Yeah, I had some starbucks and microsoft stock in the early to mid 90s. I bought after the initial rise, but still, worth a lot today if I held on. Of course, I needed the money and sold at a modest profit a few years later.
I was in IT during that era. Researching for my post I learned that MSFT went public in Mar 1986, 9 years after its founding in 1975. The PC era began in 1980 and that’s when they really took off.
It was already a behemoth in its industry before the first non-insider could touch a share. That was later than I thought. They’d already released Excel and Windows 1.0 by then.
The cool thing about that kind of wealth is that you don’t have to sell. I don’t understand the mechanism (not having that kind of wealth), but apparently people will loan you money backed by collateral at favorable rates. I suppose that at some point you have to pay it back (and presumably sell some assets), but maybe you just keep rolling it over (and spending $8B would take a while).
This has exactly a 0% chance of happening. Landfills require large trusts to ensure maintenance through perpetuity. Any excavation would severely damage the liners and caps, and require significant money to repair them.
The guy’s only source of money is the chance he finds the drive and the data is recoverable, both very low probability events. No one is going to loan him money for the purchase, excavation, and ongoing maintenance with imaginary bitcoin as collateral.
I just spent a bunch of my morning reading this thread and you taught me a lot.
There’s an interesting twist to all of this, at least as I understand the situation.
We may to be in the verge of creating a practical working quantum computer. As I understand it, such a computer would be able to relatively easily crack RSA encryption, which is the backbone of all internet security as well as banking transactions, etc. The answer to this is to convert all of our systems to quantum computer proof forms of encryption. These forms of encryprion do exist. Given the stakes, I have litle doubt that these conversions will be done.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies use RSA encryption so would be vulnerable to quantum computers. So all of the blockchains and wallets will need to be modified, otherwise all wallets would become hackable. Also coins could be outright forged.
Tbe answer would be to modify the existing software, blockchains, and wallets to use the stronger encryption. Either that or a new Bitcoin could be created and everyone could transfer their existing coins to the new blockchain using new wallets. This should be done as soon as possible so that it occurs before a quantum breakthrough. Whether or not this can or will happen is an open question given that, by design, there is no centralized control over Bitcoin.
Even assuming that this happens, there’s still an issue. For a wallet to be modified or transferred, someone must have access to that wallet. There are numerous apparently lost or abandoned wallets, including this gentleman’s.
Once quantum computers become available, anyone with acces to one will have access to any non-upgraded wallet, so it could become a first come first served field day on those wallets (which will be findable on the old blockchain).
They do not. What vulnerable algorithms they do use, however, is not as important as the question of what you would want to use Bitcoin (pre-2010, if you recall)-like systems for in the future at all. If you want decentralized e-cash there are more modern ways to implement it.
RSA is not that widely used. It’s been deprecated for some time. The problem is that to reasonably secure it requires such large keys that take too much time for rapid en/de-crypting. For a while the method was to use RSA for a jump start to decode keys for another, faster to use system which is then used for the remainder of the communication. Now even that is taking too long in mundane private communications since the recommended key length is so long.
In the case of BitCoin, for example, which relies on hash systems, it started off using ECDSA and later added Schnorr Signatures.
The big system out there that is used a ton is some form of SHA-256.
Oksy. I may be wrong about the specific type of encryption they use. But am I correct that whatever they are using it would be vulnerable to quantum computers?
The fact remains that, rightly or wrongly; wisely or unwisely, they are being used as a store of value. Even some counties are considering doing this. There are Bitcoin ETFs. So if they are vulnerable, it could become a big problem in the future.
Obviously I meant countries, not counties.
Well, then, Disclaimer: I am not your financial advisor, but don’t dump all of your savings into Bitcoins. I would suggest that regardless of actual and hypothetical vulnerabilities. That said, again hypothetically, if Bitcoins were worth anything you could imagine, before it was too late (“SHA-256 completely broken in practice” or whatever) transferring the state to some other medium not necessarily backwards-compatible with a 2008 Bitcoin client.
This is beginning to sound a lot like an Oak Island situation to me. I’m wondering if this is now (effectively) his full-time job. It’s not that hard to attract early investors with promises of big returns. “Sure, mate! I’ll spot you 300K now for a 10% interest in whatever you find. I can always write it off my taxes if it comes up dry.”
RSA is a special case. Schor’s algorithm for factoring came out in 1994. It was the algorithm that demonstrated the possible usefulness of quantum computers. There is no general method that solves any NP problem quickly on a quantum computer. So it’s sort of hit or miss.
People have long been aware of the possibility of real quantum computers and encryption methods that might be resistant to quantum computing attacks have been designed. But there’s a lot of problems. We don’t have the centuries-old knowledge base like we do with factoring and such. Are these good systems even without quantum computing? Are they actually resistant to such attacks? Etc.
Further, we know a lot less about quantum computing, in general, than classical computing. There are some problems (like factoring) where we know that quantum computers work better than classical. There are some problems where we know that quantum computers don’t work any better than classical. But there are a whole lot more problems where we don’t know: Nobody knows of a quantum algorithm that works better than the classical algorithms, but maybe there’s one out there somewhere that we just haven’t found yet.
There are also a bunch of algorithms that do provide a speedup but are still useless. For example, Grover’s algorithm allows searching a database in O(\sqrt{N}) time. But you need a quantum memory with O(N) qubits to store the database, and if you can do that you can build O(N) classical circuits to search in parallel for O(1) time overall.
Grover’s algorithm can be used even when the database isn’t stored explicitly (such as cracking AES encryption), but even then there are enough practical obstacles (even assuming a working QC) that it’ll probably never be useful. It’s just not enough of a speedup.