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You posted a good article a while back about the theoretical v. engineering issues involved. Do you still have that link? One other thing. Excuse my ignorance, but who specifically are the economic nodes with all the sway? It can't be etfs, since coinbase is the custodian. Saylor certainly would have a say. Has he weighed in? Blockstream? Of course coinbase?
who are the economic nodes with all the sway
Great point -- I'm treating IBIT/MSTR/Coinbase as a monolith, and I probably shouldn't. I don't believe I have heard specific statements by any of those entities about quantum. But I suspect they are closer to the Nic Carter approach than to the Bitcoin Maxi approach.
If they back a fork that burns Satoshi's coins, and people like us don't like it, there's a real possibility we become something like Bitcoin Classic. I wonder what that would do to hashrate.
Also, did you notice the change in terminology? When this debate was happening last summer it was "Burn or Steal" and now it's "Freeze or Do not Freeze." Freeze is just a nice way of saying burn.
At a bitcoin meetup last night this was also the general opinion:
pretty much everybody was in the camp of: what is the problem? if someone figures out how to get satoshi's coins, they are now the new owner of satoshi's coins. "mind your own coins"
(the only concern was the thought that if multiple quantum computers were to be discovered around the same time, there might be competition over the who gets satoshi's coins and in that case, the size of the prize is big enough that contenders would be likely to offer miners very high fees and the network might experience a pretty rough time of reorgs as miners fought to reorg out transactions moving satoshi's coins)
In Carter's piece, he draws the lines on this issue between the
and the
And it does feel to me like these are where the lines are drawn. But economic nodes are what carry the network, and it's hard not to see how the nodes that control Coinbase, MSTR, IBIT, and all the other big piles of coins don't out weigh the rest of us...
I'm not sure I see how this plays out. It might not even require a real quantum computer to ever materialize to result in a pretty unpleasant situation.