Nic Carter: Quantum Threatens $600B of Bitcoin

You're now plugged in to the Deli podcast. Nick Carter, who made these loafers?

Tell me to see. Thank you for having me.

You didn't make them, though. I got them from a store here in Miami called Blue Scarpa.

How many pairs did you look at before you landed on Tiffany Blue?

I own all of the loafers from that store.

So you keep them in business?

I think I'm their power user. So they make shoes in any color as long as it's blue.

So you walk in and they just turn the lights on.

Well, they know me. So I'm not like this most of the time. Just I really like this one. I want to sit in the store as you come in and just watch them into the design.

Rally around you. They're great. Will they last?

No. These are made of linen. They're not really meant to be worn.

Damn. They're not. I thought it matched the fit. I love it.

Nick, last time you were on the podcast was two years ago. Operation Chokepoint. Was that it?

That was it. That was before you broke the story and it became a big deal. And you know, similar to then that like I think that was one of the first ones I'd done on the topic. This is the very first podcast I've done on quantum. I had to pull out a lot of best friend favors to get you here.

I sent one text and you said yes.

Yeah, that was I'm retired. Until now, I don't do podcasts. I don't do TV. I don't Why not?

I don't want to. That's fair. I don't want to. Does it distract from work or it's just you don't like the interviewers or what's the

I don't feel like it anymore. That's fair. That's a good reason. And I can communicate more precisely in writing.

Well, the writing is good. For this episode, I'm gonna say a lot of stuff that's like slightly wrong, and I'll have to refer you to my writing, which is the canonical stuff. That's fair.

So, so Nick, you wrote a four-part series on quantum's risk to Bitcoin. They're beautifully written. They have real purpose. It also feels like you enjoy arguing with diehard Bitcoiners. Is that

I'm not even I haven't even finished the series, the third installment. Have you started it?

No, but I'm think I'm thinking about it a lot. So that's like that that happens in the background and then eventually one day I wake up I'm like it's ready, you know.

So why did So you had the Satoshi dice for like in 2018, so 8 years ago. And you put Quantum on there.

Yeah, the FUD dice. Quantum was on the second edition of the dice. Same year. Yeah, in 2018. What got you to put it on that early? What was the

Oh, because I ran out of fuds. I mean, there were like three or four editions to the dice. There's only so many fuds that you give it on a panel with a 12sided die. That's what else was on there. Think about how many sides that is. Yeah, that's 48 sides. That's a lot of different FUDs. But quantum was always a good FUD because me calling something FUD doesn't mean it's not a risk to Bitcoin to be clear. Like FUD, some FUD is quality FUD. Like the block reward stability in the long term, right? the fee issue. That's quality fund because that's an unsolved problem.

So is quantum back then though in 2018 that was 7 years ago, right? That's a long time though. It's like you know so a lot happened since then in quantum and this went from a very theoretical possibility that well actually it sounds like most people in the field are saying this is going to happen.

So it was something that Satoshi knew about back in the day in 2010. Satoshi wrote about quantum and said, "Yeah, probably will break the hash functions eventually. Probably won't honestly, but that's what Satoshi thought." Jeez. So it's always been a potential issue with cryptography.

So how much research did you do for these articles? How many people did you talk to? How many books did you read?

I don't know. Put some numbers around it. Hundreds of hours. Jesus.

So every 6 months I get totally obsessed with something. So in 2023 it was choke point right and then it completely dominates my focus and before that it was proof of reserves and I don't remember what it was last year. I know maybe maybe you remember something and well AI and data centers that was probably my main obsession last year and the year before um and this year at the end of last year uh for the last 6 months of 2025 it was quantum and there's a lot of work you have to do to like get to a reasonable level of understanding first of all I didn't even know what quantum mechanics was let alone quantum computing.

You know, turns out quantum mechanics is the established theory in physics and it has been since 1920. I didn't know that. Um, it's very empirically, frankly, proven. Some people will disagree with me for saying that. Is proven. There's a lot of people like, "Oh, quantum computing isn't real because quantum physics is actually fake." I'm like, tell that to Neil's Boore. I wish I could debate this with you. Yeah. Yeah. I know there's actually people in in the year of our lord 2026 that say quantum mechanics is fake. It's like no do you but like we've known it's real.

So 6 months of time spent. I have other questions on that. But before we dive into all of the points I want to know

Well, I didn't answer your question. Sorry. Fair. I talked to well over a dozen physicists including Nobel Prize winners. I we obviously made a big investment in a quantum resistance company uh which a lot of people are upset about.

