I do like the idea of bitcoins becoming ancient treasure after they’ve all been mined. Plucky future cyberpirates comb through scrap hardware and ancient data repositories, searching for old caches. Legends of whales, in the wild but not yet lost to time, call some adventurers across the globe in search of ancient treasure.
This is a fun premise that is completely ruined for me by the fact that it’s kind of intrinsically an ad for cryptocurrency. I think the movie would be more fun in the future when crypto isn’t such an active scourge on the internet.
The dozen-or-so global nodes are all in active collaboration and can change BTC’s programming with a majority vote (which is part of its core code, from what I barely remember reading), so they can simply roll with it. All deceased users’ wallets would eventually become bounties (like the original one by Nakamoto, who is probably dead), while everyone else would migrate to quantum-resistant wallets to keep up with the times with no problem.
I imagine the oldest caches will be the easiest to break, so for those the main difficulty will be in finding them. For some of the middle-ancient currencies, it might still require a considerable amount of compute to crack, or specialized knowledge from people who hoard vulnerabilities and will help crack a cache in exchange for a cut.
It could happen, but there are several large existential threats Bitcoin has to overcome to avoid collapsing and being supplanted by something else and survive into the long term, especially quantum computing attacks and the structurally diminishing funding for Bitcoin miners. The people who maintain its code are very reluctant to make any upgrades.
I do like the idea of bitcoins becoming ancient treasure after they’ve all been mined. Plucky future cyberpirates comb through scrap hardware and ancient data repositories, searching for old caches. Legends of whales, in the wild but not yet lost to time, call some adventurers across the globe in search of ancient treasure.
This is a fun premise that is completely ruined for me by the fact that it’s kind of intrinsically an ad for cryptocurrency. I think the movie would be more fun in the future when crypto isn’t such an active scourge on the internet.
Like the Superbowl?
Won’t future cyber pirates simply crack private keys by factoring primes on their quantum iPhones?
The dozen-or-so global nodes are all in active collaboration and can change BTC’s programming with a majority vote (which is part of its core code, from what I barely remember reading), so they can simply roll with it. All deceased users’ wallets would eventually become bounties (like the original one by Nakamoto, who is probably dead), while everyone else would migrate to quantum-resistant wallets to keep up with the times with no problem.
I imagine the oldest caches will be the easiest to break, so for those the main difficulty will be in finding them. For some of the middle-ancient currencies, it might still require a considerable amount of compute to crack, or specialized knowledge from people who hoard vulnerabilities and will help crack a cache in exchange for a cut.
It could happen, but there are several large existential threats Bitcoin has to overcome to avoid collapsing and being supplanted by something else and survive into the long term, especially quantum computing attacks and the structurally diminishing funding for Bitcoin miners. The people who maintain its code are very reluctant to make any upgrades.