[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to Crypto Talk radio, the podcast for everyday investors like you. Visit us on the
[email protected] and now here's your host, Leister.
[00:00:13] Speaker B: Thank you for that, Bailey. And welcome everybody out there on Crypto Talk radio
[email protected] due to circumstances outside of my control, today's episode will be somewhat on the slim side as the weather has decided to take a turn for the extreme worse and there are a number of people who claim that they're flooding out. Now. I'm not flooding out, but I have to monitor the situation obviously to stay safe. And right now there are three pumps, water pumps engaged, maintaining the fort, keeping things under control.
And I have to wait on the fourth pump because the fourth pump is battery operated. I need the batteries to charge. He's the stronger of the of the other two, but it seems to be holding pretty strong. It's just that the water keeps coming on, doesn't want to stop. So I'm monitoring the situation as a result. It will be a slim episode is the point.
It's fine because I just have one topic today. I'm not, I'm not criticizing this person. I'm just providing my share of thoughts in case you happen to see it and some educational. Be a one on one episode. Haven't had one of those in a while. Foreign.
Market cap.com we will zoom out to the month chart starting with bitcoin, which exhibited somewhat of an upward trend, caused a number of YouTubers to speculate that we were past the worst of it. And on the way up, a couple of youtubers, including da Vinci Jeremy, who is the topic of today's episode, speculated we're on the way down, potentially down to about the $50,000 mark. Currently it's about 75,000 bucks. Ish, as I recorded and I do see an upward trend but obviously it may not sustain and that is a legitimate risk. Keep your eyes on the prize Ethereum on the same month chart, roughly 2400 bucks as I record upward trend, strong upward trend again. People speculate it may not last. So keep an eye on the charts.
Trade smart. Don't yolo into garbage. You know how that goes.
Today's topic, again, it's going to be slim, but today's topic is brought to light from something that da Vinci Jeremy has talked about in a couple of episodes.
It's around the quantum and threats from Google and threats from others. That quantum is going to crack your bitcoin. You're going to lose everything and I always question, you know, okay, well, why are you yoloing into that?
Why are you rushing into it? Why are you hurrying to that? Like what? Seems like there's some sort of a motive that's not being divulged. Look it up. But the point is, it seemed like there's just a rush, there's like a, an urgency to get to this quantum. And I don't know what that's all about, what's driving that motive? We already have seen a degradation in our energy supply because of AI. That rhymes. Then we've got crypto mining, and that's a different thing. And now we're trying to do quantum computing. We know that's going to be extremely expensive. So it doesn't seem like there's a strong strategy. And of course, I wish our governments would get a little bit smarter and get some balls, step up and say, stop not doing this.
But the government is feckless. We understand that. And of course, we know with what's happening with Iran and Hormuz and everything out there now, we understand the game. We know how it's kind of played.
Time will tell, kind of where this all sits and where this all settles. I suspect, though, that we're going to have kind of a long game ahead of us. I don't know for sure, but that's my theory on it. But Da Vinci, Jeremy talked about something around this quantum that I wanted to bring the surface and I wanted to talk about, because again, it's not in critique, it's simply sharing my thoughts.
He has been pretty emphatic. Look it up about the idea or his opinion that bitcoin is not going to be hacked anytime soon. And everything that's being brought out, terms of this risk and the time and everything is a bunch of fluff. And I said it's kind of a fad, but I wanted to dig into what he's basically talking about. So bitcoin, if you don't know the way that it was envisioned, and he knew this way back years ago, like close to two decades ago, he knew this. But Bitcoin, in the way it was designed, was already designed to be somewhat robust against hacking. But the thought around quantum is that it was going to be able to breach some of those layers. We've already seen situations where bitcoin have been breached in the past, so it's not unheard of. It's not unusual that to think that it could happen.
But DaVinci, Jeremy's whole stance is, well, it's a hash, it's not the key that they would need in order to breach the wallet. It's a hash. And the only way it ever gets exposed is by making a transaction, AKA purchase, let's say, and the transaction, you can't make an invalid transaction against it because the transaction, the whole point of the ledger is that you'd have to sign the transaction, it has to be you, etc. There's no way that you could do that unless you had access to the other part of it, which is the ability to decrypt the hash, and that the hash inherently is not able to be decrypted except by the device for which it was hashed. So I wanted to explain kind of conceptually what he's talking about in cryptography. This is not about cryptocurrency specifically, but it is relevant in cryptography.
Let's use your computer, because you should be using computers, not your phones, but your computer, okay? When you access a website, Google, if you use Chrome or Chrome based browsers at some point in the past, pushed this idea that everything that you do should be encrypted.
