3rd March 2026 > > Dubai & the quantum threat.

tl;dr

Dubai is a touch stressful. The quantum threat to cryptos.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

With nearly half a billion dollars flowing into the spot BTC ETFs yesterday, and the Israeli stock market hitting a new ATH, the markets’ belief that governments’ answer to any problem is to print yet more dirty fiat remains as intact as ever.

Occasional Series – Dubai

We are still stuck here, though hopefully not for long.

I have two exit strategies.

One is a bus from Dubai to Riyadh tomorrow afternoon, a journey that is currently taking up to twenty-four hours with long queues at the border, and little in the way of interesting views out of the windows, followed by a flight booked out of Riyadh on Friday morning. This plan looked good except that I hear this morning that Riyadh is currently under attack. The frying pan/fire analogy feels all too appropriate.

The second option is a flight out of Dubai on Thursday morning, which has some legs to it, given that some planes left last night. It is hard to know the right choice to make.

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You will have seen that the UK government is claiming that it is doing everything possible to help the large numbers of UK citizens currently stranded in the Middle East. It is also claiming credit for getting some citizens out of here.

Let me assure you that is complete bollocks. A pack of lies. Displacement claims that stand no scrutiny.

The only information we have been given is that a phone line is now open, but I can’t be bothered to wait several hours for someone to finally answer and tell me to stay put.

If the government has been getting people out, then that effort has been restricted to government employees. It seems that not only do public sector workers get paid more, have full-fat pension entitlements, get to work-from-home, can never be fired, and will soon be on a four-day week, but that they are the first to be transported out of a war zone.

My advice to anyone starting work, or thinking of a career change, is that you are mad to consider the private sector. Go for the easy life and let the productive taxpayers take the strain.

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It is a little odd being in a war zone, a situation that I had never really contemplated, as I am a total coward when faced with danger. It is stressful, even though much of the time everything seems normal here. The pool on the top floor of the hotel, with its cocktail bar, is in full swing. I hear people talking about going to the mall (there isn’t a lot else to do in Dubai). I can see workers building a hotel just across the river, and a street cleaner sweeping up some rubbish. I do hope their collective efforts are not in vain.

The sirens on the first night were loud and disconcerting. The smoke rising from a missile attack even more so. But it seems that the air defence systems are working properly now, though for how long is a subject of discussion. It is only the newspapers’ front pages that would alert someone waking from a long sleep that a war is ongoing, or perhaps also my nervousness whenever I hear either a loud noise or the sound of an aircraft overhead.

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The other blatant lies are those being told by Emirates, which can try to sue me for saying so if it wishes.

The support and information flow has been almost zero. I was emailed a hotel voucher for our first night, but with no hotel or address included it wasn’t much cop. There has been no communication since. I found out by accident that Emirates had put on new flights out of Dubai that can be booked and paid for, though I have already paid to get home. I see a claim that it is prioritising those who were on the earliest flights out of here but given that I was in the boarding queue at the time my plane was cancelled, that is one fat porky.

I understand that moving tens of thousands of passengers is difficult in this situation but at least have the decency and honesty to state the truth of the matter. Don’t just make shit up for that helps no-one. The UK government and Emirates are of the same kind.

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On a final note, with unfortunate timing, I see an offer for 10% off the ticket price for this event:

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – The quantum threat

Now that you know how to ensure your personal BTC stash is safe from a quantum attack (https://www.curiouscryptos.com/post/20th-february-2026-the-quantum-threat-your-part-in-its-downfall), here is a handy cut-out-and-keep guide to understand the threat to others who are not as diligent as you:

If you are in any doubt about your personal bags, any doubt at all, get them into the green section today. It’s very simple to do, especially with a Ledger Nano Flex. We all want to see that orange section go to zero.

