[tw600040]

Naive question may be. But if quantum can break bitcoin, won't it also be able to break other encryptions that literally everyone else uses as well? So, it's not that bitcoin is particularly vulnerable right any more than banks and Gmails?

[weakened_malloc]

Yes and no. I'm no expert, but there's two things that don't make it nearly as dangerous as it is for BTC.

The first is the fact that many things are centralized. Things like Signal already have quantum-resistant encryption, and if they don't, they're able to implement it relatively quickly because it's centralized. BTC is not centralized and needs to jump through a bunch of hoops to get anything done.

The second is that because those things are centralized or close to, you can roll back changes with ease. For instance, if you hack a bank and steal a bunch of money from an account you're far more likely to be able to freeze those funds and get other banks to help stop everything before they're gone forever. You can't do that with BTC.

[nickvec]

From the article:

Q: A CRQC also breaks banking, military communications, and most of the internet today! If one appears, isn’t Bitcoin the least of our problems?

A: True! Banking software, military communications, and the internet also need to be upgraded. I have high confidence they will be, successfully (I’d put my B_{HTTPS} at close to 1). Unfortunately, I have less confidence that Bitcoin will upgrade successfully since upgrading a decentralized system of honey-badger-like participants is much more challenging and people like the questioner seem to think this is a valid argument that we shouldn’t even worry about it? If you disagree and think there will be a CRQC and the rest of the internet won’t upgrade successfully, maybe you should consider shorting the stock market and buying gold. But not Bitcoin, because if we do nothing that won’t work anymore. Not investment advice.