ABOUT THIS EPISODE
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.
