Patrick Shyu, a former Google and Meta engineer, says he sold all his Bitcoin and took heavy losses, warning that decaying miner incentives and quantum computing are two unresolved threats to the network. His case rests on a shrinking security budget and the risk that quantum machines could one day crack older addresses.
Patrick Shyu, the engineer known online as Techlead who once worked as a tech lead at Google and a staff software engineer at Meta, says he sold all his Bitcoin and suffered heavy financial losses. He laid out his case in a recent video, naming two threats he calls ticking time bombs: decaying miner incentives and quantum computing.
Miner incentives under pressure
Shyu's first concern is the erosion of the network's security budget. Miners earn from newly minted coins and transaction fees, but the block subsidy is cut in half roughly every four years and currently stands at 3.125 BTC, with the next halving expected in 2028. He argues that new coins are running out while fees have not filled the gap, saying: "95% of all Bitcoin is already minted".
Miner stress already shows in the data. Hashprice, a daily measure of mining revenue per unit of computing power, hovers around $29 per petahash per second this month. Miners also absorbed an 18% hashprice crash in late June as mining difficulty jumped 7.15%.
The quantum question
His second threat is quantum computing, because a sufficiently powerful machine could in theory use Shor's algorithm to derive private keys from exposed public keys, putting older addresses at risk. Timelines vary widely: venture investor Nic Carter has pointed to a possible "Q-Day" around 2035, while other research this year has shifted some planning horizons toward 2030.
Not everyone shares the alarm. Several academics recently concluded that attacking Bitcoin's mining process itself would demand an implausible amount of energy, and the industry has mounted a broad security race to quantum-proof the chain. Proposals include BIP-361, a three-phase soft fork that would eventually freeze coins skipping migration to quantum-safe addresses.
Leverage behind the losses
Shyu's exit was as much about leverage as protocol design. Bitcoin fell from about $126,000 in October 2025 to the low $60,000s this summer, a drawdown of roughly 50% that triggered automatic liquidations of his position built with excessive leverage.
Even so, he insists he has not abandoned the asset class, describing himself as still a long-term bullish investor. Critics note that Shyu has a history of dramatic reversals, and his warning landed during a week when the market moved the other way.
Source: Bitcoin.com News
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