Um, why would they be upset about that?

They like claiming that I have a conflict of interest. It's like I'm a VC. I invest in stuff I believe in obviously. Uh, that's how it works. Um, so obviously you know how much diligence goes into the full details aren't out yet. They will be in several weeks. I don't want to spoil the surprise, but you know how much goes into a material investment. Just so just that alone, it's an obscene amount of work. Yeah. people don't see it. And then just besides that, I had this fascination with it. I wrote an entire fiction story about it for some reason.

I feel like you have more time in the day than the rest of us.

I don't know. And while I work, I I spend my weekends doing this, you know. And then I also really didn't want to get yelled at on the internet, so I wanted to make sure I was right about everything that I was writing down. So, I was totally obsessive about my longer articles.

I remembered your last obsession. It was boxing. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was it. That was it. That one made no sense. Yeah. Yeah.

So, you spent a lot of time on this 6 months, read books, talked to physicists. Before I ask you all the questions about the reports, the rapid fire questions I have are, have you sold any Bitcoin following your research?

No. All right. Second, but I'm not ruling it out. Okay. But but it is a no though right now.

I would sell it if with some within the next year the Bitcoin developer community was not sufficiently mobilized. Okay, that's a good point. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then the second question I had was your percentage chance on a quantum break for Bitcoin within the next 10 years.

By 2035?

Yeah. 70 to 80%. Wow. Maybe higher. Damn, that's a lot. What would you put it at five years?

By 2030 I would say 100% possible 20 to five to 30%. So 25 30% for 2025 there are many for 2030 there are many hundreds of millions of dollars that have been deployed with this belief in mind. So you don't really have to trust me. You have to trust Well, there's actually institutional investors out there that genuinely believe this and were able to convince their IC to put hundreds of millions of dollars into this concept. Wow.

So well billions frankly, but a quantum break of Bitcoin specifically, but you know, $10 billion roughly were deployed into quantum computing generally, but only a subset of that was with the idea that it might break Bitcoin. Okay, but that's materially more than what it was historically. That's This was 2025 was the highest year of quantum computing investing in history by far. Typical rates like 1 to2 billion. Damn. Um, and I'm not even counting internal investment at places like Google or Microsoft or IBM.

And that investment number, is that specifically to fix the problems we're going to discuss or is that to create alternative versions like coin? Like what are

That's just the 10 billion is just general investment in QC with the idea that you'll be able to monetize the technology in various ways down the road physics simulation material science and of course breaking cryptography which you can sell to governments or you can steal all the bitcoin.

So your least favorite question but we have to set the stage and I'll ask one of it. What is quantum computing versus classical computing? You specifically told me when asked me that, but it's on the sheet. Quantum computing. All right, we won't dwell on it.

So, classical computing is like a model of the world that's not accurate, right? You know, classical computers have finite states and they are deterministic and a bit is either one or zero and they're so that's how like classical computers are. But the world the stuff that we are made of that's in this room is not classical. It is made of quantum stuff. So particles are nondeterministic. They are probabilistic. They can be ones and zeros at the same time or both or neither for some reason. And uh particles can be entangled and be physically correlated in their attributes even at a distance even light years apart. It doesn't make any sense. It's just so hard to wrap your mind around like having something on Earth and then having it a billion light years away and them spinning at the same time. No, it doesn't make any sense at all. Uh, but apparently, and I looked into it, you can't actually communicate information faster than light. So, even given that, so there's no loopholes around, you know, space-time charge.

I know. I thought that was a loophole. Yeah. Um, and so the world is made of, you know, and and when you measure something, uh, you're also, uh, you know, collapsing the wave function and you're forcing it to be discreet. Uh, and so you're actually changing the nature of a particle when you measure it, right? So this is like that is crazy to me that I Yeah, that one part I struggle with a lot. I mean, all of quantum mechanics is like an insane like I don't think anybody actually intuitively understands it. Intuitively, I I can't understand that that something could have multiple states. When I look at it, it only has one. Like, yeah.

So, yeah, we live in a quantum world as we've known this for about 100 years, but physicists hated this. Hated this at the time. Einstein never accepted it really. He was really against it. And wonder what I mean cuz it's like if you're if I'm sitting here and telling you that you know um particles aren't in a specific place but they're kind of in a probability space and um you know I'm trying to explain to you how the double slit experiment works and particles interfering with themselves and their function as a wave some percentage of the time and particles some other percent. You'd be like well this sucks. I hate this. Yeah, Newtonian physics is way better and more satisfying. So way easier to read. As it turns out, we live in uh a quantum world.