And although the traffic is encrypted, it doesn't necessarily mean that you can't be scanned by your ISP or scanned by the government or any of that. Simply means that it's harder to do it.
Now, the encryption and the basic really oversimplified. So don't come at me when way to think about it. Your device knows something, the end server knows something. When you ask for something from that server, you're communicating to the server and you're saying, I want this resource. That's a web page, it's a file, it's whatever that is, I want that. The server then says, okay, I'm happy to send you that, but we need to kind of keep this on the low, low, as the kids say, and create a secure channel for me to send this back to you. Now, this all happens in split seconds, so you don't notice this is happening, but creates a secure channel. After it creates a secure channel, it sends you whatever it is that was requested.
You then take what was requested and it's a bundle. And you're like, okay, how am I supposed to open this? I don't know how to open this. I don't understand it, I can't interpret it. It's because it's been encrypted.
The server, when you reached out, gave you the key, it gave you the ability to open up that package. So you say, they say, well, use that key and It'll let you in there. But it's a one time use key exclusive to you because you asked it and I created the secure channel. And by the way, the secure channel we can now, I can trust you with the package and the payload.
So use the key, you open the package, you're like, oh, it's a web page. Got it. And there's all these resources, there's fonts and everything else to make the page display.
Then it's on your computer to interpret what it sees and say, okay, I understand how to read a page, I understand how to download fonts, I understand how to run scripts, I understand how to do this, I understand how to do that. And it goes through this methodical framework to understand how to show you what it is that you asked for. Okay, that's the basics of this encryption that happens in cryptography. Then take it to the next level.
If I wanted to trust a device, so I'm trusting your device to do something.
In order for me to trust your device to do something, I have to certify that your device is trustworthy. There are a number of authorities out that provide this trust. I won't bore you with the details behind it. Suffice to say that the trust is managed by these authorities. The authorities say if you issue this certificate to the device, I'm going to inherently trust it. When you take a wallet, crypto wallet, and you create it brand new from scratch, what's happening under the hood is the wallet is then making a call out to the blockchain in question and it's saying, okay, I need to get a wallet address. Now this will always start with a basic, it's called EOA or EVM compatible wallet address. Why? Because that's the most ubiquitous. However, most wallets these days, especially trust wallet, will create what's called a multi wallet. The multi wallet creates addresses for each of the different common blockchains. Bitcoin, Cardano, Ethereum, Avax, etc.
So it'll go through and it'll create all these different wallets for you. If you use a dedicated wallet like the Bitcoin.com wallet, it'll only create a Bitcoin wallet unless you ask for the rest of them. But if it's a multi wallet, it's going to create all these different addresses.
Now what ties it all together essentially is your private key, which is why you're not supposed to give it out. Some wallets actually won't even let you get access to it because they're trying to protect your assets. If somebody has your private key to the multi wallet, they can import it, have access to all your different wallets. But also did you know each of those different wallet addresses for each of the blockchains have their own separate private keys for each and every one of them, including Bitcoin. So you could take just Bitcoin's private key, pull it in and expose it on a new wallet. But it's not as easy as it would be if it were ethereum. That's what DaVinci Germany is getting at is it's not straightforward like that. You'd have to have more to it to be able to do that. And it would take essentially incompetence on your part as the wallet owner to enable that to happen. Is it impossible? No, but it's extremely unlikely. He's not wrong in that regard.
So his stance is that with Quantum it's making assumptions about what information it would have had in order to be able to do the breach that it's saying is so easy. And it's not as simple as just simply running through a bunch of keys and codes and letters and numbers and then spitting out a result and taking your money. This doesn't work that way. They have to have certain factor information from your device, from your brain, from whatever, in order to be able to get access to those assets. Thus that's extremely unlikely, certainly not within the nine minutes or whatever they're quoting for any quantum computer to get access to those assets. Unless, and this is my caveat, such a quantum computing technology were in the hands of a bad actor who already knew how to social engineer you to give access to certain things like your device or malware, say to your device and then be able to get accident in that way. Yes, there is a risk that your stuff gets breached. So the point is, is that it would take more than just a computer running and breaching everybody's Bitcoin wallet. He is absolutely correct. It's not. It doesn't work that way, unfortunately. And there's a lot of fear mongering with it because they're trying to get people to up the security, which is never a bad thing, really.
In summary, am I suggesting you shouldn't worry about quantum. No, it's not that I disagree with Jeremy either. I don't disagree conceptually what he's saying. I do think there needs to be a healthy respect for what quantum computing might be able to do in the wrong hands. I think that's a valid concern and I do think that you could be smart about it, because at the end of the day, it's all blockchain, it's all keys. And that's been a known flaw of crypto is keys. It's key pairs and hashing and everything that might be subject to such a hack. It's simply unlikely, but not impossible.
