubit, which is a huge step up from the previous needs of virtual qubits to make a logical qubit. How many logical roughly do you think, or have you heard it would take.
[01:13:40] Speaker A: To risk elliptic curve for RSA? I think the lower bound has to be 2N +1. Yeah. So basically it would be like you need 256 qubits to contain the number. And then you need another 256 qubits to like work over the numbers, like kind of like working memory. And then you need like one control qubit. And so I think the minimum number is 513 logical qubits. And that, that would be like the very bare minimum. And then to do this efficiently, there are, there are other ways that are even more efficient to do it and might actually be required for elliptical cryptography. And those have a lower bound of about 2,000 logical qubits.
[01:14:40] Speaker B: Okay.
[01:14:41] Speaker A: And so what's funny about that is just to put a bow on that, Shor's algorithm is actually kind of a stone's throw where we are now in terms of quantum computing development. And in addition, it's one of the simpler things that a quantum computer can actually do is factor large numbers. And so, like, one thing quantum computers can also do is simulate high energy physics, right? Like infusion reactors or like model chemistry and optimize, you know, how we might develop pharmaceuticals. Well, all those applications require like many tens of millions of logical qubits. And whereas, like Shor's is like a thousands.
[01:15:38] Speaker B: Certain cryptographic algorithms will probably be the first things to reveal or to tackle, I guess, in a direct application of quantum computing.
[01:15:47] Speaker A: Right. And one could, you know, if just like extrapolating further out, like, maybe there's a possibility that like, like Satoshi's coins help accelerate the transition to quantum computing.
[01:16:03] Speaker B: Because you've got to. You basically get a bounty.
[01:16:06] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And there's also the possibility that like, one reason why we can't communicate with aliens is because, like, our protocols are like, their protocols could be based on quantum computing. And there's also something called the no communication theorem, which is like, the idea is that quantum communication is impossible because it's not, or at least it's possible, but it doesn't go faster than the speed of light without some kind of reference signal to send, I think like some kind of matrix over. But the thing is, like, it's still vastly superior if you can, you know, communicate confidentially, potentially instantaneously.
It's, it's like without needing necessarily like a, a dedicated light speed radio phenomenon, if that's possible, if it's possible to communicate using quantum computers. Maybe there is the no communication theorem. It's been discussed, but I'm not sure that we know everything about that.
It's very possible that we just need better quantum computers in order to establish like a quantum communication protocol. And the reason why I think suspect that is because, like, even early radio communication required transistors to work, right? Like, they needed like a. I think they called it a thyristor, like a, a like basically a vacuum tube, but like, it was needed to isolate the signal from the noise. And like, similarly, I think you might need a decent quantum computer in order to communicate. Kind of like how our cell phones, they have a cellular baseband module that is basically a computer in its own right. That is just dedicated to processing radio signals. And also, if you think about it, if we were to develop such a technology that could transmit any distance practically instantaneously, then you wind up with a couple interesting concepts. One is all radio communication from Earth would probably seize in a decade as everybody would transition to this vastly superior communications technology. And then we just kind of go radio silent because, like, it's just better, you know, and everybody transitions to it. There's that possibility.
[01:19:07] Speaker B: And there's an interesting idea, is that if we're. If we're thinking about intelligent life has already made somewhere else, has already made this leap. Is that the reason nobody's getting our radio signals is because.
For the same reason is, you know, if somebody yelled on Jupiter, we wouldn't hear them. Is because of, like, nobody's listening for somebody yelling. You know, we're listening for cell signal and we're listening for, you know, like, you're. It depends on.
It's so antiquated as far as, like, a mode of communication. And it's not even going to get. If they're light years away. Okay, well, then, yeah, it's going to take you 2000 years for our message to even get there. So our entire span in which we are dumping all of these radio waves out into the universe is going to be tiny. Could very well be this very tiny blip in the history of the species.
[01:19:59] Speaker A: Yeah, could be.
