100% The quantum solve is not required to pull out of this bear; it is a workable plan, a motivated community, and a termination of hand-waiving away the quantum risk.
BTC is not down because of Saylor selling
It's down because of quantum. Still
There is no such thing as a "store of value" whose current terminal value is exactly zero
We'll find bottom when a viable plan to implement quantum resistance emerges
Talk about OP_RETURN and $MSTR imploding/Saylor selling BTC makes me bearish.
Not because those are meaningful issues (they are not), but because we are not talking about the issues that big money cares about: Will quantum make my investment near valueless in 4 years?
Until the Bitcoin community signals that it gets that and it has a clear plan for it, I think we have only paid ahead.
$MSTR blowing up and failing would be the biggest blow to Bitcoin. — not that it would kill Bitcoin, but it would severely hurt the credibility it’s built over the last number of years.
This would be max pain.
There is gulf between what the code-academics care about and what is needed to push network adoption forward.
Institutions and big money care about quantum and AI.
If the narrative here changed to:
1. How to make Bitcoin quantum-proof and
2. How Bitcoin is a perfect companion to AI,
Much of the current pain would be behind us.
Script-expanders are saying bitcoin would be more valuable if it was more flexible.
Filter-proponents are saying bitcoin would be more valuable if it was tighter.
Nobody I talk to in institutions is referencing either thing. They're talking about quantum risk or AI distraction. Same for retail outside of our bubble; they're in tech stock speculation land.
Solutions aren't appreciated until problems are understood and felt.
History has always been mutable based on who is in power. The ability to create an unalterable history is a small and simple thing that can change the world.
Bitcoin Ordinals are not competing with fine art.
Bitcoin Ordinals are not competing with NFTs.
Bitcoin Ordinals are competing with civilization's entire concept of ownershipand winning by default because nothing else is immutable. 🟠🌊
JUST IN: 🇺🇸 Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the U.S. Government has seized $1 billion of Iran's crypto:
"Just outright grabbed the wallets. Some of them may be typing in right now and might not realize their wallet had been grabbed."
This is a 110 IQ take.
The 140 IQ take is that Saylor doesn’t own any bitcoin himself - it is owned by shareholders who have confidence in his ability to acquire more Bitcoin - and that is just corporate adoption of Bitcoin as savings tech, which is a prerequisite for hyperbitcoinization.
The 160 IQ take is that Saylor, by packaging Bitcoin into corporate securities with different risk profiles, has done more to democratize and distribute Bitcoin than any person since Satoshi himself. People who own $STRC are, without knowing it, using bitcoin:native to save, but at a risk profile that is acceptable to them.
Michael Saylor isn’t preventing anyone from owning bitcoin - and he, more than anyone, tells you to do so - but he is opening up Bitcoin to people and pools of capital that previously could not access it.
Bitcoin is trading at a discount b/c of the quantum risk overhang.
Fix it quickly --> short squeeze, positive revaluation
Delay/denial --> widening quantum discount.
BIP-361
A. 3 years till spends to quantum-vulnerable addresses are forbidden.
B. 2 more years till those addresses are unusable.
C. Recovery of frozen coins after the five years will be the ideological debate.
We can deal with C later.
The vast majority of holders, especially miners and institutions, want A and B, whether they say it or not.
Tick-tock.
BIP-361 (https://t.co/TBiP3I5Me9) in one sentence: it tackles the incentive problem of the Post-Quantum migration, how you actually get holders to move, without trying to settle the technical parameters of it (which signature scheme, which output type). Those are deferred to other BIPs.
It defines three phases:
- Phase A (~3 years after activation): new outputs to ECDSA/Schnorr addresses are forbidden. You can still spend from legacy, but only into post-quantum scripts. The vulnerable surface stops growing.
- Phase B (2 years after Phase A): a flag-day that makes ECDSA/Schnorr spends invalid altogether. Unmigrated UTXOs are effectively frozen.
- Phase C (TBD): a recovery path for legitimate owners of those frozen funds.
The A → B logic is clean: cap the exposure, then sunset it. Phase C is where it gets interesting.
In a post-quantum world, "knowing the private key" is no longer proof of ownership, a CRQC can derive it from the public key just as well as the legitimate owner. Recovery therefore needs a secret quantum computers cannot reach.
The elegant idea hinted at in the BIP is a zero-knowledge proof of BIP-39 seed phrase ownership. The BIP-39 → BIP-32 derivation is a one-way hash chain, quantum-secure: a CRQC can invert ECDSA, but it cannot invert the seed derivation. The owner proves "I know the seed behind this UTXO" without revealing it; the chain verifies the proof and releases the funds. This ZK would have to be Quantum resistant to avoid arbirary proof forgery (STARK is our friend).
This is doubly attractive: it solves recovery, and it forces Bitcoin to natively verify ZK proofs, unlocking a much broader design space (validity-rollup settlement, succinct proofs, privacy upgrades).
There's a catch, though, that the BIP itself acknowledges. BIP-39 was only introduced in 2013, and BIP-32 in late 2012. UTXOs created before then, including most P2PK coins, whose public keys are already exposed on-chain, were generated from raw, individually managed private keys. There is no seed phrase to prove. For these coins, ZK recovery is structurally impossible, and the BIP-361 authors explicitly fall back on an Hourglass-style mechanism (rate-limited spending) to handle them.
So BIP-361 is, in my view, the right scaffolding. But Phase C is where the real political and ethical questions of the migration actually live, and ZK-of-seed only solves the easier half.
Ordinals are not just NFTs on Bitcoin.
They are primitives for permissionless digital property: artifacts, collectibles, publishing, provenance, credentials, memberships, markets, and organizations.
That expands Bitcoin beyond monetary settlement into property, rights, and coordination.
Bitcoin has long been sound money. Ordinals extend its role as a settlement layer for digital civilization.
🟧◉