And so then quantum computing is computing quantum lee. So instead of having uh you know regular old bits composed the computers, you have quantum bits which are basically atoms that are in a quantum state. uh so cubits and uh they can be one or zero or a variety and they can interfere with each other um and uh that gives you way more uh degrees of freedom in terms of your computation. So you can do uh different sorts of computation that are just completely impossible classically. So that is my really bad explanation.

No, no, it it's helpful. I mean a a couple things maybe also to clarify before we get into I will say there's no good explanations of what quantum computing is. No there is I argued with Gemini for a while before this interview and there there's no way to intuitively describe what quantum computing is. It's impossible. Jeez it but so like I'm trusting a that quantum mechanics is real. Some people don't believe that. Okay, but we're just going to assume that for the purpose of this discussion and two that not every physicist that says quantum computing is possible is lying to us. Some people think that's true as well. They think there's a huge conspiracy of the quantum physicists that everyone is lying to, you know, extract money from the VCs and that uh quantum computing is fake. Uh and the $10 billion that were put into it last year, everyone was tricked. So, a lot of people think that.

So, like without debating the technicals, like one thing is what you're saying, which is like all these people want to get all this money from the VCs. But as you and I both know, like the diehard technical folks, I don't think they care as much about that, right? Like, so why would they be lying? Like, yeah, I don't I don't believe that there's a big conspiracy of physicists, you know? I think there are some uh physicists that don't think quantum computing will happen, but they're in the minority. And and there are some people that think thought the engineering challenges were too high for quantum computing to ever be useful cuz it hasn't been useful yet. Those people are defecting. So they're increasingly changing their minds. Now I would say the consensus among physicists physicists is this will happen.

Um and not in 30 years but maybe in 10 maybe in 15 years but maybe shorter. When you talk to these experts, the ones who don't believe the quantum mechanics is real, are those the ones that are typically raising money or not raising money?

No. I mean, you wouldn't, right? Like there there are people that want intellectual clout from saying that quantum computing or quantum mechanics is fake, but they obviously wouldn't start a company in the domain. I'm only talking to people that are bought in. I was kind of trying to figure out like the mercenary versus non- mercenary like that we saw with AI. like the mercenaries went to Meta, took hundred billion dollar paychecks. The real people kind of stayed at Google and OpenAI and Anthropic. But yeah, it's hard to say. I mean, it's very hard to say whether the people of Microsoft and Google and IBM were the purists or the purists are in academia or the purists of Regetti and OQ. It is very hard to say. People just seem interested in quantum computing because it's intellectually fascinating and it's a new domain of computing which could be very transformative. Yeah.

So, one other question to ask before we go into the fun stuff. Two of the things you called out in your second article was the difference between physical cubits and logical cubits. And you also made a really key point to discuss fidelity. And I think you did this because everyone on Twitter is just sharing these cubit counts. But there's a difference between logical cubits and physical and then like how accurate they actually are. So can you dive into that for a minute and then we'll go into the fun stuff.

Yeah. I mean so a physical cubit is an atom that's held in a quantum state, right? Uh there's different modalities for this. There's um there's like trapped ions. There's super cooled cubits. It's like when you think about those chandeliers that have multiple stages and then those Microsoft videos, they're really cold and they actually get colder and colder until they're 7 ml, which is like way colder than outer space. Like way colder. Like someone today was asking me, could you put a quantum computer in outer space? Would that help? I'm like, well, no, actually, cuz it needs to be so much colder than outer space. That's crazy. Yeah, it is nuts.