[01:20:00] Speaker B: Especially at the grand scale.
[01:20:01] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Could be a possibility.
And, yeah, I mean, maybe there are photons coming from other star systems that are entangled and, like, the minute they hit our. Yeah, our. Our telescopes, they just completely, you know, like, lose that entanglement and that. That might be how you just kind of get the process started. So, you know, there's. It's like. I mean, I have no idea if any of that is, like, you know, the case, but it's just stuff. I've kind of thought through that, like, oh, if that was true, then, you know, these other things could be true, too.
Another thing that, like, comes to mind is that there's a. There's a direct relationship between energy and information.
And if you're able to transmit information, you may also be able to transmit energy.
[01:20:56] Speaker B: Yeah, that's interesting. Dude. There's the number of rabbit holes that as soon as you get into the realm of, like, you don't even have a concrete explanation for it, which is what's interesting. Both interesting and infuriating about the whole quantum conversation is the difficulty in getting concrete stuff.
[01:21:18] Speaker A: In one way, it's. It's Just a function of it being so new and also like theoretical and not applied in our everyday lives. And like, if you tried to go back 50 years ago and explain how a web browser works, right? Like they, they would have.
[01:21:36] Speaker B: You'd have the same problem. Right?
[01:21:38] Speaker A: Exactly.
[01:21:39] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[01:21:40] Speaker A: And so like, you know, maybe someday 50 years from now, we'll have very succinct explanations for how all of these things work. And we're just like, right now we're just fumbling around, you know, trying our best to come up with explanations. But, you know, once it becomes something that you can just teach in, in primary school, then, you know, it's, it's, it's reach the mainstream and we can talk about it with a measure of like, oh, well, you know, bacteria are, you know, like germ theory, right? Like we have like, you know, and this is how it impacts our lives and we have antibiotics and penicillin.
[01:22:24] Speaker B: On that, then I feel like this is actually a good place to wrap it up. I don't want to take too much of your time. I know you're working on HSM stuff, but I'm curious, so what's your call to action for people, like for the audience? Is it, is it to just start progressing this conversation or getting involved in the conversation?
[01:22:47] Speaker A: I would say the best call to action I could give is behind every piece of FUD is a kernel of an actual concern, right? And I hate it when people dismiss FUD against Bitcoin instead of acknowledging it and then being like, yeah, but it's not a concern because xyz, right, for example, like what one thing people say about Bitcoin is that it's not backed by anything. And it's like, well, it doesn't need to be backed because it's sound money to have value, right? And like, it doesn't need to be backed to have value. It's money and it's scarce and it has good monetary properties and stable monetary properties, right? That can be depended on long term. And also it's secured by energy from however many tens of millions of miners are out there. And in addition, there's the FUD around energy. So there's like, okay, so we're going to start using 1% or 10% of the Earth's energy. I'm like, well, there's always that possibility, but that's not the case. And even if it was the case, it would be wasted stranded energy that wouldn't have any better use anyway. And because like, like it's always.
[01:24:07] Speaker B: But to just dismiss it as FUD is kind of like ignoring the point. It's like, no, there's, there's a conversation about.
[01:24:14] Speaker A: There's a conversation to be had. Exactly.
[01:24:16] Speaker B: Their framing is wrong, but I mean it's an actual thing to have a conversation about.
[01:24:21] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. And so for people who are like, you know, doing their best to fud, like use that as an opportunity to, to like discuss like. Well, Bitcoin is anti Fragile. It secures $2 trillion worth of value currently. And there's a huge monetary incentive to maintain that security.
And there's a number of very intelligent people who are working on that problem of just making sure that Bitcoin is quantum resistant. And additionally, I would also say not to worry because like 80% of coins out there are held in public key hash addresses or so you know, it's not going to like be complete devastation to the network. There might be a period of time where there's like, you know, a transitionary period that could be quite, you know, stressful.
