QUANTUM SURVIVAL POLITICS
THE FIX IS EASY. THE POLITICS AREN’T.
THE EASY PART
The technicals of quantum decryption are scary, but there seem to be pretty clear solutions. Bitcoin’s basic architecture of miners and wallets would remain basically the same after a relatively plug-and-play switch to post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) schemes like Falcon or NIST’s ML-DSA standard.
THE HARD PART
The problem is that this upgrade can’t be executed with just a standard update to Bitcoin clients. Jameson Lopp — whose judgment on Bitcoin I may trust more than anyone else’s alive — last year co-authored a migration pathway that relies heavily on user-initiated migration to PQC wallets.
This is ripe for chaos and frustration, with some huge portion of Bitcoin holders sure to miss even the generous five-year cliff proposed by the Lopp group. And that deadline might need to be shortened in light of Google’s new findings.
CONSENSUS IS BROKEN
Any PQC upgrade will be a test, appropriately enough, of the Bitcoin community’s ability to reach consensus. Personally, I’m not terribly optimistic on that front, because the past five years have eroded the actual pro-Bitcoin community so badly in favor of financialization and political maneuvering.
And indeed, the post-quantum update push already has contrarian voices: Samson Mow, a very influential Bitcoin “OG,” warned this week that “rushing a fix [for quantum] is the worst move.”
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For crypto, the U.S. dollar is like a warm hug. Wrapped in a stablecoin, it’s the safe haven where traders rotate in the storm of largely-vibes-based speculation.
So at a moment like this it’s important to take a slight step back and look at the big picture: The dollar itself is in serious trouble. Just by the numbers, USD/Euro is off about 14% since the beginning of the year. USD is down 16% vs. the Brazilian Real, more than 11% against AUD, and nearly 7% against offshore Yuan.
That started well before the Iran invasion, with moves like China’s ongoing Treasury dump fueled by fears of U.S. domestic instability. But Iran has definitely made things even more fragile.
Aaron Brown wrote for Bloomberg this week about the eroding political sands that are exacerbating what was already substantial weakness going in to Trump’s war on Iran. In short, Iran’s retaliatory bombing of the Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, and Dubai is undermining the (largely implicit) security guarantees that keep Gulf states denominating the oil trade in dollars. At the same time, China is paying in Yuan for Iranian oil – an initiative that could well survive, or even expand, after Trump gets bored with whatever it is he’s trying to do over there.
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A few months ago I published a pretty-well regarded book about Sam Bankman-Fried. One of its main arguments (pretty uncontroversial now) is that Sam is a sociopath, without any internal sense of right and wrong, and who lies without shame because he actually believes whatever would most benefit him if it were true.
The same, to some degree, seems to describe his parents. Barbara Fried and Joe Bankman — both material accessories to their son's crimes — recently appeared in an interview segment on CNN pushing for a retrial, on the shifting basis that "the money was always there" and that there was some ill-defined judicial conspiracy against him.
The current push for a re-trial is the last feasible exit for SBF, now that Trump has said he won't pardon SBF, and after a catastrophically embarrassing appeal last year. And to be clear, the new trial won't happen either.
Sam's parents repeat yet again the same nonsense claims that have seemingly insulated them from reality for three years now. On whether Sam is "a crypto version of Madoff," Joe replies that "Sam was a legitimate businessman." The success of Sam's businesses, of course, was built on fraud and malfeasance dating back to 2018, when SBF was nearly kicked out of Alameda Research for mismanagement and sexual misconduct.
Barbara describes Sam as "generous and thoughtful in the extreme," despite examples of his rampant cruelty including his leak of Caroline Ellison's diary — which got him slapped down for witness tampering. She also fantasizes that Sam "almost succeeded" at making "a real difference in this world" — no acknowledgment that SBF later admitted his "effective altruist" stance was a performance to improve his brand.
The lack of shame, more than anything, characterizes the broader moral degradation of our era. Joe and Barbara spare not a word or thought for the tens of thousands of people materially harmed by their son.
"Sam is one of the most brilliant, talented young men of his generation," Barbara concludes, from whatever planet she lives on. "He ought to be regarded as a huge asset going forward, for the country." That, at least, seems fair enough: Donald Trump and Sam Bankman-Fried have practically everything in common.escription text goes here
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In the year 2026, one of the most disgusting privileges of seniority is freedom from the 12-hour news cycle (generously) of social media. I can take my time to savor the Arkham Asylum lineup of purported crypto "True Believers" that graced a Vanity Fair story last week. The photo at the head of the story made the sardonic rounds of Crypto Twitter/X, thanks to both the absurd comic-book-villain getups of Meltem Demirors, Olaf Carlson-Wee, and Mike Novogratz — and frankly for my money thanks to the mere presence of Cathie Wood, whose vapid messianic capital incinerator ARK Innovation ETF has for half a decade enjoyed the media treatment one would give a hedge fund operated by a Make-a-Wish kid from his terminal cancer ward. On the fashion front: I'm taking the over. Crypto people are and should be freaks, and even in the dregs of the current bear market they have enough money to, as VF's incredible title had it, "demand to be taken seriously." And yes, that really is the headline — a reference to the infamous Arrested Development Alliance of Magicians bit. Of the lot, Meltem Demirors best embodies what an uncompromisingly weird but still Wall Street-friendly-ish crypto sector should aspire to. She's deadly serious about some of the deeper values of the space — her quote to VF that "Really what we were building was a religious movement" is simultaneously self-satire and completely sincere. At the same time, she is more than game to indulge in the cyberpunk camp of what we might call crypto's metanarrative. The VF story itself is a fine overview of that metanarrative so far — a snapshot of committed proselytizers and how far they've come. It's worth a read to get caught up on the landscape, but the only real standout moment is the disrespect both participants and writer dish to Devin Finzer and his wife, Yu-Chi Lyra Kuo, the leaders of OpenSea, who come off as both the least significant and most self-important and vain of the entire roster. They don't belong here, and they act like they know it.
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Last November, C-SPAN came out to Powerhouse Arena to tape the release event for Stealing the Future, when David was in conversation with his former CoinDesk editor Ben Schiller. The video is now live — if you're looking for an overview of the book's core ideas, watch it here.