At the beginning of 2025, I mentioned in a number of places that I thought during 2026 we’d get to the point where building your own highly competitive self-custody bitcoin wallet would be doable with an LLM during the year. Sadly, what mostly happened instead is that wallet developers continued to double-down on fully trusted and custodial platforms, further centralizing Bitcoin and bringing pervasive censorship on Bitcoin closer to reality. Still, we did (almost) deliver the software required to bring the original claim to bear, with a full graduated wallet in a simple library allowing wallets to offer highly competitive fees and overall UX being close to ready…if anyone wanted it. I spent a few days over the holidays testing it out, having an LLM build me a native iOS graduated wallet, and it nearly entirely works, basically only missing some bugfixes and the ability to store and display transaction descriptions. At least we built it.

While we cannot make this decision on behalf of a theoretical future Bitcoin community, I think burning vulnerable bitcoin is inevitable. First of all, I think it’s the right decision. In a world where a CRQC (cryptographically relevant quantum computer) is on the short-term horizon, these coins will not remain with their original owners. No amount of hopium will solve that. Instead your options are only (a) freeze or (b) let some CRQC owner eventually steal them. I definitely prefer (a). Luckily, it doesn’t have to be a lot of coins - any addresses which were created from a standard seed phrase + HD derivation can be recovered with a QC-safe ZK proof. It’s only the very very old coins (or more esoteric wallets) that would be frozen. Finally, it’s worth pointing out that I think this is inevitable. In a theoretical future where a CRQC is on the horizon, both forks will exist. The market will ultimately decide which bitcoin they value more - one with an extra million coins of supply as the CRQC owners steal lost coins or the one without. I cannot imagine the market preferring the former. View quoted note →

I think most Bitcoiners haven’t fully grokked how much work Gloria (and Greg Sanders and others) did to get package relay and zero-fee anchors and TRUC over the line and how absolutely critical this work is to Lightning, Ark, Spark, and nearly everything bitcoiners are going to be using over the next few years.

Bitcoin is going to zero if this fork activates. A few devs deciding it’s okay to seize people’s money just because they use the same feature as some spammers use isn’t even remotely bitcoin. View quoted note →