So, physical cubits are subject to interference. They interfere with each other. So if you have a lot in an array, they start to generate just all kinds of interference, right? Kind of like we're sitting I'm probably generating some radiation and it's interfering with you right now. Jeez. Yeah. And vice versa. But and so you need to error correct these cubits that are being hit with cosmic radiation and temperature and noise and someone was walking too loudly outside. That's a real thing. uh the these uh quantum computers have to be held like in these very delicate uh like pneumatic uh you know bases so that so that there's no vibrations right the HVAC has to be in the different part of the building you know stuff like that so um but we did figure out uh more recently how to error correct the physical cubits and to get sort of like pure theoretically pure logical cubits which are the things that matter so that's the thing that you're really trying to count

And then the fidelity is basically the odds of uh a bit flip being successful and not happening for the wrong reason. And uh so when you're thinking about the success or progress of quantum computing, you want to think about a two axis chart. You want to think this this chart exists. You want to have uh physical cubits on one axis and fidelity on the other axis and then you care about the frontier advancing. M uh so we've recently reached fidelity thresholds where people think okay this thing's possible that only just happened just a couple years ago people would say well we're below the uh fidelity threshold where adding more cubits means you're just increasing the total amount of noise in the system so you so hundreds of thousands I think to millions of physical cubits correlate to thousands or tens of thousands of logical cubits yeah I For context, the best systems we have today have like a dozen logical cubits and maybe a thousand physical cubits.

It's crazy to think that we need this at that cold of a temperature and walking close to the machine could mess it up and yet we need to scale. I think your article said three orders of magnitude from where we're at now. Yeah, but three order three orders of mag isn't that much, right? I mean, it's kind of a lot. Oh, like if how many orders of mag are we doing in terms of like flops a year in AI? Yeah, it's like one a year. Like you think about algorithmic improvements, energy, bigger and bigger data centers, better GPUs, power. Yeah. So that in AI that's happening. I mean it happened quick too. How much bigger is Gro 5 versus whatever AI model existed in 2017?

Many orders of magnitude bigger, right? Yeah. Because we developed the scaling law in AI. We don't have that in quantum yet. It seems harder to spell scale quantum than AI. There's more variables. We haven't found a way to hold most of the variables fixed and improve on the ones that matter yet.

So before we dive into the fun stuff, we actually have to discuss the link between quantum and what is to break on Bitcoin. So like you identify three risks. The first one is trillion dollar bug bounty. So the ancient coins which is 2 million bitcoin sitting in Satoshi's original P2PK wallets. So that's a lot of money. Um, you when you go into the article, you discuss a lot of different things like how it's a pretty big moral issue because if we steal his coins, how do we even figure out who to give them back to? You also mentioned that we can't just retroactively upgrade his wallet, things like that. So, let's let's uh dwell on Satoshi's coins for a minute.

Yeah, I mean that's uh there's like two really big problems. If I mean if quantum happens and Bitcoin's not prepared, it's like the end of Bitcoin basically. So, but even if Bitcoin is prepared, it might also be the end. So, you're also so optimistic.

So, so basically Bitcoin's never faced challenges like this before. Ever, ever, ever. The the Satoshi problem is very acute because Bitcoin is a replicated database that many people agree on one version of it. There's no way for any administrator to change the way that Satoshi's addresses are encoded. Unless everybody that runs Bitcoin says, "We are going to collectively steal/burn Satoshi's coins," which has never happened before, right? In Ethereum, they did that one time with the DAO, right? The Dow hack in 2016 and they forked to change the state in a regular state change. Bitcoiners pointed at Ethereums and they're like, "You guys suck. This is the whole thing's arbitrary and like anyone could steal any coins for any reason." And now that's the only time they did that in Ethereum. But still, right? So, this is like that on steroids. I mean, you're talking about the creator's coins. That's like God's coins.

So, even if everybody upgraded their their wallets and and we'll go into the other risks, what you're saying is there's no way to fix Satoshi's wallets themselves. Unless you do something completely unprecedented, which is fork out the coins. Yes. Uh those coins are held in a vulnerable state, which is pay to public key, which is an address type that's not hashed. The hash is considered quantum resistant. So, Shaw 256 should be fine. But elliptic curve cryptography, the thing that is used to make sure that the private key to public key function is one way that is not secure against a sufficiently advanced quantum computer. Satoshi's coins are in an in insecure format and it's weird that Satoshi left them like that because Satoshi was aware of this risk. Didn't you mention I forgot in the article you mentioned that he was like aware of the risk and hash the addresses twice or something like what was the well addresses are hashed in Bitcoin as a matter of good housekeeping. Um I don't think it's because of quantum I think it's just cuz it's see but you mentioned Satoshi was aware though of quantum. Yeah, but if if Satoshi had really cared about the risk, Satoshi would have not left a million to two million coins laying about. It's crazy. Yeah. Like it's nuts. Why Why do you think they would do that? They They didn't think Bitcoin would be this successful or they thought Quana was further away or what was the

