Quantum Bitcoin Countdown

Every quantum conversation in Bitcoin starts from the same place: the threat is to Bitcoin, and the question is whether Bitcoin can be fixed in time. What if that's the smaller half of the story? In the [Nth] episode of The Quantum Bitcoin Podcast, Bitcoin historian Pete Rizzo and co-host Nathan Jeffay put that question to John Lillick, author of Quantum Money, an investor whose roots run back to the earliest days of both Bitcoin and Ethereum, and who argues that the machine capable of breaking today's signatures arrives on the same clock as the infrastructure built to replace the financial system outright.Episode [N] is the one that widens the lens: why Lillick separates the problem into defense and attack and thinks the industry is watching the wrong one, what the roadmaps from IonQ, IBM, DARPA and NIST actually converge on and why the gap between a startup's incentive and a government agency's matters when reading them, how the no-cloning theorem turns a quantum state into a bearer asset and what Stephen Wiesner saw in 1972 that took fifty years to become buildable, and why he thinks Bitcoin's proof of work consensus is never the thing at risk. It covers the roughly seven million coins sitting in vulnerable address types, the case he made publicly that Bitcoin is a military target and what a state actor would actually gain, quantum memory as the dependency that gates everything, and the quantum internet's missing modem moment. It closes with the two things he cannot put a date on: whether Ethereum can execute a migration he compares to engineering a jumbo jet in mid flight, and how far ahead the capability may already be in hands that have no interest in telling us.The Quantum Bitcoin Podcast is a series examining the quantum threat to Bitcoin, designed to be watched in sequence. Each episode opens with a discussion between the hosts, presents extended interviews with expert guests on a single key question, and closes with a recap of how the evidence has changed their thinking.Links referenced:Quantum Money — John Lillick [book link]"Bitcoin Is The Perfect Military Target" — John Lillick [article link]Project Eleven — https://www.projecteleven.com/https://www.ibm.com/quantum/technologyhttps://ionq.com/resources/ionq-technology-roadmaphttps://www.nist.gov/pqcryptohttps://psiquantum.com/Cryptography and physicshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theoremhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wiesnerhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithmhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_Curve_Digital_Signature_Algorithmhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_key_distributionhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_networkhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_memoryGUESTSJohn Lillick is the author of Quantum Money. He was involved in Bitcoin and Ethereum from their earliest days, worked with Polygon, and now invests in quantum technology as a venture capitalist. He argues that the arrival of cryptographically relevant quantum computers is only half the transition, and that the quantum internet will underpin a financial system anchored in the laws of physics rather than in distributed consensus. He is currently writing a second book, Quantum Money for the Banks.FOLLOWThe Quantum Bitcoin Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@QuantumBitcoinPodcastPete Rizzo: https://x.com/pete_rizzo_New episodes release weekly. Subscribe to follow the full series.

