Pourquoi Adam Back ne s'inquiète pas de l'informatique quantique détruisant Bitcoin | Bitcoin Backstage

How tired are you of people referring to you as Satoshi? >> It's not me, but I think it's actually good for Bitcoin that Satoshi stopped participating and left in 2011 from participating in the forums because it helps Bitcoin feel more like a commodity. >> Who's a the founder of gold? >> Yeah. Who's the founder of gold? We don't know, right? >> We're here with Adam back. You've probably seen him everywhere in all the documentaries. Now you're the newly appointed CEO of Bitcoin Standard Treasury Company. Can you tell us a little bit about that? How did that happen? It was sort of like a plot twist. Yeah. So, uh I was uh a relatively early investor in Micro Strategy and then in MetaPlanet and so I'd you know looked at the different strategies and we were talking internally about uh starting our own to implement some of the strategy ideas that we had. So one of the differentiators for BSTR is that it has an active approach. So it tries to put the Bitcoin to work to create a positive yield basically. >> Can you say like an active approach? What are you guys doing differently? >> Well, most of the treasury companies are storing the Bitcoin cold stored with a custodian whereas we would use different strategies like option writing strategies or uh different hedge fund strategies to get to create a return above Bitcoin. And so of course the treasury companies are using market factors like selling shares at the market um issuing convertible notes. So we're in a position to do that on top of an active manage strategy rather than on a passive. >> Wow, that's super interesting. We're talking here with Matt Cole and he was telling us how uh Micro Strategy is on the path to stack a million Bitcoin by September. He's gonna have like more Bitcoin than Satoshi himself. >> Yeah, it's uh pretty fast. >> How does that even look like for like Bitcoiners or like the Bitcoin culture to have all these companies have so much Bitcoin? >> Well, I mean, I think it's effectively a sign of success that you have different types of entity buying and using Bitcoin as a savings or an inflation hedge. So you know now you have a few countries El Salvador, Swiss National Bank that holds Micro Strategy, some of the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth funds, Bhutan, other countries, right? And then the public companies, some pension funds. So Sean Bill who is the CIO of BSTR and a well-known hedge fund manager who's interested in Bitcoin for some years you know he was able to get Bitcoin into the first US public market sorry public pension fund in uh 2021 so you will see I think it's just that you know when the internet was first available it was improved self-s sovereignty but very few people had it it was all users not companies right and over time of course all the companies companies have a website and email and apps and stuff like that. So it's I think it's like that it's it's another signpost on the adoption arc of Bitcoin. So long as it you know remains bearer you can hold your own keys it remains unseasonable individuals can benefit from that and you know sometimes funds like to benefit from some of those properties as well. >> Wow. Now also I want to talk about the Jade as well because Jade Core launched today. Can you tell us about the device, what gap it is designed to address and how it fits within Blockstream's hardware wallet ecosystem? >> Yeah, so it fits between the Jed classic and the Jade Plus. >> So really it's a simplified streamlined experience for new users to you know generate a seed, start buying Bitcoin and cold storing it. So it's uh filling that market need. So self-custody has long been viewed as one of the strongest responses to counterparty risk. How does Jade Core help mitigate that risk while maintaining the security standards that people expect across the broader blockstream ecosystem? >> You know, if you are cold storing, as the Bitcoiners say, not your keys, not your coins. So yeah, you uh do your backups, you're then self-s sovereign, you store your own Bitcoin. It's using a standard backup format, the seed format, and you can use the hardware wallet in combination with Blockstream's mobile app or desktop app and or with some other wallets that have Jade compatibility. So, it's quite a lot of interoperability. And so, I think it's, you know, for people who haven't experienced cold storage, you know, it's a good time to do it before the Bitcoin price is too high. What you've seen in the in the past is sometimes people will have bought Bitcoin, casually stored it on a phone and then you know they've suddenly realized five years or eight years later that it's now 90% of their net worth and they need to revise their storage. So I think it's useful to sort of plan ahead a bit to cold store bitcoin and you know even if you have invested in bitcoin via ETFs or an exchange it's an interesting learning experience to you get confidence start storing a bit of it yourself once you built the confidence maybe you can cold store more of it. >> What's interesting is we were talking about like the bitcoin treasury company's adoption and also like holding the own keys to your coin. How do you see Bitcoin adoption in the next decade? In your mind, what is the blueprint? >> Um, I mean, I think it's Bitcoin has come further and faster than people