Yeah. I mean, in 2008, it wasn't seen to be But if you're Satoshi, you're building this thing in the last 50 years. You have to consider maybe Satoshi didn't they probably they presumably thought that the whole thing was upgradeable easier to upgrade like in in 2010 Satoshi couldn't have known that 15 years later as it turns out it's impossible to upgrade Bitcoin and at that time Satoshi was changing stuff in Bitcoin all the time sometimes without asking. So Satoshi and Satoshi said this on the forum. They said, "If Shaw is broken through quantum, we'll just upgrade." So Satoshi didn't realize maybe that the stakes would be what they are. Just upgrade seems so hard. Yeah. Yeah. But like during Satoshi's tenure, Satoshi left in 2010, like Bitcoin was still worth basically zero. Yeah.

We'll come back to Satoshi's coins. The the second risk you mentioned is the address reuse and there's a lot here. I think you mentioned 1/3 of the supply itself is vulnerable which is exchange cold wallets and tap routt addresses. That seems pretty crazy too. Well yeah there's different things here. One is that if you reuse an address you have now broadcasted your public key on the blockchain. So if the public key is known with sufficially powerful quantum computer, you can reverse engineer the private key out of that. So if you don't spend the Bitcoin, your public address is not revealed if they're held in a modern address type with the exception of tap routt which jeez. Bitcoin developers making taproot not quantum resistant is the craziest thing that's ever happened. How much of a oversight is that? like how easy would it have been? They knew. I went back and I looked at the discussion. They knew Luke Dash raised this objection at the time and said, "Hey guys, by the way, uh, tap routt addresses are vulnerable to quantum. This is 2021." At that point, we kind of did know that quantum would happen eventually. So, what the hell were they thinking?

Why do you think they didn't take it? Why do you think they didn't trust Luke? Luke didn't actually try and derail the process. He just pointed it out. Okay. Um but I think Bitcoin developers are not physicists you know for the most part. So their skill set is cryptography and software engineering and it's not uh being on the bleeding edge of what's happening in physics or theoretical computer science. So I think they just didn't have enough appreciation for the risk. So when you say I and I don't know if this is totally right but onethird of the supply that's addresses that have their public key revealed. Yeah. I mean it's more actually if you look at all the different categories of vulnerable wallets whether it's the abandoned P2PK Satoshi coins the address reused coins there's all these big exchange code wallets or um other uh niche categories of addresses that reveal or expose the public key like top rate for instance. I want to say it's like 6 million bitcoins. Jesus. Yeah.

But some of those can be addressed. Like if we have a fork and we're like, "Okay, everybody move your coins to quantum safe format." Most of those can be secured, but not all of those, right? What's the overall risk number? 6700 billion. You said a third, maybe a little bit higher. Yeah. I mean, it's hundreds of billions of dollars. And you know, like what you can't do is call up Satoshi and say, "Uh, hey bud, I know you've been like AWOL for a while. That's fine. We're not mad at you. Please check back in." Uh, it's really important that you come back cuz we need you to move those million plus coins ASAP, dude. Otherwise, China is going to get them. So, like if I don't know if this is accurate, but like could the Binance hot wallet you mentioned or cold wallet, whichever one it is, um could they they could transfer their Bitcoin to a new wallet, but they would never be able to spend the money because they would reveal their key.

The there is a risk that in the 10 minutes between broadcast and spend, this is a more niche risk. It's still worth thinking about. A quantum attacker could see the memp pool and they could be like, "Okay, let me quickly reverse engineer your private key from your public key and then I'm going to pretend to be you and broadcast. It can, you know, but that is kind of not that likely to happen even in the case that quantum computing occurs because we think that it would take a really long time to compute a key quantumly. So probably you wouldn't be able to get all that done in 10 minutes and also you could just send the transaction to the minor directly. So in the 10 minutes to send the transaction that's not enough time for the quantum computer to reverse engineer assuming like normal roots of development. Maybe in 30 years it would. Okay. But probably not. That's probably not the thing we have to worry about right away.

So we talked about Satoshi's coins. That's kind of like unsolvable from what we're talking about. Problem. That's right. I wrote a short story about it. Think up the best case of the worst case. So then in part two now we're talking about publicly revealed addresses though that is solvable. I would I would say it's all solvable. It's just a matter of is the Bitcoin developer community and the Bitcoin community community interested in solving it. Satoshi's coins could be solved with a fork or we just say whatever the quantum attacker gets the coins. Who cares? Um but how do we fix the address reuse ones? What do people do there?

