GM!
Today’s top news:
Crypto majors chop while HYPE leads; BTC at $77k HYPE hits new ATH over $62 yesterday, ETF flows hit $70M Mark Cuban sells his BTC, cites disappointment vs gold & with broader crypto New quantum solution proposed by American Fortress, could protect Satoshi coins MegaETH shuts down its Terminal program and ends points season early Mark Cuban Sold Most of His BitcoinThe billionaire investor, who once described Bitcoin as a superior version of gold and held a crypto portfolio heavily weighted toward it, said the divergence between gold and Bitcoin during the Iran war was the breaking point. Gold surged while Bitcoin struggled to maintain momentum despite a weaker dollar, the exact scenario where the “digital gold” thesis was supposed to deliver.
Cuban commented: “I always thought it was a better version of gold than gold, but gold just blew up and went to $5,000, and Bitcoin dropped. Every time the dollar dropped, Bitcoin should’ve gone up. It’s not the hedge I expected it to be.”
His disappointment spans across crypto, which he feels still has not found “an application for grandma.” That includes NFTs, which while he refrained from calling them dead, did say they are “disappointing.”
That view is becoming a more common one, as more 5-10 year holders start to capitulate in 2026. And unfortunately, the trend seems more likely to continue than to reverse, at least near term.
The problem they’re solving is the “Satoshi problem” that has haunted every quantum defense proposal so far. Bitcoin’s roughly 6.9 million coins in addresses with exposed public keys are directly vulnerable to any quantum computer powerful enough to run Shor’s algorithm against secp256k1 elliptic curve cryptography. BIP-361, authored by Jameson Lopp, proposed freezing those coins if they don’t migrate to quantum, but Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson pointed out a fatal flaw: “1.7 million coins can’t do that. It’s not possible. 1.1 million of which belong to Satoshi.” If Satoshi is dead or the keys are lost, there’s no way to migrate voluntarily.
AmericanFortress’s approach is different. Rather than requiring migration or imposing a freeze, their proposal uses a soft fork to create a protected dormancy state, essentially putting a quantum-resistant cryptographic lock around vulnerable addresses without requiring the owner to move the coins or prove control. The system layers multiple post-quantum signature schemes to prevent any quantum attacker from exploiting exposed public keys.
The proposal is in early-stage peer review and has not been submitted as a formal BIP. The parallel PACTs proposal from Paradigm researcher Dan Robinson offers another path, letting holders timestamp cryptographic proofs of ownership today and later unlock coins via quantum-resistant STARK proofs if the network freezes vulnerable addresses.
