Bloomberg asks the question everyone in crypto is quietly worried about, can quantum computers actually hack Bitcoin

[Sorted Echo]

A Bloomberg feature lays out just how seriously the cryptocurrency world is starting to take the quantum computing threat, noting that as much as 470 billion dollars worth of Bitcoin could theoretically be at risk if the technology keeps advancing at its current pace. Quantum computers use qubits that can represent multiple states simultaneously rather than the simple 0s and 1s of classical computers, which is exactly the property that could eventually let them crack the elliptic curve cryptography protecting Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

Bitcoin has survived plenty of existential crises since 2009 through what the piece describes as the unshakable faith of its enthusiast community, but this particular threat is different because it does not depend on regulation, market sentiment or adoption, it is a pure hardware and mathematics problem. The exposure is concentrated specifically in older wallets and any address that has been reused after spending, since those are the ones with public keys already sitting visible on the blockchain

The reassuring part is that today's quantum hardware remains nowhere close to capable of this, current machines have somewhere around 1,000 to 1,500 physical qubits while breaking Bitcoin's cryptography is estimated to require anywhere from several thousand to several hundred thousand depending on the error correction scheme used. That gap has been shrinking though, as quantum error correction techniques keep improving faster than raw qubit counts alone would suggest

Developers are not waiting for that gap to close before acting, with proposals like BIP-360 aiming to migrate Bitcoin toward quantum resistant address formats, though as of now those proposals remain stuck in draft status without an agreed activation mechanism. The harvest now decrypt later concern, where an adversary simply records exposed public keys today and waits for the hardware to catch up, is the argument developers keep making for why this cannot wait until quantum computers are actually close to capable

Will Quantum Computers Hack Bitcoin And Other Cryptocurrencieswww.bloomberg.com

[Linda52]

470 billion dollars is such a staggering number to have theoretically exposed, no wonder this keeps coming up as a genuine concern rather than just crypto Twitter paranoia

[NeuralTrace96]

The unshakable faith line is a good way to describe Bitcoin's community honestly, but faith doesn't fix a math problem, only an actual protocol upgrade does

[Daz]

BIP-360 being stuck in draft status for this long really shows how hard it is to get Bitcoin's decentralized governance to move on anything urgent