Oddbean

Astronomer math is fun because you can be way off and it kinda doesn't matter. > There are maybe 100 million bitcoin owners. There are soon going to be 10 billion people, increasing at an exponential pace. If we want 10% of people to trustlessly self-custody (this is a very low bar) we need to scale 100x. This was 10x too high. > Quantum computers are coming. Post quantum signature schemes A) will require a soft fork and B) are also very large, so let's divide transaction throughput by 10-100x. This was 10x too low. It's a wash. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah my first mistake was a simple off by one error: 10% of 10B divided by 100M is 10x not 100x. But looking at it again today I think that 100M number is very sus. We should hit 10B people in the 2040s. This is a pretty reliable estimate. So 10% self custody in the 2040s puts us at 1B bitcoiners. We currently have ~100M "bitcoin users" but this counts Coinbase accounts, ETF holders, etc. The actual important metric is how many people are using the blockchain. How many self custody users do we have today? Probably closer to 1M actually. So maybe the first 100x figure actually should have been 1000x. The quantum signature stuff is the most unclear because there are lots of different algorithms to choose from. This fantastic analysis indicates that SPHINCS+ is the frontrunner by a large margin. Those sigs are 100x bigger than current signatures. I estimated 10-100x so this indicates we'll land closer to the top of that range without some big optimizations. https://conduition.io/cryptography/quantum-hbs/ In any case, you get the idea. We need to scale exponentially and bitcoin just does not do that today.

Good points, though I hope your swag at only 1M is pessimistic 😢 I’ll have to check this link out, thanks! So much to learn, so little time…in the meantime, can everyone stop innovating so the rest of us can catch up 😮‍💨

I got the 1M estimate from here. 4.2M == 1M in astronomer math. > Let’s say we use an assumption for average addresses per person to be 10 — which is just a rough guess — then the ceiling of bitcoin users who have their own addresses is around 4.2 million. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/markets/an-objective-look-at-bitcoin-adoption