And there's always been a desire to evolve it, take it to the next level, but it's never really gotten to that point because it's part of the underpinnings, look it up, of how cryptocurrency works. You can't really just uproot it and derail it and go some other way, because there's no other way. Right now.
The logins and all that don't solve the problem. It's still key based.
The very nature, the very intricate point of blockchain itself is the risk vector.
Now, blockchain has a unique piece. Every time that you want to do a payment or a transfer or something, it can spawn a new key on the fly.
And the other key that Jeremy's talking about always stays kind of behind the scenes, and so it's never exposed when you do the transactions. That's why he's confident something like this could never really affect Bitcoin.
And so Bitcoin is somewhat robust in that regard. But again, at the end of it, you're still stuck in the underpinning of a chain that is key pair based. And because it's key for a base, there is at least some remote chance that something can happen. But it would, again, take a bad actor. It would take negligence. It takes a lot to be able to get to that point. So I am telling you, as my call to action, maintain a healthy respect for what might happen. And the best way you can do that is to always, first of all, I'll tell you, if you're one of those that has your wallet on your cell phone, I think that's a bad idea, personally. And you're like, I am not a cell phone person.
I have a mobile device, but it's only for the hotspot. I don't. There is no cell phone, right? If somebody needs to call me, I got my landline voip number.
I don't do text message of things. I got email for that. It's just as fast. It's easy, easier to organize, it's easier to read full on computer. So you're like, okay, well, how do you do crypto assets? I have tablets, okay? And the tablets have the crypto assets. And the tablets are not connected to Anything other than my home Internet. My home Internet then is behind protection. So it's got perimeter protection to where you can't touch it unless I tell you that you can. Right. And so then it's like, well, could Quantum break into people's networks? Absolutely. But you'd have to again, similar to this, you'd have to go through layers and it would not be easy jump through hoops. Could it guess your password? Absolutely. If you, you know, go dummy on the password, Absolutely no different than a human, it just would do it faster.
So the risk doesn't go away with what I'm describing, but you mitigate it. If I'm on a mobile network and my wallet's there, you're subject to a SIM attack. Right. When and these have happened to multiple people, they get SIM swapped attacks. What's called, it's actually a social engineering attack where they emulate or request a new SIM in your name, take over the device. There's passkey breaches which are unthinkable, but you know, you're. Some people are blistering idiots and they'll take care of your stuff. But just to simplify, a passkey, a passkey should be a unique signature for your device. It basically says this device is what I trust to let you in with that key. And it's hidden, you can't access directly, but it access with the key and lets you in.
The thought is it's your device, but that assumes that you're not an idiot with your device. Right. Some people are idiots for their device and it doesn't negate the whole business of the SIM swap attack. That might still affect you if you didn't set up all these layers that I'm describing.
Everything comes back to the human. You know, everything comes back to you and how you protect your assets. It doesn't matter if it's quantum or not. These are all fundamental things and if you don't do them, then yes, you could get breached. It's just faster under Quantum. So again, the call to action is be smart, take care of your stuff. I would recommend you don't have your wallet on a mobile phone.
If you don't have a computer, first of all, shame on you. But two, you don't necessarily have to have a computer full on to do it. You can do a cold wallet. A cold wallet can then display information through the phone. There's still a, you know, an address and keys and everything, but it's not stored on the device. The whole point in my mind is to not have it stored anything stored that could be accessed on the device. And it should. This is the part people don't like. It should actually be a little bit painful to get into your assets. Think about it. If it's a little bit annoying for you, it's going to be greatly annoying for somebody else. That's called smart security. So just practice smart security more than you normally do.
Get away from dumb passwords. Consider again a cold wallet instead of, you know, having it stored on your mobile device. Ideally, you're nowhere near a mobile, you know, plan with your wallet, but that's, you know, some people, whatever, but just be smart about it and then, then sit back and watch and make sure you're not putting all your assets in one basket. Because the other thing to think about with the whole quantum is that each blockchain is different. So it's going to take, let's say it does take 10 minutes for Bitcoin.
If it takes 10 minutes for Bitcoin, it's going to take X amount of time for for Tron, let's say it's going to take X amount of time for Solana, it's going to take X amount of time for bnb. Just because of the nature of the way other differences and their nuances.
So diversity is one of the best things you can do to secure and protect. Once you, if you yolo into something, you lose that one. What do you have left? Nothing.
So again, be smart about your trade strategy too. Use that as a form of security and insulation. Not just the physical, but just smart trading. I've always talked about diversification anyway, you should. To me, you should always do it anyway. Here's your opportunity to consider doing what you might have considered not doing before.
Sam.