The Bitcoin community has an assumption it rarely examines: that doing nothing is the neutral option. Leave the abandoned coins alone, touch nobody's property, and you've kept faith with the protocol. What if inaction is the thing that breaks it? In the 6th episode of The Quantum Bitcoin Podcast, Bitcoin historian Pete Rizzo and co-host Nathan Jeffay put that question to Yehuda Lindell, Head of Cryptography at Coinbase and professor of computer science at Bar-Ilan University, who started this debate in the don't-touch-anyone's-property camp and ended at the opposite extreme — not for economic reasons, but moral ones.Episode 6 is the one that stops being about cryptography: why "not your keys, not your coins" actually means the reverse, and what happens to that promise when signing no longer proves ownership. It covers the roughly 1.7 million Bitcoin sitting in the abandoned class across some 20,000 early public keys, why Lindell thinks an attacker with a quantum computer dumps rather than sells slowly, and the line he draws between coins that are genuinely lost — gold at the bottom of the ocean, he says, and he has no ethical problem with someone taking those — and coins whose owners simply cannot move them. It walks through what a partial freeze could look like using hash pre-image proofs that need no external registry, why the Hourglass proposal solves the cutoff-date problem better than it solves the market-dump problem, and an idea Lindell raises for the first time on this recording: leaving low-value addresses untouched because no quantum attacker would spend the machine time on them.The Quantum Bitcoin Podcast is a series examining the quantum threat to Bitcoin, designed to be watched in sequence. Each episode opens with a discussion between the hosts, presents extended interviews with expert guests on a single key question, and closes with a recap of how the evidence has changed their thinking.Links referenced:https://www.coinbase.com/blog/coinbase-quantum-advisory-councilhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithmhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover%27s_algorithmhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_Curve_Digital_Signature_Algorithmhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preimage_attackhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proofhttps://bitcoinops.org/https://delvingbitcoin.org/CHAPTERS00:00 Cold open01:00 Introducing Yehuda Lindell01:40 Why it's the abandoned coins, not Satoshi's02:45 How many coins are actually at stake05:17 The two extreme positions07:07 Why he changed his mind07:51 What "not your keys, not your coins" really means10:30 The market impact argument11:45 How a quantum attacker would behave16:50 Does knowing a key make it yours?21:06 The bank analogy25:07 Lost coins versus coins that can't move27:40 Proving ownership without elliptic curves29:46 The Hourglass proposal32:33 What "freezing" actually means34:59 Why inaction doesn't preserve anything38:52 The moment his position flipped41:32 Coldcard, and what the protocol does and doesn't promise44:22 The people he'd help if he could47:19 Separate the two questions49:26 Rizzo and Nathan wrap up52:20 The Coinbase Quantum Advisory Council paperGUESTSYehuda Lindell is Head of Cryptography and an Engineering Fellow at Coinbase, and a professor of computer science at Bar-Ilan University, currently on leave. He is a co-author on the position papers published by the Coinbase Quantum Advisory Council, the independent body Coinbase convened to assess quantum computing's impact on blockchains, including its report on the abandoned-coins question discussed in this episode. His work spans secure multiparty computation, threshold cryptography and applied cryptographic engineering.FOLLOWThe Quantum Bitcoin Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@QuantumBitcoinPodcastPete Rizzo: https://x.com/pete_rizzo_Coinbase: https://www.coinbase.com/New episodes release weekly. Subscribe to follow the full series.

Bitcoin's quantum problem has always come with an assumption attached: fixing it means changing Bitcoin. What if it doesn't? In the [Nth] episode of The Quantum Bitcoin Podcast, Bitcoin historian Pete Rizzo and co-host Nathan Jeffay put that question to Avihu Levy, Chief Product Officer at StarkWare, who spent his evenings, weekends and holidays proving that a quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction can be built today, inside the rules Bitcoin already has, with no soft fork and no consensus battle.Episode 5 is the one that doesn't ask permission: how Quantum Safe Bitcoin shifts security from elliptic curves to hash pre-images without touching a line of consensus code, why the trick lives entirely inside legacy script and its 201-opcode, 10,000-byte constraints, how revealing eight secrets out of a hundred makes a forged signature worthless to the attacker who forged it, and what that costs in transaction size, in dollars per spend, and in transactions that no ordinary node will relay. It covers the limitations Avihu puts up front himself, what a wallet would have to hold, and how Robin Linus's Binohash became the missing piece after a commenter dismissed it as useless. It closes with the two things the mechanism cannot solve: what happens when a working workaround becomes an argument against ever fixing the protocol properly, and what Bitcoin does about the coins that will never move.The Quantum Bitcoin Podcast is a series examining the quantum threat to Bitcoin, designed to be watched in sequence. Each episode opens with a discussion between the hosts, presents extended interviews with expert guests on a single key question, and closes with a recap of how the evidence has changed their thinking.Links referenced:https://starkware.co/blog/quantum-safe-bitcoin-transactions-without-softforks/https://github.com/avihu28/Quantum-Safe-Bitcoin-Transactionshttps://bitcoinops.org/https://delvingbitcoin.org/https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawikihttps://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0340.mediawikihttps://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0341.mediawikiCryptography and historyhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithmhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover%27s_algorithmhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_Curve_Digital_Signature_Algorithmhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamport_signaturehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIPEMDhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-2https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preimage_attackPresented in partnership with Starkware.CHAPTERS00:00 Cold open01:00 Introducing Avihu Levy03:34 How QSB came about08:19 The limitations up front11:47 Signatures without a protocol change16:07 Robin Linus and Binohash19:00 A quantum safe spend23:43 What wallets would have to hold26:38 Size, cost and non-standard transactions30:03 What QSB does to the debate32:55 When a workaround becomes an excuse35:05 The field of proposals37:13 The coins that never move41:57 Why he is optimistic45:03 Rizzo and Nathan wrap upGUESTSAvihu Levy is Chief Product Officer at StarkWare. In April 2026 he published "Quantum-Safe Bitcoin Transactions Without Softforks," introducing Quantum Safe Bitcoin (QSB), a scheme that makes Bitcoin transactions resistant to an adversary running Shor's algorithm without any change to the protocol. QSB operates entirely within existing legacy script constraints and builds on Binohash (Linus, 2026), replacing reliance on elliptic curve security with hash pre-image assumptions. The paper and script generation tools are published open source alongside it.FOLLOWThe Quantum Bitcoin Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@QuantumBitcoinPodcastPete Rizzo: https://x.com/pete_rizzo_Starkware: https://starkware.co/Avihu Levy: https://x.com/avihu28New episodes release weekly. Subscribe to follow the full series.

