Crypto loves fights you can screenshot. The ongoing fight about Bitcoin Core vs. Bitcoin Knots fits the template, with passionate arguments about which policies are a form of censorship and which offer neutrality instead.
Meanwhile, a totally different risk is doing the opposite of what investors want from tail risks, which is to say that it's drifting closer. That risk is a compressed post-quantum computing timeline, which is a problem highlighted recently by Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum.
Even if the first truly dangerous quantum computing machine arrives later than the doomsday posts predict, the problem for investors is that creating post-quantum security by migrating signatures, wallets, and infrastructure, is an inherently slow process.
So it's time to stop arguing about filters for a minute and determine if the chains you own can coordinate a cryptographic migration without turning the upgrade itself into a legitimacy crisis.
An Accelerated Quantum Timeline Compels Action
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently argued at Devconnect in Buenos Aires that “elliptic curves are going to die” sooner than many assume, and perhaps as soon as before 2028. Investors should treat that estimate less like a countdown clock and more like a position statement which implies that significant changes are going to need to be made to Ethereum in the near future.
Those changes are likely to be financially relevant, as they'll be adding capabilities and reducing tail risks to the chain, and not all chains will be able to become quantum secure at the same time.
To clarify, the risk here is that a quantum computer might soon be large enough to run Shor's algorithm at the scale needed to derive private keys from public keys. That's why NIST says quantum computing can threaten public-key cryptography. That does not mean the internet “collapses overnight,” but it does mean that without mitigation, quantum computers could cause a tremendous amount of financial damage in crypto.
The mistake that many investors are bound to make here is waiting for a proof of the danger before demanding a roadmap for how to prevent the danger from becoming actual damage. Migration to post-quantum security is not the stuff of a weekend patch so much as a multi-year coordination program across wallets, custodians, exchanges, developers, and core protocol code. Most chains are simply not sufficiently organized in terms of their governance to make adaptations in advance of the threat.
Therefore, the chains which are making progress towards becoming quantum secure, like Ethereum, may soon trade at a premium, especially if investors at large come to recognize the potential severity that quantum computers could inflict.
Quantum risk is a timeline problem
When it comes to assessing the threat of quantum computers and placing the risk of them into the appropriate context timewise, there are a few key estimates regarding adaptation timelines that it behooves investors to be aware of.
The first is that, contrary to what the public discourse on the topic might have you think, you do not simply need a quantum computer with a lot of qubits to crack the cryptography that underpins most cryptocurrencies. There need to be quite a few physical qubits, with adequate fault tolerance, error correction, and enough logical qubits to run deep circuits reliably.
The good news is that it is impossible to build such a computer in someone's garage, which dramatically lowers the odds of non-state actors (including corporations) from ever doing it. Even better, progress in the field of quantum computing is slow by virtue of the onerous engineering involved.
Google's messaging around its brand new Willow quantum computer is a useful calibration point. The chip has 105 physical qubits, and even optimistic estimates for breaking mainstream cryptography talk about millions of physical qubits (or thousands to tens of thousands of logical qubits once full error correction is in place), meaning it would still take a very long time before a useful quantum computer was made.
The more interesting investor signal here is that large players are now comfortable with publishing roadmaps that assume fault tolerance is a solvable engineering project. IBM says it aims to deliver a fault-tolerant system called Starling by 2029, targeting 200 logical qubits and 100 million quantum gates. Microsoft, separately, points to progress on error-corrected systems and claims that it holds a record on logical-qubit performance.
Standards for security are moving apace too. NIST finalized its first post-quantum suite, including three standardized algorithms, which means the question is no longer “does PQC exist,” but “can your ecosystem adopt it without chaos?” For many chains, the answer to that latter question will be a sheepish "no", most likely after major breaches start to happen in the (potentially distant) future.
Migration is the real battlefield
Bitcoin Optech notes that Bitcoin's signature schemes are vulnerable in principle to Shor's algorithm. Ethereum has a similarly vulnerable seam because it signs transactions with asymmetric crypto. Its transactions use recoverable ECDSA, which is exactly the sort of primitive you would eventually need to replace or wrap in a post-quantum world.
This is where most of the marketing collapses; migration is a far harder problem to solve than cryptography or implementations thereof. You need a staged plan that real humans can execute, and you need a governance culture that can keep legitimacy intact while doing it. Both of those are, at least in crypto as it is today, fairly rare.
Now, let's zoom back out to revisit filters in the context of Bitcoin. The filter fights are rehearsals. They reveal how quickly internecine technical disagreements can become legitimacy disputes, and that behavior is exactly what can derail a post-quantum upgrade -- and it might. Put differently, the elephant in the room here is that a chain can fail the quantum test without ever being hacked, simply by failing to coordinate within the necessary timespan.
The Final Verdict
If Vitalik's thoughts on quantum computing's timeline compression are even partly right, complacency is about to get incredibly expensive for the chains that can't form a consensus and act quickly and competently. Make sure you understand what you're holding in terms of the risks you're exposed to and position your portfolio accordingly, as some of them could go to zero over exactly this.
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