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But that will still leave 8.6% of total supply which cannot be made safe for these are coins for which the private key is presumed lost, either deliberately (the Satoshi stash) or accidentally. These coins will remain forever susceptible to a quantum attack as the public key is shown in unencrypted form on the blockchain.

In the long-term, adding a near extra 10% to the circulating supply is annoying but hardly devastating. In the short-term the price machinations would throw up some very exciting opportunities to load up more BTC at fire sale prices, which suits me, but I think overall the industry would prefer not to find itself in that position.

There has been one suggestion made to address the problem of the lost coins which is going to pit the maxis against everyone else. To understand why, let’s go back in time and revisit the story of the very first DAO (Digital Autonomous Organisation).

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The invention of the Ethereum blockchain was truly revolutionary, for it is based upon the concept of creating smart contracts that can provide a great deal more functionality than simply moving coins from one wallet to another. Smart contracts spawned the idea of a DAO, a set of coded instructions that would never deviate from the preset path defined by the code itself.

The first DAO, given the unimaginative moniker DAO, was designed as an onchain venture capital fund that received funds from investors which would then be directed to projects determined by a decentralised governance process. Any resulting profits would be returned to the investors. This was a mighty fine and ground-breaking initiative.

The problem with code can be that it may have logical flaws or bugs that can be manipulated by a malicious actor. There are well-established auditing techniques and processes today that provide a substantial level of confidence that smart contracts are sound in principle and practise, but back in 2016 that was not the case. In short, an individual took advantage of a weakness in the code to drain the DAO of significant amounts of ETH.

Before the attack, the DAO held 12mm ETH worth approximately $150mm representing a mighty 15% of all ETH in circulation. The attack removed 3.6mm ETH from the DAO. Once the attack became public knowledge, the market price of ETH nearly halved from around $20 to $11 or so. I remember clearly the shock waves caused by this event which at the time seemed to present a potentially existential threat to the nascent crypto industry, a very scary prospect I am sure you will agree, for a world without cryptos is a world much diminished.

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Almost immediately a debate began about whether to roll-back the Ethereum blockchain to the very last block prior to the attack with a change in the coding of the DAO to prevent the attack from happening in the first place, reminiscent of the Terminator storyline. The advantage of doing so would be to wipe out the history of this event, returning all ETH holders to their rightful position. The disadvantage is that doing so appears to contradict the principle of eternal immutability, one of our key justifications for public (as opposed to private) blockchains.

The solution was a simple one – the blockchain was both rolled back and was also left intact. The current Ethereum blockchain has wiped the attack. The Ethereum Classic (ETC) blockchain is the maxi-version which holds that code reigns supreme in all situations. You pay your money and you make your choice.

ETH has a market cap of $236bn. ETC has a market cap of just $1.3bn. I think that is a strong indictment of which approach has been the more successful.

A side effect of having these two blockchains is that if you owned ETH before the attack, and had not lost your ETH in the attack, you now owned equal amounts of ETH and ETC on the two distinct and separate blockchains. This revelation led to the hard-fork jamboree of 2017, when multitudes of BTC derived blockchains came into existence. Very few survive today, though BCH (Bitcoin Cash) is one of them. My approach was to sell any hard fork coins as soon as possible, reinvesting those funds back into BTC, a strategy that proved highly remunerative. Occasionally there are still hard forks today, the most notable one being the transition from PoW to PoS for Ethereum a few years ago, but that isn’t the only recent example.

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A suggestion to resolve the problem of the BTC that cannot be made quantum resistant (that red section in the pie chart above) is to change the code to effectively exclude these coins from the blockchain by refusing to recognise any movements of these coins to a new public address, rendering a quantum attack pointless.

Cue outrage from the maxis which, as we all know, means that the suggestion is both right and practical. Perhaps other solutions will be equally effective, but they will also cause anguish to the maxis. I confidently predict that there will be another hard fork to the Bitcoin blockchain in the future, one that negates the quantum attack, and one that does not. I also know which one is going to be the more successful.