Former Meta and Google engineer warns of quantum and mining time bombs affecting BTC

A warning to heed

Shyu, who served as a technical lead at Google and later as a software engineer at Meta before building a YouTube audience of over a million subscribers, laid out his case in a recent video, focusing on issues of quantum computing and the future of incentives for miners, saying:

I sold all my Bitcoinand I suffered absolutely enormous financial losses

The first bombshell, in Shyu’s words, is the slow erosion of the network security budget. “Miners secure the network and must be paid in two ways: either by the newly minted coins or by your transaction fees,” he explained. The block grant is halved approximately every four years and currently stands at $3,125 BTCwith the next halving expected in 2028.

The problem, he says, is that new parts are running out and fees haven’t filled the gap. “95% of all Bitcoin is already hit. The cost savings they would depend on never materialized,” Shyu noted, while cautioning:

As fees drop, miners die out, security decreases, the network weakens again… and a slow death spiral could set in. Bitcoin is finished.

Miner stress is already visible in the data as the hash price, a daily measure of mining revenue per unit of computing power, is hovering around $29 per petahash per second this month, and miners absorbed an 18% hash price crash in late June as BitcoinMining difficulty jumped 7.15%.

The quantum clock

The second bomb is quantum computing, because a sufficiently powerful quantum machine could, in theory, use Shor’s algorithm to derive private keys from exposed public keys, putting the old ones bitcoin risky addresses. Timelines vary widely, with venture capitalist Nic Carter discussing a possible “Q-day” around 2035, while other research published this year has moved some planning horizons to 2030.

Not everyone is panicked, with several academics recently concluding that attacking BitcoinThe mining process itself would require “the energy of a star,” and the industry has launched a massive security race to quantum-secure the chain.

Proposals include BIP-361, a three-phase soft fork that would eventually freeze coins that ignore migration to quantum-secure addresses, while Starkware’s chief product officer released a system for quantum-secure transactions built from existing rules.

Popular analyst Willy Woo also claimed that the threat has already been met, highlighting the increase in developer activity around this issue.

“Massive financial losses”

Shyu’s own exit was as much about leverage as protocol design. “I used excessive leverage. A small mistake led to drastic consequences,” he admitted. Bitcoin fell from around $126,000 in October 2025 to $60,000 this summer, a roughly 50% drawdown that triggered automatic liquidations of its leveraged position. He described the market as walking on “thin ice.”

Even after capitulating, the engineer insists he hasn’t completely abandoned the asset class, calling himself “still a long-term bullish investor.” Critics noted that Shyu had a history of dramatic reversals, and his warning came during a week when the market moved in the other direction.

Whether either bomb goes off will depend on decisions that will be made years from now. The halving by 2028 will reduce the block subsidy to 1.5625 BTC, sharpening the fee debate, and developers still need to unite around a single quantum migration path.