Can Bitcoin's signatures actually be replaced, and what does the replacement cost? In the [Nth] episode of The Quantum Bitcoin Podcast, Bitcoin historian Pete Rizzo and co-host Nathan Jeffay put that question to Jonas Nick, Blockstream's Director of Research, who has spent the past year and a half building the smallest post-quantum signature scheme anyone has proposed for Bitcoin and who maintained Bitcoin's secp256k1 library for over seven years before that.

Links referenced:https://blockstream.com/quantum/https://blog.blockstream.com/op_checkshrincs-a-hash-based-signature-opcode-for-post-quantum-bitcoin/https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/2203https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/shrincs-post-quantum-signatures-for-bitcoin/https://blog.blockstream.com/searching-for-shrincs-parameters/https://blog.blockstream.com/blockstream-quarterly-update-q1-2026/https://blog.blockstream.com/blockstream-quarterly-update-q2-2026/https://bitcoinops.org/https://delvingbitcoin.org/https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawikihttps://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0340.mediawikihttps://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0341.mediawikiCryptography and historyhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithmhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover%27s_algorithmhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPHINCS%2Bhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_Curve_Digital_Signature_Algorithmhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schnorr_signaturehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkle_signature_schemehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamport_signaturehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattice-based_cryptographyhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-2Presented in partnership with Starkware.CHAPTERS00:00 Meet the expert: Jonas Nick00:32 A year and a half inside the problem01:59 It isn't only the signatures. Lightning too.03:40 The assumption everything rests on04:47 What cryptographers stopped researching05:27 Why a plan is needed regardless of timing06:16 If Bitcoin does nothing: every coin, gone07:13 Why this needs a consensus change08:39 The people who say it will never happen10:01 Bitcoin as a social construct11:24 The government's post-quantum billions13:12 Why NIST's use case doesn't transfer14:42 Why hash-based is the conservative bet15:00 100x larger signatures15:37 Seven transactions per second becomes half of one16:52 There is no free lunch17:03 What breaks: BIP-32, silent payments, MuSig, FROST18:01 Verification time and who stops running nodes18:56 Signing time and the hardware wallet problem20:50 No reinsurance22:42 No silver bullet23:06 SHRINCS and the statefulness trade-off23:19 Five to ten times larger, seven down to three25:06 Who actually pays for this26:04 Why he won't bundle a block size increase27:05 Four megabytes was never the right number29:35 What SHRINCS actually is35:38 Why Bitcoin's usage pattern makes this work37:36 Already running on Liquid38:38 What Liquid doesn't protect39:47 The next step is a BIP41:23 Nobody knows what rough consensus means43:21 What changed in the last six months44:17 Where to follow the discussionGUESTSJonas Nick is Director of Research at Blockstream, where he leads the post-quantum signature work. With cryptographer Mikhail Kudinov he designed SHRINCS, a hash-based signature scheme producing 324-byte signatures whose security rests entirely on SHA-256, and SHRIMPS, its multi-device counterpart. In May 2026 he published OP_CHECKSHRINCS, a proposed Bitcoin opcode that would verify those signatures through an extension of the Taproot tree. FOLLOWThe Quantum Bitcoin Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@QuantumBitcoinPodcastPete Rizzo: https://x.com/pete_rizzo_Starkware: https://starkware.co/Jonas Nick: https://x.com/n1cklerNew episodes release weekly. Subscribe to follow the full series.

