9th March 2026 > > Saudi Arabia, the quantum threat, & Florida.

tl;dr

My latest (and last!) update from the Middle East. The quantum threat becomes ever less worrying. Florida sounds like a mighty fine place to me.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

Check that negative perpetual futures funding rate. The slightest bit of positive news regarding Iran and those shorts are going to get killed. I will shed no tears.

Stop Press – I am back in Blighty!

But because it is all about me, I just know you want to hear the last gasp of my past week’s travelling travails whilst fleeing a war zone. Below is what I wrote waiting in the lounge at King Khalid International Airport, Terminal 2, Riyadh, just yesterday morning.

Occasional Series – Saudi Arabia now, not Dubai

Yep, still here. A mammoth 30 plus hour wait which started on Friday morning in Riyadh airport for a flight that kept getting delayed was finally finished with a flight cancellation on Saturday afternoon accompanied by a painful process back to landside for baggage reclaim. Sucker for punishment that I am, I am back in the same airport just twelve hours later waiting again for another flight supposedly scheduled for this afternoon, though I have low expectations of getting out any time soon.

It is all getting very tiresome this business of being stuck, not least as I am supposed to be heading to Tromsø on Tuesday for another of these ridiculous multi-day, multi-disciplinary, and lengthy, races across frozen lakes, ice, snow, and smallish summits. Though the timing could have been better, those sub-zero temperatures are way more appealing than this Middle Eastern climatic nonsense.

Occasional Series – That UK government flight that didn’t take off

Seriously I am not making this up.

Having bussed a load of a civil servants (the flight was not open to us mere mortals who work in the private sector) to a plane standing on the tarmac earier in the week at Muscat airport, the potential passengers were left stranded for a few hours, before being driven back again to the terminal. The reason? The delay had meant that the pilot had exceeded his mandated hours of work and to fly the plane would mean that he broke some ‘elf ‘n safety regs.

I get it. In general, we don’t want tired pilots. But where is the nuance? Would you personally prefer to get on a plane (which can fly itself unless an emergency landing is required) with a pilot who is slightly over his hours with ready access to caffeine, or to stay at an airport which is under a constant threat of a missile barrage?

These no-brainer questions are increasingly being determined by rules and those who enforce them, and not by common sense, which is more than just a touch depressing. The technocratic age that we are living through is a low point of culture for humanity, embodied in the UK-hating, liberty denying Lord Hermer, whose political defenestration cannot come a moment too soon.

Occasional Series – Havin’ a laff

It’s a key skill finding stuff funny when the stress is on. The UK government clearly agrees, sending this satirical email to everyone just so we can have a laff to briefly lift our spirits:

The FCDO is full of jokers

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Cryptos

I guess you prefer to hear about cryptos than my personal trials and tribulations. To be honest, the entire experience of this last week means I am finding it tough to concentrate on the important things in life, but here goes anyway.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – The quantum threat

When we last discussed this minor irritant of an issue (https://www.curiouscryptos.com/post/3rd-march-2026-dubai-the-quantum-threat) the CCC raised the very real prospect that the practical and simple solution to negating the point of a quantum attack on the BTC blockchain will lead to a hard fork. A thoughtful piece has followed my lead:

https://cointelegraph-magazine.com/bitcoin-may-face-hard-fork-over-any-attempt-to-freeze-satoshis-coins/

The author is as sceptical as I am about maxis, which puts him on the right side of history, but his conclusion that no agreement will ever be reached I find to be depressing. The article references a claim by BIP-360 author Hunter Beast (what a name!) that Satoshi Nakamoto would undoubtedly have been aware of the potential for a quantum attack, which is why he coded an alternative public address type that would prevent the quantum attack (P2PKH). However, the initial rollout of BTC implemented P2PK addresses which are susceptible to such an attack. Hunter Beast (his name gets better the more you say it) claims this was deliberate on Satoshi’s part, though I don’t really concur with his logic for such a claim. An oversight is a more likely explanation.

Other possible solutions are interesting, such as the Hourglass V2 proposal which would allow quantum attacked coins back into circulation but only at a rate of 1 BTC per block. I quite like this approach, as it retains the immutability of the blockchain, but prevents a quantum attacker flooding the market with newly released coins. Naturally, as the most sensible of options so far posited, it has received the most damning of responses in general.

The least likely solution is perhaps the most elegant:

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Florida

Florida has long been a crypto-welcoming state.

Just this week it became the very first US state to pass its own stablecoin bill regulating stablecoin payments and adding stablecoins to its own Control of Money Laundering in Money Services Business Act. Intriguingly, the new bill passed Senate with a unanimous vote indicating that the previous bi-partisan approach to cryptos is undoubtedly in retreat in some parts of the US for which we are all grateful.

This is a signpost that the stablecoin revolution is getting properly underway, a revolution that will be of immense benefit to the world’s poor and dispossessed, whilst forcing the giant TradFi banks to think a little harder about customer service for retail clients.

It also might provide the impetus for the Floridian legislature to look again at creating its own strategic reserve of BTC and other cryptos embodied in a new bill that was proposed in October 2025 and is currently under discussion in a finance sub-committee. Once just one state goes down this route, others will follow.