expected. So, when Blockstream started, which is about 10 years ago, this is a very different time. And the banks didn't want to hear about Bitcoin, they were in their blockchain, not Bitcoin or even pre-blockchain thinking, right? And then they went into the you know the blockchain application process and finally more recently they've come to Bitcoin the asset. So now they're making products they're making Bitcoin available to their clients. They're making ETFs and putting adding Bitcoin into managed funds. So you see Black Rockck, Morgan Stanley and other uh large investment firms putting out recommendations from model portfolio of what percentage of a general share portfolio you would put Bitcoin. So 1 to 4% these kind of ranges. So you're seeing that from a lot of different companies >> cuz one of the things is you mentioned the banks and you were part of the cippher punk mailing list. you created hash and seeing this mass adoption in you know having the governments you know Bhutan and El Salvador the US wanting to build their strategic reserve isn't it like is it contradictory to like Bitcoin's ethos that it started you know to remove the middleman like do you see banks even like being like transformed to like Bitcoin banks like Alex Leeman creating river >> yeah I mean you are seeing some NEO banks that are Bitcoin first. Uh another one is Zappo for example, right? So some NEO banks um Capital Union Bank who who are very Bitcoin native, right? You know, the cyhunks were interested in bearer electronic cash, smart contracts and things like that and Bitcoin has that. And so the question mark for me, you know, a decade ago as Bitcoin started to see over time different types of owners, corporate owners and so on, that you could see in the future. Maybe there will be sovereign owners and governments and government agencies and the question mark was you know how will they interact with it? Will they try to impose their viewpoint or influence it from their viewpoint? But I think it's gone quite positively which is that it seems that the you know now you have politicians uh leaders of countries like in El Salvador who seem to understand Bitcoin for what it is and I think what you're seeing is that the incentive structure for Bitcoin scales. You know there have been events in international finance that have caused countries to withdraw assets from the financial system or from other countries. You know for example the um freezing of some sovereign funds during the Ukraine Russia situation that I think tends to make countries who are not sure how aligned they are to withdraw funds and lose confidence. And so you can see that people doing that are understanding the value of controlling the assets. And so Bitcoin addresses that in a similar way that gold does if you you know if you store it in your own country. And you see also that some countries are moving their gold reserves domestically for similar reasons. So I think Bitcoin has advantages compared to gold but it has that benefit which is a hard asset. There's no middleman but countries care about that too for their for their reserves. Right? If a if a country has its assets in a stock portfolio, if there's some conflict, maybe the country that owns, you know, that has the stocks can cut you off and you lose your sovereign assets, right? So, I think Bitcoin addresses some of that. That's why I saying it the incentive scale because it solves problems for the individual, >> solves problems for companies. you know they have the inflation hedge the bitcoin as a hurdle rate and finally it's also solving problems for governments in a in a different scale so yeah >> it's funny because um you saw how we Iran was asking to get paid in bitcoin >> yeah [laughter] >> so I was like there you have it >> well I mean some people were saying that you know they were getting asking to be paid in dollars and they were curious well how you know if it was a stable coin it would get seized. So, of course, Bitcoin is not seizable unlike a stable coin. >> I suppose the other possibility is it could be with physical cash, you know, like a suitcase of cash, right? [music] [music] >> [music] [music] [music] >> Blockstream has built a full stack spanning self- custody layered to infrastructure. and enterprise financial application. How does the Jade core complement that broader strategy and how do you retail products and institutional infrastructure um that reinforce one another in supporting the next phase of Bitcoin adoption? show up. >> Yeah. I mean, I think with the uh new types of entity coming in, you have more of a need for like enterprise wallets, small business wallets and also the technology that custodians use. So, a kind of custody wallet and they have different use different hardware. So, the custodians will tend to use HSM. The enterprise wallet is more about uh kind of approval processes. So you know maybe a transaction needs to be approved by the CFO or something like that. So you'll have role based approval processes in that kind of wallet which as an individual you have you know a single key you're the owner or maybe a multi-IG but the the enterprise use case is you know new so we're making uh you know different wallets for different use cases and custodians are another one but that uses HSM instead of hardware wallets kind of custodian version of that actually >> so enables liquid swaps allowing lightning play uh