But once that's done, then we've hardened Bitcoin, you know, for the foreseeable future. And that then addresses the concern, the valid concern that you know, if we're having nation states start to stockpile these, you know, this, this coin, they need to have a safe place to, to put that coin. And for anybody who is in charge of large honeypot addresses, basically like exchange wallets or mining pool rewards or just like the ETFs or wherever they're keeping their funds. Right.
Ideally they don't reuse those addresses, meaning they can receive to the address multiple times. That's fine so long as they haven't spent from it yet. And the moment you spent from an address, you've revealed your public key to the network. And so that's, and you just deprecate.
[01:26:30] Speaker B: It at that point you just like this one's done.
[01:26:33] Speaker A: Right, exactly. And ideally so like in these large custodians they should move towards bip32 style, higher HD wallet style key derivation and keep your XPub as private as your xpriv. Right.
And so like at that point like your, your, your keys need to be like both consider private and you know, and, and that's, and that's good for privacy anyway.
So yeah, don't reveal your ex pub, don't reuse addresses. Avoid tapper deck dresses if you can.
Native Segwit's fine. BC1Q is fine. Like if you, if your, if your address starts with bq, that's fine. There's actually a table in the BIP where we show every address output type and it.
[01:27:30] Speaker B: The relative risk.
[01:27:31] Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah.
[01:27:33] Speaker B: And so I'll have a link to all that stuff. I don't even put this in my list. Link to the bip.
[01:27:39] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:27:39] Speaker B: Just so people can check it out.
[01:27:41] Speaker A: Yeah, I'll, I'll link you to that. To this. Yeah.
And yeah, I think that the TLDR is or is just.
We're working on it and please don't worry too much.
Even if there is Q day, it's not the end of the world.
There will be a time to transition. We just need to be level headed, think it through and come up with the best possible solution at the time.
[01:28:22] Speaker B: Yeah. And as I understand it right now, this will be a big breakthrough which. Who knows what the timeline is on this of quantum computer that can generalize what computation it's doing.
[01:28:35] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:28:36] Speaker B: So because as far as I've read, and this was during the whole willow rabbit hole trying to make sense of that, is that they basically have to build the circuit. It's like, it's like a psychotically specific asic that like do you have to build the entire thing to compute exactly what you want to compute? And so when, even when we get to the idea of the number of logical qubits that would be relevant is that you have to. Or at least currently without a, without another breakthrough, which this would be a breakthrough to look out for in the quantum world, is that they would literally have to build their quote unquote quantum chip, whatever you want to call it, with the public key built in as the framework, like, like the physical framework for it, until we have a breakthrough that allows for generalization in it, as I understand it. So they would literally have to build a quantum computer starting from Satoshi's public key, which might actually fund it, you know, like when we get to that point or whatever. And then the only thing that it can actually crack is that one Satoshi public key.
[01:29:49] Speaker A: That's not, that's not quite how I understand how quantum computers work. Like the, the qubits are programmable, right. So you can just reuse that circuit.
[01:29:58] Speaker B: Once it's how does the, how does the circuit work? Because that is, and this could be an extrapolation or implication from something that I read that that was wrong obviously.
But I, I understood there was some sort of attachment to how they built it for.
And this, this runs into a problem of not under, not not having a foundation for how the chips or even design anyway.
[01:30:29] Speaker A: So there are qubits and then there are gates. Right. And like, gates are like, like things like logical C not, you know, controlled not. There's also something called a Hadamard gate, which basically sets the qubit as being an exact equal chance between settling as a 1 or 0. And so kind of like resets the state of a qubit and then you can start like interacting with it.
And so yeah, if you chain, you know, controlled not or CCNOT or CCC not. I think CCC not is called Trifoli gate.
If you're able to arrange these gates in a way that conforms to Shor's algorithm, which includes inverse quantum Fourier transform and modular exponentiation, then you may not need additional gates for that. But on quantum computers generally, there's thousands of gates for every 10 or 100 qubits.
[01:31:47] Speaker B: Okay.
[01:31:48] Speaker A: And they can be configured.