We implement a new signature scheme in Bitcoin which uses postquantum cryptography which does exist. It's not efficient. Your key sizes are most likely way larger. So it's basically implies a block size increase which Bitcoin can handle. I mean look at Salana, right? Yeah. Salana blocks are I think Salana is like 500 times more data per second than Bitcoin. So we can handle a block size increase. So there are obviously we have to pick a postquantum scheme which is like oh this is new and untested cryptography. This is scary. Um there's a risk that the postquantum signature scheme could be classically breakable. That would be bad. Can you imagine if we were like okay everybody move over to this postquantum signature scheme. And it turns out ordinary computers can break it. But if we if you change the signature scheme that is that a hard fork or that's a soft fork?

You could do it with a soft fork, but you would need a long time for people to move over their coins voluntarily. Oh, so it doesn't retroactively help people who don't move their coins over. Well, there's a couple ways you could do it. So, probably the Bitcoin way of doing would be a soft work. You have 5 to 10 years to like, you know, wake up or wake up from your coma or get out of prison. Like, you know, Bitcoin is meant to be long. Yeah. Wealth technology, right? So, we can't just assume everyone's online. No, I Some people are like hermits, you know, they're at a monastery in Mongolia and they're on a retreat for a year. I don't know. Yeah, people are busy. No, I get it. They are. If you gave me a year to move my coins, maybe I wouldn't figure out how to do it. like got to go to five different cities and you know but the the big people would though like the Coinbases the Binancees like they would Yeah. I don't think everyone would honestly I mean this is why I'm saying we need to act now or plan now because maybe there is a quantum break in 5 years. Mhm. We need to have begun that migration.

The the crazy part though about the timeline that's like killing me is you not only need years to like figure out the fix and discuss it, but then now you're also saying even if you had it, you still need time for people to move over. That's a really long timeline. Yeah. So when you work backwards from Qday, which is like Y2K the bottom, we work backwards from Qday. Okay. Qday, let's say it's 2033. Okay. We'll be conservative, right? How long will it have taken for Bitcoin to migrate? I don't know, 5 years. Okay. How long will it have taken for us as a community to agree on the path forward? 3 years. How long will it have taken for us to test the code? A year. That takes us back to now in the past. Yeah. But we're in the present. So the numbers are not adding up anymore. No. Right.

The hard thing though is like as we both know like I feel like there always is creative software fixes that sort of come about like I'm betting on Bitcoin devs ingenuity. The fact that I still have any Bitcoin is a testament to my belief in these devs who mostly don't like me now uh getting their act together. I don't think they liked you for a couple of years. So they're extra mad. But uh I am betting that we find a creative uh solution. But really like the fundamental facts are what they are. I think this is going to happen in 10 years. Satoshi's coins can't move without a forcable basically confiscation by the community which is unprecedented. We have to rip out all the cryptography in Bitcoin which is unprecedented. We have to get every single Bitcoiner to make a transaction on chain like and for we haven't even talked about like okay well does it find out about a box like okay so you need hundreds of millions of transactions like how long does that take so is that even possible it is it just takes months if it's even ordinary and that's assuming no other transactions on the network. Yeah. So it's like the only transactions are happening are migration transactions. nothing else is happening off of them.

So like the this is by far the biggest problem Bitcoin's ever faced ever by 10 orders of magnitude. Like compare like SegWit or to this completely irrelevant nonsense, right? Yeah. Like we spent 5 years or seven years building Lightning. That was the developer priority for man. Do you remember how much funding those lightning labs companies got or like years ago? I funded some of them. that they didn't work. No, I mean at the time it made sense as an investment. It's more hindsight. This is the biggest problem Bitcoin's ever faced. This is like Godzilla compared to an ant. Okay. And uh no one wants to acknowledge that it's problem because even speaking that out loud, it's like saying Lord Voldemort's name. Like it's dangerous, right? Like shall not say his name. It's the problem that must not be named. If you say it out loud, the investors might panic. Yeah. which is I think is fine, right? Uh probably the investors should know about this. Yeah. Uh so that we can mobilize and figure it out instead of being like the turkey the day before Thanksgiving that gets suddenly executed cuz that's what's going to happen otherwise. Oh.

So Nick, what how do you like score the preparedness intensity of the Bitcoin core developers and actually fixing this issue?

One out of 100. Wow. Yeah. So, you fail. You fail at 50