The firm’s senior financial strategist is concerned the advancements in the field of quantum computing will break Bitcoin.
Crypto seems like alot lower on the list of problems that will happen if encryption no longer works
Businesses/orgs that have smart leaders are already implementing (or have already completed implementing) post-quantum encryption algs/methods into their systems to protect them for when quantum computers and quantum programming mature, making their existing encryption defeatable. For most systems it’s just a matter of a software update and re-encrypting any data.
This is a problem for public proof-of-work systems that cannot change their encryption, eg: all crypto. Bitcoin cannot change how their coins are encrypted without redesigning and completely rebuilding their public blockchain - it would require concensus from all major bitcoin users and businesses (coin exchanges etc), and could potentially leave any prior-minted bitcoin vulnerable anyway. It will not happen anytime soon - and when it does happen, it may be too late.
Hence, its actually pretty high on the list of quantum targets, and will likely be attacked as soon as it’s available. Some people might be able to steal a bunch of Bitcoin and exchange it for other new (secure) coins or for cash, and get out before the Bitcoin public realize its been cracked. At which time the Bitcoin price will crash hard and may not recover (depending on what action they take to resolve the issue), so the cautious are getting out asap.
Businesses/orgs that have smart leaders
So very few
But agreed its easy for centralized businesses/entities to eventually migrate their stuff into quantum secure systems. Theirs like a 100B for whoever can crack satoshi’s bitcoin keys
Well not all encryption, mostly just public key based algorithms. AES-256 should be good for a while yet even in a post quantum computing world.
forgot to specify asymmetric encryption good point
It’s not even close lol why the panic. Did wall street read one of those clickbaity quantum computing research breakthroughs
In trading, gotta react early to stuff everyone else will react to later
I won’t though, I’ll just keep my Bitcoin until it’s worthless lol
💎
Guessing how close or far we are from any given computing breakthrough is bound to be wrong.
I wouldn’t be shocked if some governments were pouring money into this in secret.
It’s also possible for bitcoin to switch algorithms so it would presumably switch to something quantum resistant.
There are already chat clients that have switched to these types of algorithms, Signal and Apple messages being the most popular ones.
Do you want to be the one holding the bag in 20 years?
Please it would be so funny
LOL. LMAO even. I emember telling my falling-for-it-again friends back 2 years ago that quantum would make their crypto get rekt.
…look at the price swings on bitcoin over the last 2 years, if they have any sense at all when it comes to how the Casino works they’ve made absolute bank
“The” advancements?
Like how it’s still experiencing too many errors to correct for and be useful for much of anything? Those advancements?
Let’s take our money out of BTC and invest it in fusion power plants and jetpacks and hover boards instead.
There is already far more being spent on fusion research. It’s way more valuable than even a million dollar bitcoin valuation.
Jetpacks are a dead end. Automated Passanger drones make more sense at the moment, just need to work out the battery weight ratio. Automation so we don’t all need a pilot license to operate them.
Hoverboards are antigravity sci-fi. I don’t think anyone is seriously research anything there.
So… did they find anything where our current quantum computing is actually faster? Last time I read about this, it boiled down to: If you spend as much time on optimizing the regular calculation, then that is as fast/faster. So no actual, fundamental, benefit to our current state of quantum computing.
In theory, quantum computing should be faster once hardware that’s faster is available, and only if the problem you’re trying to solve is in BQP, which isn’t that much of what computers are used for. Progress has been slow, but continuous, so the gap between simulating a quantum computer and actually using one has been shrinking. In October last year, Google’s Willow chip was verified to have achieved quantum advantage, i.e. done something that could be checked externally faster than a classical computer could have. It was only 13,000x faster, and in one specific task, which isn’t really enough to change the world, but ten or twenty years ago it was still thought to be fairly plausible that the physics might not be right and even if the practical problems were solved, they still wouldn’t work.
Even if quantum computers get ludicrously fast, they’re still not going to be especially common, and they’ll be a piece of specialised equipment, more like an electron microscope than a home PC. Most people just don’t need to do any stuff that’s in BQP, so don’t care if they can do it faster. If you’re a company, university or government body that needs to do one of the very specific things that will be faster, though, they’ll be indispensable.
Edit: Of particular relevance to the article, at the moment, SHA256, the hashing algorithm underpinning Bitcoin, is considered to be quantum-resistant. Someone might discover some new maths that means a quantum computer can break it faster than a classical computer, but at the moment, even though people have looked into it, there’s no indication that it’s possible, so it should never become easier to break Bitcoin etc. with a quantum computer than a classical one.
Prime factorization is one. Another is an asymptotically faster Fourier transform.
There are several tricks in signal processing that have faster analogs in a quantum implementation. Those cool tricks are the foundation of much more complicated transformations and algorithms.
There is an entire complexity class you can read up in: Bounded Quantum Polynomial Time (BQP).
