Square buys $170M worth of bitcoins

Edit to add: Glad instead of getting 3 downvotes right off the bat, people decided to spend effort into writing thoughtful comments.

Which means you need to fork early and abandon any wallets that don’t do a transaction with the new system. That’s not the kind of transition that works with just the miners involved.

Work is on the way to standardize a quantum-safe digital signature, but it takes years to get the best solution, and right now there's no time pressure.

If BTC has a multi-trillion-dollar market cap, and quantum exploitation occurs, the only thing that backs the currency (trust) vanishes, and the values quickly drops to zero.

If we are reliant on BTC for global finances in the future, as many are proposing, this could result in a global depression.

This might be the single biggest problem quantum computing could bring us, short of the "talking to alternate universes" theoretical use cases some people are talking about (that probably won't happen).

Encrypted data can be re-encrypted to be quantum-secure. The vulnerability is temporary

A compromised blockchain dies forever. A brand new quantum-secure blockchain would need to be invented.

That doesn't mean the Public key has ever been exposed online and therefore not true. Look up cold storage best practices, I'm not going to line it out for you but what you said is entirely false and built on a flawed premise.

> 2. Relatively early, the blockchain shifted to only storing the hash of the public key, which seems less susceptible to a quantum computing attack. The risk in these wallets is that once you want to transfer bitcoins out, you need to temporarily publish your public key - this key is not stored on the blockchain, but might be stored by future attackers. In addition, at some point getting your private key will be so fast that the moment you publish a transaction request you'll many fake requests asking to transfer to another wallet.

You started it off with a valid observation, but then led into a non-sequitur, what does that have to do with Bitcoin's vulnerability if as we just said 1 is not true if done correctly.

> The trick is that this needs to be deployed before attacks exist, and people need to transfer their Bitcoin into the new wallets.

While I agree security on mainchain is an issue, we should dhave had taproot long ago, and mixing by default by now as tx fees get more and more expensive--all you're doing is mixing it with other adddresses to make the sum indistinguishable from it's source and that cost adds up as the netowrk gets more expensive to operate on.

But also your premise is at odds with the fact that most of the traffic will be done on LN moving forward, and the bitcoin (token) will locked out of the network's mainchain (Bitcoin) to operate on LN and thus does not require your 'solution.'

In short, these are non-concerns.

Note how I didn't downvote you, and instead I challenged your arguments in order for others to benefit from this conversation, instead of being a child and downvoting simply because I disagree with your points.

Edit: HAHA!

Nobody knows except the people doing it.

They said the same thing at $100.

If BTC was USD$1m per, that would make a satoshi one US cent. To me that makes 1m the hard psychological limit, not 50k or 100k.

Doenst seem like that's the case here at all, Square buys lots of Bitcoin as they offer it via CASH. Also, they didn't buy at the peak if they expect it to go higher in value, which Jack of all the billionaire class knows why and how it will.

> Not to mention an old generation crypto with dubious value on the face of 3rd generation crypto that does not damage the environment and does not have the same scaling issues. It's like considering some old tech as which has dubious value just because it was invented first.

Ok, this is starting to make sense now...

> Like overvaluing a gas car when an electric exists and is the wave of the future. What do these companies know that we plebs don't.

Horrible analogy, but it's an opportunity to explain relative value theory I understand cars better than most here by a large margin, short of being an engineer, as in designed stuff for OEMs, I've done just about everything you can do in the auto industry, including Motorsports. In with manufactures with both ICE and EV programs, btw.

And the fact that you will never understand why pristine a Toyota 2000GT, or Ferrari 250 GT California will be coveted and worth millions of X whether it's driven or not shows what a shallow understanding of the analogy that you're trying to describe actually is.

Value and worth are relative and subjective concepts, and while I KNOW bitcoin's utility is superior to fiat in every conceivable way as I helped build fintech solutions with this tech that fiat could not do, that led to monumental legislation and reversals of laws in the US that we all deal with every day, it underscores that utility is relative to it's users.

Square has lots of fiat, it loses value everyday, and it lost its value on its stock price today; but in a DCA model I bet their BTC holdings is still in the double if not triple digit returns given how early they got in in the high hundreds if I recall correctly. And Jack was playing with this tech pretty early, he never gave any dates buy its safe to say he was in before the 2013's rally that made all the non-tech people take even care.

So, what 'dubious value' are you talking about here? It made their earnings hold value when the OVERTLY manipulated stock price dipped this week.

Perhaps you are right with your gas car analogy... Or perhaps Bitcoin will be more like the relational database from the 70s which, despite being derided by the NoSQL crowd, remains king to this day.

All time high yes, but we don't know that this is a peak