[ransom1538]

SO... BTC goes to zero?

[bilsbie]

I don’t see why bitcoin wouldn’t update its software in such a case. The majority of minors just need to agree. But why wouldn’t they if the alternative is going to zero?

[jonathanlydall]

Sir Alexander Dane: MINERS, not MINORS.

[andrewla]

How could updating the software possibly make a difference here? If the encryption is cracked, then who is to say who owns which Bitcoin? As soon as I try to transfer any coin that I own, I expose my public key, your "Quantum Computer" cracks it, and you offer a competing transaction with a higher fee to send the Bitcoin to your slush fund.

No amount of software fixes can update this. In theory once an attack becomes feasible on the horizon they could update to post-quantum encryption and offer the ability to transfer from old-style addresses to new-style addresses, but this would be a herculean effort for everyone involved and would require all holders (not miners) to actively update their wallets. Basically infeasible.

Fortunately this will never actually happen. It's way more likely that ECDSA is broken by mundane means (better stochastic approaches most likely) than quantum computing being a factor.

[andrewstuart2]

I'll tell you right now, no way my kids would agree until they're at least adults. They don't even know what asymmetric cryptography is.

[jacquesm]

> The majority of minors just need to agree.

That's an uncomfortably apt typo.

[udev4096]

The problem is all the lost BTC wallets, which is speculated to be a lot and also one of the biggest reason for the current BTC price, who obviously cannot upgrade to PQ. There is currently a radical proposal of essentially making all those lost wallets worthless, unless they migrate [1]

[1] - https://github.com/jlopp/bips/blob/quantum_migration/bip-pos...

[chermi]

Hey, why are you bringing the kids into this! ;) "The majority of minors"

[logtrees]

No, I don't think so. By the time quantum supremacy is really achieved for a "Q-Day" that could affect them or things like them, the existing blockchains which have already been getting hardened will have gotten even harder. Quantum computing could be used to further harden them, as well, rather than compromise them. Supposing that Q-Day brought any temporary hurdles to Bitcoin or Ethereum or related blockchains, well...due to their underlying nature resulting in justified Permanence, we would be able to simply reconstitute and redeploy them for their functionalities because they've already been sufficiently imbued with value and institutional interest as well. These are quantum-resistant hardenings.

So I do not think these tools or economic substrate layers are going anywhere. They are very valuable for the particular kinds of applications that can be built with them and also as additional productive layers to the credit and liquidity markets nationally, internationally, and also globally/universally.

So there is a lot of institutional interest, including governance interest, in using them to build better systems. Bitcoin on its own would be reduced in such justification but because of Ethereum's function as an engine which can drive utility, the two together are a formidable and quantum-resistant platform that can scale into the hundreds of trillions of dollars and in Ethereum's case...certainly beyond $1Q in time.

I'm very bullish on the underlying technology, even beyond tokenomics for any particular project. The underlying technologies are powerful protocols that facilitate the development and deployment of Non Zero Sum systems at scale. With Q-Day not expected until end of 2020s or beginning of 2030s, that is a considerable amount of time (in the tech world) to lay the ground work for further hardening and discussions around this.

[deliriumchn]

no, not really, PQC is already being discussed in pretty much every relevant crypto thing for couple years alearady and there are multiple PQC algos ready to protect important data in banking etc as well

[cyberpunk]

I don’t really understand the threat to banking. Let’s say you crack the encryption key used in my bank between a java payment processing system and a database server. You can’t just inject transactions or something. Is the threat that internal network traffic could be read? Transactions all go to clearing houses anyway. Is it to protect browser->webapp style banking? those all use ec by now anyway, and even if they don’t how do you mitm this traffic?

Where is the exact threat?

[pclmulqdq]

No, we're still not much closer to that event.

[LarsDu88]

If quantum computers crack digital crytography, traditional bank account goes to zero too because regular 'ol databases also use crytography techniques for communication.

[wcoenen]

If all else fails, banks can generate terabytes of random one-time pad bytes, and then physically transport those on tape to other banks to set up provably secure communication channels that still go over the internet.

It would be a pain to manage but it would be safe from quantum computing.

[OsrsNeedsf2P]

Let's say I give you a function you can call to crack any RSA key. How are you hacking banks?

[r33b33]

This is WRONG and a very common stupid belief. Traditional banks will just transfer easily to safer encryption, since they are centralised. Bitcoin won't. Bitcoin will die and world will undergo infinite suffering.