What actually happens to Bitcoin the day a quantum computer arrives? In the third episode of The Quantum Bitcoin Podcast, Bitcoin historian Pete Rizzo and co-host Nathan Jeffay put that question to Jameson Lopp, the Bitcoin security researcher who has spent the past year writing the attack scenarios out in full and who authored BIP-361, the first Bitcoin Improvement Proposal of his 14 years in Bitcoin.

Episode three maps what the attack actually looks like: why a quantum attacker works in silence rather than in public, how roughly six blocks of block space could sweep 95% of the most valuable exposed addresses before anyone knows it is happening, what Lopp heard when he asked quantum computing companies directly whether they would take vulnerable coins, why address reuse has already exposed around 30% of all Bitcoin, and why he expects roughly 2.6 million coins to never migrate at all. It closes with the uncomfortable part: what deprecating elliptic curve cryptography would mean for people who cannot move their coins, why Lopp thinks the real constraint is not the computer but the decade Bitcoin needs to agree on anything, and what he actually wants to see happen on Q-Day.

The Quantum Bitcoin Podcast is a series examining the quantum threat to Bitcoin, designed to be watched in sequence. Each episode opens with a discussion between the hosts, presents extended interviews with expert guests on a single key question, and closes with a recap of how the evidence has changed their thinking.

Presented in partnership with Starkware.

CHAPTERS
00:00 Cold open
01:24 What this episode covers
02:08 Rizzo and Nathan set up the question
06:40 Meet the expert: Jameson Lopp
07:38 Why quantum is half a dozen problems at once
10:35 Q-Day and the real target: Bitcoin's signatures
14:16 What a quantum attacker does first
15:58 Six blocks: how the sweep plays out
17:44 Why nobody announces a working quantum computer
20:19 The board meeting: asking the quantum companies directly
22:47 Enigma, salvage law, and the softer target
25:04 Why Lopp refuses to predict a date
27:50 Safe until you spend: the mempool attack
29:44 Address reuse and the 30% already exposed
31:38 The migration math: 17.5 million move, 2.6 million don't
33:41 Why the upgrade takes a decade
36:19 Why Lopp rejects the collective action framing
38:24 A systemic threat, not an individual one
43:49 Deprecating elliptic curve cryptography
46:38 Rescue paths and why nobody gets rug pulled
49:06 Setting the record straight on Satoshi's coins
53:12 Every other chain has this problem
56:40 What Lopp wants to happen on Q-Day
57:30 Recap: what we learned about the attack scenarios

GUESTS
Jameson Lopp is a Bitcoin security researcher and co-founder of Casa, with 14 years in Bitcoin and a decade working in Bitcoin security, previously at BitGo. He is the author of BIP-361, which proposes deprecating elliptic curve cryptography on a fixed timeline to force migration before a quantum attacker arrives, and he publishes his research at lopp.net.

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The Quantum Bitcoin Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@QuantumBitcoinPodcast
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Starkware: https://starkware.co/
Jameson Lopp: https://x.com/lopp

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How far away is a quantum computer that can break Bitcoin? In the second episode of The Quantum Bitcoin Podcast, Bitcoin historian Pete Rizzo and co-host Nathan Jeffay put the series' central question to Ethan Heilman, the Cloudflare researcher and Bitcoin cryptographer who co-authored BIP-360, the proposal that put quantum security on Bitcoin's agenda.

