Why Saylor Is Wrong About the Quantum Threat | Alex Pruden

**Robbie** (0:02)
All righty, guys, Alex, welcome to the tower, man. It's the Tokenization Tower. I'm not sure you've seen the view quite yet.

**Alex Pruden** (0:10)
It's a nice view.

**Robbie** (0:11)
It's not bad. Welcome to New York. Are you a resident of New York, or are you visiting, or are you?

**Alex Pruden** (0:18)
I'm visiting, yeah. I live in Montana.

**Robbie** (0:20)
Oh, really?

**Alex Pruden** (0:21)
About as unlike New York as you can get.

**Robbie** (0:23)
Like cabin and acreage.

**Alex Pruden** (0:26)
I do have a cabin, but I live in a small town called Bozeman, so outside of Yellowstone.

**Robbie** (0:30)
Nice. Nice. So no animals or...

**Alex Pruden** (0:33)
No, I don't have horses or anything like that. I had a dog, but yeah, no, I see a lot of animals, like elk and bears and stuff, but yeah, don't know.

**Robbie** (0:43)
Good. Well, obviously this Quantum stuff has been very, very hot topic. Project Eleven, your company, they're the CEO of is kind of addressing this head on, right? And I think for the longest time, this ecosystem in blockchain and digital assets has feared this, kind of pushed it under the rug. Now big names, Brian Armstrong is coming out. He's leading an initiative in this, he's been pretty publicly vocal about it as of late. This has been kind of going around after that Google paper. Maybe you just start with like, where are we at today?
A bit of a foundation as to what the state of Project Eleven is and what you guys are doing to address this quantum problem.

**Alex Pruden** (1:23)
Cool, so yeah, and maybe I'll just say, even before that, I'll say, what's the state of quantum today? So the first thing to be supportive of knowledge is there's no quantum computer today that can break Bitcoin or any other digital assets. So this is a fear about what may come and how quickly it may come. So, you know, Project Eleven, we founded the company to feature-proof digital assets against quantum threat potentially. And this quantum threat has become more and more real over the last couple of years. There's been repeated experimental demonstrations and reductions in the resources that, you know, the scientists at Google, among others, have shown that you need to break the cryptography underlying Bitcoin, right? So, you know, there's one aspect of it is that quantum is moving faster than it used to. The second aspect of it is that blockchains and digital assets rely so much on public key cryptography. And like the risk is really existential compared to many other systems. And the fix is potentially more difficult because these are decentralized, right?
You know, not your keys, not your crypto. There's no like management company for Ethereum or Bitcoin or whoever, you know, so the fix is going to be a little bit more involved. And so that was really kind of the modus. You know, that's the reason why we founded Project Eleven.

**Robbie** (2:28)
Yeah.
And so on the state of how critical this kind of is, people have different opinions and prescriptions as to how they think this is going to play out in the time frame and the level of seriousness. What do you personally stand on that?

**Alex Pruden** (2:47)
I think it's critical. And I think it's critical. I think you can say it's critical and you can say it's urgent without having to put a timeline on quantum computing because I think, frankly, you know, any number of people can come up and tell you what their opinion is about quantum computing. And I have an opinion, but I think what is, you know, I think it's just uncertain how quickly scientists at Google, at Caltech, at IBM and any of these places, or China will actually realize this technology. I mean, look at AI. AI went from kind of this thing, it didn't seem like much was changing for years and years, and then it exploded. You know, maybe it'll be like that. Or fusion power where it's still dragging and what? I mean, we just don't know. But I think the reason why I think it's critical is because of the critical impact it has on blockchains. And blockchains will use public key cryptography for effectively identity and authentication, right? Your Bitcoin address is where I send money to, and then I send you money by signing a message using my private key. Only the owner of the private key is able to send money. So as the owner, right? But if a quantum computer is able to reverse engineer the private key from the public key, in a very real sense, they own everything. And so like it kind of breaks the entire philosophical model of ownership in crypto, and that's unique to crypto. Like no other area of the world or the internet that uses public key cryptography is that deep of a dependency. So because the threat is critical, we need to prioritize it urgently, I think over everything else.