The Bitcoin community has an assumption it rarely examines: that doing nothing is the neutral option. Leave the abandoned coins alone, touch nobody's property, and you've kept faith with the protocol. What if inaction is the thing that breaks it? In the 6th episode of The Quantum Bitcoin Podcast, Bitcoin historian Pete Rizzo and co-host Nathan Jeffay put that question to Yehuda Lindell, Head of Cryptography at Coinbase and professor of computer science at Bar-Ilan University, who started this debate in the don't-touch-anyone's-property camp and ended at the opposite extreme — not for economic reasons, but moral ones.Episode 6 is the one that stops being about cryptography: why "not your keys, not your coins" actually means the reverse, and what happens to that promise when signing no longer proves ownership. It covers the roughly 1.7 million Bitcoin sitting in the abandoned class across some 20,000 early public keys, why Lindell thinks an attacker with a quantum computer dumps rather than sells slowly, and the line he draws between coins that are genuinely lost — gold at the bottom of the ocean, he says, and he has no ethical problem with someone taking those — and coins whose owners simply cannot move them. It walks through what a partial freeze could look like using hash pre-image proofs that need no external registry, why the Hourglass proposal solves the cutoff-date problem better than it solves the market-dump problem, and an idea Lindell raises for the first time on this recording: leaving low-value addresses untouched because no quantum attacker would spend the machine time on them.The Quantum Bitcoin Podcast is a series examining the quantum threat to Bitcoin, designed to be watched in sequence. Each episode opens with a discussion between the hosts, presents extended interviews with expert guests on a single key question, and closes with a recap of how the evidence has changed their thinking.Links referenced:https://www.coinbase.com/blog/coinbase-quantum-advisory-councilhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithmhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover%27s_algorithmhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_Curve_Digital_Signature_Algorithmhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preimage_attackhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proofhttps://bitcoinops.org/https://delvingbitcoin.org/CHAPTERS00:00 Cold open01:00 Introducing Yehuda Lindell01:40 Why it's the abandoned coins, not Satoshi's02:45 How many coins are actually at stake05:17 The two extreme positions07:07 Why he changed his mind07:51 What "not your keys, not your coins" really means10:30 The market impact argument11:45 How a quantum attacker would behave16:50 Does knowing a key make it yours?21:06 The bank analogy25:07 Lost coins versus coins that can't move27:40 Proving ownership without elliptic curves29:46 The Hourglass proposal32:33 What "freezing" actually means34:59 Why inaction doesn't preserve anything38:52 The moment his position flipped41:32 Coldcard, and what the protocol does and doesn't promise44:22 The people he'd help if he could47:19 Separate the two questions49:26 Rizzo and Nathan wrap up52:20 The Coinbase Quantum Advisory Council paperGUESTSYehuda Lindell is Head of Cryptography and an Engineering Fellow at Coinbase, and a professor of computer science at Bar-Ilan University, currently on leave. He is a co-author on the position papers published by the Coinbase Quantum Advisory Council, the independent body Coinbase convened to assess quantum computing's impact on blockchains, including its report on the abandoned-coins question discussed in this episode. His work spans secure multiparty computation, threshold cryptography and applied cryptographic engineering.FOLLOWThe Quantum Bitcoin Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@QuantumBitcoinPodcastPete Rizzo: https://x.com/pete_rizzo_Coinbase: https://www.coinbase.com/New episodes release weekly. Subscribe to follow the full series.
