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Published · transcript-backed

Ben Gilbert: uncertainty

19 Jan 2021 Acquired Bitcoin

“Of course, the caveats abound here that David and I don't know jack about quantum computing except maybe it'll be a big leap forward in the amount of computing per square inch, per square watt, or whatever.”

— Ben Gilbert

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Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Ben Gilbert
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
uncertainty
Recorded
19 Jan 2021
Publisher
Acquired
Episode
Bitcoin

Transcript context

…If you already own Bitcoin, then your incentivized interest is not to break the system. If you hack it, then people lose trust, and then the value of the Bitcoins that you already hold—which presumably if you're a miner, you've already been mining—they go down. Even if you could create more fake Bitcoins for yourself, you have this massive disincentive to do that as more people join the system. Yeah, that's a great point. The other thing that the system is designed to do is to provide enough incentive. Of course, they rebalance this over time but provide enough incentive to the miners that if they were to make a call between being a malicious actor and mining, they should make it worth your time to mind, to be white hat. If you had access to a quantum computer they would adjust the software such that it would make more sense for you to mine than it would to attack. Of course, the caveats abound here that David and I don't know jack about quantum computing except maybe it'll be a big leap forward in the amount of computing per square inch, per square watt, or whatever. Square watts [...], but per unit. Network economies, absolutely. One that I wanted to bring up that I think is interesting is it’s counter positioned but not against other cryptocurrencies. It's counter positioned versus the US dollar where the definition of counter positioning—of course with my editorial here—is doing something that incumbents basically can't. It would break their system.…

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