[matt_wulfeck]

> Gold can't be inflated by fiat, but it could be inflated by the discovery of a large deposit (or asteroid mining). Bitcoin can't be inflated at all, period.

Is this really true though? Couldn't a leap forward in quantum computing make mining BTC considerably "easier" and thus inflate and devalue the supply of BTC on the market?

[wyager]

Not as far as we know. Even with grover's algorithm, all hash algorithms in Bitcoin should still (probably) be secure. Even if there were a huge leap in processing power, the mining difficulty would increase automatically. Even if someone had infinite processing power, all they could do is mine the rest of the coins more quickly; there is still a hard cap on the total future number of coins.

[UncleMeat]

Quantum computing has implications for the transmission of coins but has no implications for mining. There is no evidence that QC is going to make it easier to invert hash functions.

[davidgerard]

I thought so too, but SHA-256 should apparently be susceptible to Grover's algorithm, which would make mining O(sqrt(N)) instead of O(N).

Of course, a practical quantum computer would also likely break public key cryptography, so you could just take other people's coins instead of doing all that tedious hashing.