payments from liquid Bitcoin and lower cost withdrawals off exchanges. How do capabilities like this advance your vision for making Bitcoin more usable and accessible? Yeah, I mean at times the Bitcoin onchain fees can be high and so one way to transfer particularly between exchanges is to do it on a layer two and not on the layer one and then you know withdrawing from the exchange for cold storage. Some people do dollar cost averaging and you know if they're buying every day or every week maybe the UTXO is a bit small for where the fees might go in the future. And so one way that people have described that and BTC BTC sessions has you know picked up on this use case and made some demos of how to do it which is you can you know buy Bitcoin in lightning you know once a month you can convert it into liquid and once a year convert it into onchain and that way you have bigger UTXOs so you can deal with the fees because the lightning fees are lowest liquid fees are in between and then you have the main chain which is the best place for cold storage but can get expensive at times. >> I've never had someone like explain it that way. Um I didn't know that if you used liquid your UTXOs are more condensed than if you do like like >> Well, they are they're on a layer two so they don't transact directly on the chain. >> Oh, okay. Okay. That's what Okay. Okay. Because I was thinking like dollar cost averaging. Every time when I dollar cost average, I automatically put it on chain >> and but you recommend going liquid or lightning and then going on chain. >> Yeah. So there's a swap like a trustless swap from lightning to liquid or from liquid to bitcoin. And so you can build up some UTXOs in liquid with intermediate amounts and then you know accumulate more and then swap it to cold storage on the main chain which is always the best place to store >> the best place. So for years and years Bitcoiners have comforted themselves saying we are still early. When do you think that that time is going to come where people actually not like miss the Bitcoin buzz but that we're not early we're like living in the present? >> Well, I think you know when you see people who are you know scared of news and you know they see the price drop because they listen to something on the financial news which is a bit confused. One way to look at that is it's a sign that we're early, which is there's a lot of big institutions and news organizations that genuinely don't understand and are fearful about Bitcoin. So, it's just kind of surprising actually seeing the effect that it seems like most people and institutions actually get confidence by looking at other people and are much slower to adopt innovation than you would expect. you know for us immersed in Bitcoin and you know being involved with Bitcoin for a while we we understand we feel confident in it but from the outside they're still uncertain about the whole asset class or the effect and will it last and what is it like how do we understand it because it's different it's new right I think for for the institutions probably digital gold is the best analogy to think about it and that's starting to happen with you know the black rock and the other asset asset managers suggesting model portfolios for how much Bitcoin as a percentage should be in a fund. So I think that's you know an indication that it's starting to improve in terms of a wider understanding of Bitcoin. So in theory, do you have like a year or do you think like maybe in 20 years we won't be that early or >> uh I mean yeah 20 years is probably going to see some radical improvement right because the last decade is already very different to what it was that you know now than right in terms of banks offering products the number of users in Bitcoin of course the technology has to keep pace as well because sometimes you know you get a lot of users at once and then the fees get expensive. So it's estimated that maybe there are 100 million users of Bitcoin. So the question is how is the technology and the models um of how to store it and how to interact with it going to cope with the next billion. >> And the key is making it sort of like keep it simple stupid. That's what it's gonna have to turn out to like the the simpler that we can showcase and have, you know, like products to put Bitcoin on chain in the simplest way possible is going to be the most game changer thing ever. So, people keep asking if quantum computing is going to kill Bitcoin. >> Give us the honest sort of like 30 second answer. Should people be worried like what are your thoughts on quantum computing? Um, I don't think it's something to be worried about because the Bitcoin developers are actively working on postquantum signatures. So, Jonas Nick spoke at this conference with a concrete proposal of a signature type that's optimized for Bitcoin use case. This postquantum secure and the quantum hardware today is still quite basic. So it really can't do very big calculations and it's it doesn't last you know it it sort of fails after fraction of a second right so they have to restart it. So there's a lot of advances that are needed on the hardware but I think you know it's a little bit unpredictable how long that will take if it will take 10 years 15 or less right so I think the conservative thing to do is to add postquantum options to bitcoin so you can choose to store it in a postquantum skill way so you're quantum ready