I felt kind of guilty about my last post , so I have spent a bit of time thinking about post-quantum Bitcoin. This includes: Thinking through specifically what I think a good “roadmap” would be to get Bitcoin to a place where it is secure in the presence of a CRQC Surveying everything that has been going on in Bitcoin-post-quantum-land Identifying the remaining open questions I have seen a few…
Bitcoin’s signatures are broken if a cryptographically-relevant quantum computer (CRQC) were to appear tomorrow. 1 Bitcoin requires changes both to its code and to everyone’s wallets (at least a soft fork and many users moving coins to different types of addresses) to be secure in the presence of a CRQC. 2 The remaining uncertainty is in two main areas: timeline and how to address this. I will…
The following are remarks I gave at the 2025 DC Privacy Summit . TL;DR we don’t talk enough about potential dystopian outcomes for privacy tech. It’s not an answer by itself, we probably need thoughtful policy. Watch the remarks here and a fireside chat with Commissioner Peirce here . Thanks to Mike Orcutt for inviting me and writing this thoughtful summary of the event. Here’s a scenario some of…
I have been doing a deep dive on how money is defined and how it works. I am more focused on fundamental definitions of money, currency, and payments, and less so on monetary policy. Here is my reading list, with some notes. This is not a thorough literature review and I am not recommending all of the ideas put forth. There are probably many important things I’m missing (I’d appreciate you…
Ark is a design to scale payments on Bitcoin. There are several explanations out there about Ark, but I couldn’t understand most of them, so I wrote my own. I also summarize how different opcode soft forks can help improve Ark properties, and compare Ark with other designs to address scalability like Lightning and rollups. Motivation Imagine you want to enable many users to share an on-chain UTXO,…
Gold vaults A year ago I toured the gold vault beneath the New York Fed . You might recall it from the classic 1995 movie Die Hard with a Vengeance , but in case you aren’t familiar: It’s the world’s largest depository of monetary gold, storing over 6,000 tons 80 feet below Manhattan and protected by airtight vaults and its own police force. The first thing I thought when I was down there was wow,…
The term “stablecoin” typically refers to tokens issued on a blockchain which are designed to maintain a stable value with respect to an existing currency, for example the dollar. The largest stablecoins currently are Tether and USDC, with total token values of $69B and $30B, respectively. 1 There is generally a reasonable understanding of the financial risks involved in stablecoins, particularly…