Instead, you get a chaotic mix of timelines. You’ll have early adopters upgrading immediately, laggards waiting until the last minute, and massive custodians or exchanges managing complex migrations. Then there are the inactive wallets and millions of genuinely lost coins that can't move, leaving a massive honeypot of vulnerable targets on the old chain.
That’s the real coordination nightmare. The success of a post-quantum transition doesn't just rely on math; it relies on game theory. How do you design incentives that convince enough of the network to migrate in time, without compromising Bitcoin's core principles of immutability and opt-in consensus?
The technical threat gets all the headlines, but the economic migration is the real final boss. That's the part that actually deserves our attention
Fuck off with more fearmongering, this doesn't matter at all. There is no nightmare, there is no chaos, there is nothing at all.
People are responsible for their own coins and they have the freedom to decide what they want to do.
If they do not update in time and their coins get compromised it is only their own fault and the network couldn't care less at all about it. This is a terrible post by an user who does not even understand the basics of Bitcoin, it seems like an attempt to farm merit by users that may give merit for technical posts.
Well, in theory, we could have a gentleman's agreement and deal with this without fees reaching $100 again, especially since the migration itself won't be that much bigger in size with standard inputs, so we could prepare for this
- exchanges consolidating their inputs prior to the deployment, so they don't need to immediately use the funds in QC-resistant addresses
- users pausing their spending habits for a while
- people with addresses not under imminent threat, with no spent inputs in their address, not rushing to be the first ones to move
- and so on
While your examples are good, this only helps if the size is only somewhat larger. If you have keys that are 5 or 10 times larger, it does not solve the issue at all. Still, why would anyone care about any of this?
It could only become an issue if there is a very time sensitive urgency of migration,
in all other cases it does not matter at all. Here is an example with random numbers to illustrate a point: Let's say that we get quantum resistant addresses in 2027, and the first working quantum computer in 2030. There will be a full 3 years worth of time to migrate to this new scheme, there is no urgency and there is no rush. There may be a very big and long queue of migration, but simply wait your turn and it will pass.
Any kind of panicking and rushing will lead to errors, overpaying and unnecessary drama and chaos. Also remember, the size of outputs is not the same size of inputs so the
real issue of capacity does not start during the migration -- it starts after the migration, once users that using these addresses. Creating outputs that are quantum-resistant is much cheaper than spending them in many post-quantum schemes. So you have the transient time of migration, and later you could have a severely reduced TPS depending on the exact scheme that is adopted.
But of course, since well, block size is a no-go anyhow and will never be, the most important thing will be to have this available way before any sign of an actual threat!
This is not true and should not be true. As technology radically improves and develops reducing transaction capacity is just moronic regardless for what virtuous reason you want to do it, and a reduction in capacity is basically going to happen with any scheme that is adopted.