I think there's something like magic gate configuration code out there.
[01:32:00] Speaker B: It could very well be something that I read. Either I misinterpreted it or they didn't know what they were talking about.
[01:32:06] Speaker A: Yeah, there's actually a really great book called Quantum Computing for everyone that is. I think it was published in 2017. It gives you kind of like a fundamentals first, like kind of background on. It's basically the primer for quantum computing. So that's another rabbit hole.
[01:32:27] Speaker B: Well, that's, I mean, that's what we do here is we go down rabbit holes and you know, fear, just generally speaking, fear comes from not knowing something. Like not knowing how to respond to something, not knowing how to think about something. You know, not having a, even an idea of how this could attack you. Or, you know, like the fear is about the dark. Once you know, is it what's in the dark and you know what to expect, you actually have a plan. You have a way to actually respond to what's out there. And quantum computing right now is the dark for most people. And so I don't know, don't, don't be afraid of it. You know, don't just like sit around and be afraid. Like, just go get a flashlight. It's a book. Yeah. You know, go read a book. Like that's what we do here. You explore it. We read about it. We. I mean, everything can be, everything's understandable. Somebody's building it. You can understand it. You just can. Like, there's nothing's off limits anybody. Doesn't matter how abstract or woo woo it sounds at the beginning. Most of us just jargon anyway, you know, like it's understandable, it just is.
[01:33:34] Speaker A: So, yeah, yeah, it's well put.
[01:33:37] Speaker B: No, I appreciate you coming on, man, and kind of going through this with me. I didn't know it was going to be we were going to talk about aliens and demons, but that's pretty great, actually. And now I got to get Matthew Pines on which he's going to want to talk about philosophy and I'm going to ask him about freaking aliens.
But this is a good one, man. Have we ever met in person? I feel like we have. Or do I just. Have I just seen you?
[01:34:00] Speaker A: Well, so like, I'm a founding member of the space.
If you heard. Have you heard of this space?
It's like Denver's bitcoin citadel.
[01:34:09] Speaker B: Yeah, Denver. With Joey and Wyatt and crew.
[01:34:13] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So like I'm close to all those people and so, yeah, Wyrick and Joyful Joey. They're all great.
[01:34:25] Speaker B: Joyful Joey.
Well, hell, regardless, next time we get to a conference at the same time together, we need to hang out.
[01:34:33] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:34:33] Speaker B: Catch up, man.
[01:34:34] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. It was nice chatting.
[01:34:36] Speaker B: Yeah, man. Good time. Thank you so much.
Later, boss.
All right, guys, I hope you enjoyed that episode. That was a really fun one that went places that I wasn't expecting and now I'm very intrigued and I kind of feel like I need to get Matthew Pines on the show and I've got a whole bunch of different rabbit holes to go down. So I have lots of links and Hunter's going to send me an email with as many of the links as he remembers and I'll try to get everything together. So you have stuff in the show, notes in the description so that you can check it out with me. I got another book to listen to, so tons to check out. Bunch of great links. Don't forget to check out fold. If you aren't stacking sats with them, then I don't. You really should be. And a great non custodial or self custodial wallet to use is Bitkid. And I will have my id, my. My key down in the bottom so that you can add me and check it out. All right, we'll wrap this up. A lot of good stuff coming. A lot of interviews lined up and a lot of guys take in the lineup and some really, really fun things happening on Paradrive. And I'm so happy to finally be able to share it with you guys. And I know I'm like holding back a little bit and I'm not. I haven't pushed it out there yet even though it's working, but I. I want to feel comfortable with it. I want to know that it is working before I get other people to. I don't want them to be disappointed in it out the gate, even though it's limited. But when I feel like we are there, I will let you get your hands on it. So stay tuned. Links, details, all the good stuff. You know where to find it and I I'm Guy Swan and I will catch you on the next episode of Bitcoin. Audible until then, everybody take it easy. Guys.
[01:36:44] Speaker A: LA.
