Dormant Digital Assets

PsiQuantum's computer Four and a half years ago I wrote The $65B Prize about the potential reward for developing a "sufficiently powerful quantum computer" capable of cracking Bitcoin's encryption. It was based on work by Aggarwal et al, who were then projecting it would happen between 2029 and 2044. The $65B was the notional value of the wallet containing the million Bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto mined originally.i But I noted that: Chainalysis estimates that about 20% of all Bitcoins have been "lost", or in other words are sitting in wallets whose keys are inaccessible. That is around another 3.6 million stranded Bitcoin or at the current "price" about $234B. So the potential prize was almost $300B. Nearly a year ago I followed up with The $740B Prize. There are two reasons why the prize was then bigger but is now smaller than that: Bitcoin's "price" had then increased from about $65K to around $107K, but it is now around $76K. Because the "market cap" of Michael Saylor's Strategy was…