Episode two maps the threat itself: how Heilman went from dismissing quantum computers as science fiction to treating them as a this-decade problem, why he refuses to name a date, what the idea of Q-Day gets wrong, which parts of Bitcoin are actually exposed and which survive untouched, and why the NSA, the banks, and nearly half of web traffic have already gone post-quantum while Bitcoin debates. It closes with the warning signs to watch for, and why whoever breaks the cryptography first may choose to stay silent.

The Quantum Bitcoin Podcast is a series examining the quantum threat to Bitcoin, designed to be watched in sequence. Each episode opens with a discussion between the hosts, presents extended interviews with expert guests on a single key question, and closes with a recap of how the evidence has changed their thinking.

Presented in partnership with Starkware.

CHAPTERS
00:00 Cold open
01:00 What this episode covers
01:30 Rizzo and Nathan set up the question
05:49 Meet the expert: Ethan Heilman
06:16 From sci-fi to serious: how Heilman changed his mind
09:11 Why no one can give you a date
12:40 The state of quantum hardware in 2026
17:11 Q-Day: why there is no single moment
20:29 What post-quantum cryptography actually is
22:29 Why mining and SHA-256 survive
26:37 The real target: Bitcoin's signatures
29:46 Is there any science behind 2030?
31:22 Who has already migrated: the NSA, the banks, the web
33:22 Store now, break later
34:31 Why an attacker would listen, not steal
39:15 Choosing Bitcoin's post-quantum signatures
48:28 Tsunami warnings and the final signal
57:00 Recap: what we learned about the quantum timeline

GUESTS
Ethan Heilman is a researcher at Cloudflare and a Bitcoin developer and cryptographer whose work goes back to the earliest days of the project. He is the creator of TumbleBit and a co-author of BIP-360, the proposal that put post-quantum security on Bitcoin's development agenda.

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The Quantum Bitcoin Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@QuantumBitcoinPodcast
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Starkware: https://starkware.co/
Ethan Heilman: https://x.com/Ethan_Heilman

New episodes release weekly. Subscribe to follow the full series.

What is a quantum computer, and does it pose a genuine threat to Bitcoin? In the first episode of The Quantum Bitcoin Podcast, Bitcoin historian Pete Rizzo and co-host Nathan Jeffay begin a structured inquiry into the question hanging over the industry: whether, when, and how quantum computing could break the cryptography that secures Bitcoin.Episode one establishes the foundations:nwhat separates a quantum computer from every machine that came before it: qubits, superposition, and the capacity to represent an entire field of possible states at once.The Quantum Bitcoin Podcast is a series examining the quantum threat to Bitcoin, designed to be watched in sequence. Each episode opens with a discussion between the hosts, presents extended interviews with expert guests on a single key question, and closes with a recap of how the evidence has changed their thinking.Presented in partnership with Starkware.CHAPTERS00:00 Cold open00:46 What this episode covers01:10 Introducing the series and co-host Nathan05:46 Meet the experts: Rob Hamilton and Brandon Black06:38 Classical vs quantum: what a qubit actually is08:06 Why quantum computing threatens Bitcoin's cryptography09:39 Shor's algorithm: what it can and cannot break11:53 Inside the machines: superconducting, neutral atom, trapped ion, photonic15:03 Theory vs practice: the factoring gap18:09 Q-Day: definitions and disputed timelines21:57 Could governments be hiding a quantum breakthrough?24:04 What a quantum attack on Bitcoin would actually require25:56 Post-quantum cryptography: hash-based signatures and BIP-36029:33 Recap: what we learned about quantum computersGUESTSRob Hamilton is the co-founder of AnchorWatch, a Bitcoin custody and insurance company focused on the long-term security of keys and coins.Brandon Black is a Bitcoin educator who has spent years making the protocol's most difficult concepts accessible.FOLLOWThe Quantum Bitcoin Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@QuantumBitcoinPodcastPete Rizzo: https://x.com/pete_rizzo_Starkware: https://starkware.co/Rob Hamilton: https://x.com/Rob1HamBrandon Black: https://x.com/reardencodeNew episodes release weekly. Subscribe to follow the full series.