and then you know people can opt into that you'll see some indication from the onchain analysis this what percentage of Bitcoin are quantum ready and then you know if the advances in quantum hardware improve or speed up then people can they have a plan right which is they can accelerate their migration and and it's ready to use today so I think that's that's the way to look at it that you know is something to think about preparedness but it's not a problem today >> so you're not worried at all >> I like that mentality so Bitcoiners do not be worried Well, I mean I think that it's something for the technologist to work on and they are working on it. You know, Blockstream Research hired Mikuel Kudenov who was one of the researchers working on the NIST standards. So NIST, National Institute of Standards of Technology in the US publishes uh cryptography standards and so they published the first their first postquantum signature standard in November 2024. So it's quite recent and and in fact the uh proposed signature scheme for Bitcoin that blockstream research put forward is an optimized version of that standard in fact. So you know we've been working on that for a while now you know going back into last year. So I think you know the technologists are always working on you know planning for the future improving security planning for the things that might need to migrate but there is no current hardware that can do you know even simple calculations like factoriize 21 I think is about where the limit is. So literally the 21 is 3 * 7. That's that's kind of where the current hardware can get. But it's complicated to compare the hardware. >> Personally, like do you have to keep updating your hardware then? >> Well, it may be as simple as upgrading the firmware on the hardware and some companies are starting to explain their readiness at the hardware level for the upgrade. >> Okay, >> these signatures are a bit bigger and take a bit more work to compute. So we might need faster hardware wallets, but that's also a good reason for people to be for the technologist to be working on upgrading the protocol so that the hardware is ready ahead of time. >> Now, um I genuinely need to ask you this. How tired are you of people referring to you as Satoshi and this hunt to figure out who Satoshi is and like pinpointing you as to being him? >> Yeah. Well, it's not it's not me, but as some people use it as a kind of joke, right? Um, and of course, it is an interesting aspect of Bitcoin that there's a mystery around that fact, right? So personally I think that we're probably never going to know because the people that are trying to do the detective work are looking at people that are visible that are known that are talking at conferences who were active on mailing lists in the past working on similar systems and there's only so many people that fit that right and it doesn't seem like they've got anybody that makes sense or that you know so I think it's more likely to be somebody that is not speaking at conferences and was not talking on mailing lists under their real name. That's my guess. But yeah, I mean it's um I think it's actually good for Bitcoin that Satoshi stopped participating and left in 2011 from participating in the forums because it helps Bitcoin feel more like a commodity and sort of decentralized permissionless than a lot of the altcoins which look like stock in a startup or something, right? It's it's not plausible for sovereign wealth funds and individuals to be storing their life savings and preserving their spending power in the stock of a starter. But a digital commodity that's a gold analog that makes sense, right? And so I think it helps Bitcoin be seen that way that there isn't a founder that you can talk to, you know? >> I mean, like who's the the founder of gold? >> Yeah. Who's the founder of gold? We don't know, right? >> Yeah. and nobody cares. So, you're one of the very few people whose contribution to Bitcoin predates Bitcoin itself. The last word is yours. What do you want to say to people? >> Uh, buy the dip and hold. Don't get shaken out. >> Well, it's super interesting to notice the different types of like Bitcoin conferences like between the bare markets, the bull markets. Do you have a preference? >> I don't mind. I mean, I think that people uh learn about Bitcoin volatility over time. And of course, newcomers who, you know, maybe have never traded stocks before and Bitcoin is more volatile, they have a tendency to sell when the price goes down where actually, you know, when you've been around for a while, you're like looking around for some something you can sell to buy some more actually, right? It's an opportunity. And that is a actually the difference between an investor and a speculator. Traditionally that investor if the price falls of something they think is is a long-term value they'll be happier and they'll buy more. It seems opportunity right whereas a speculator the the short-term move is the wrong direction for their speculation. So it's a different outlook. >> Thank you so much Adam. It was great having you. >> Thank you. Every year this community comes together to [music] celebrate, to debate, to build what comes next. [music] And every year the stage [music] gets bigger. Sound money center [music] stage. So where do you go to celebrate the next chapter in Bitcoin history? [music] You come home. [music] Nashville, July 2027.