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At least Adam Back is already publicly known to be worth at least tens of millions anywyas. Many of those dozens/hundreds of other guesses are not so lucky.

If the private key still exists, the BTC would be worth more like 10s of billions though. I choose to believe the key is long gone from this world though, whoever originally had it.

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Long gone until quantum computers crack all the legacy wallets

At which point the bitcoin in legacy wallets is clearly worthless

It would be insane for the Bitcoin protocol to make Bitcoin in non QR wallets worthless.

I was curious about this point when discussion came up on HN just recently. I don't see how you could "assign" each non-QR address a new quantum resistant address unless they "claim" it themselves somehow. What can possibly happen to an uneducated mom-and-pop bitcoin holder who never takes up their claim? Someone else who cracks their private key would be in an identical position to them w.r.t authenticating themselves and doing such a claim first - thus it becomes a race

The parent claim is that once quantum cracking becomes real, there would be no more bitcoin in non-QR wallet (because the quants would steal it all).

The protocol isn't what determines how much a coin is worth

That's not really what GP was saying, but since you brought it up I think it would actually be insane NOT to - otherwise Bitcoin has an extremely unstable period as 100s of billions of $ worth of locked up BTC becomes instantly fluid the moment the non-QR wallets are crackable.

I.e. it makes sense to have a long term planned migration of what's active rather than any type of instantaneous rush/change.


It's all about timing.



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