Nobody Agrees on When Quantum Computing Breaks Crypto
33 posts across 10 communities in the last 30 days; 55% from r/CryptoCurrency.
“It's not, it's a hash of the public key. You can't calculate the pub key from it. [re: Bitcoin’s Quantum Wake-Up Call: 1.79 Million Exchange BTC Have Exposed Public Keys.]”
“Quantum theft is going to be a non issue. A quantum computer can computer every single key at the same time, how would you use each key to ensure its the right one. They will be no faster than brute forcing the key with a normal computer [re: Satoshi-era bitcoin mined in 2010…”
““It’s in cold storage” shouldn’t end the conversation. Glassnode’s October 8 snapshot puts 1.79 million exchange-held BTC behind public keys already visible on-chain. These figures measure exposure—not stolen coins. Cold storage keeps private keys offline. It cannot erase a…”
Crypto users are experiencing anxiety and confusion surrounding the potential impact of quantum computing on their assets and security. The timeline for this threat is unclear, with conflicting information about its imminence and the necessary steps for mitigation, leading to uncertainty and a need for proactive adaptation.
SOURCES (60)
“So what you're saying is my crypto is cooked? [re: Google just broke open a 20-year bottleneck in quantum computing.]”
“https://preview.redd.it/mw49f78mztvh1.png?width=1168&format=png&auto=webp&s=fb73ebd8c8222767623d56212e6facebbe537b7f Quantum computers can do basic operations fairly easily. But to run the powerful algorithms that could solve hard problems (like drug design, materials science, or breaking certain codes), they need extra special resources called magic states. By making high quality magic states much cheaper to produce, quantum computers don’t need to be nearly as huge just to support”
“The experts polled in December 2025 put the odds of a working RSA-2048 breaker by 2035 [re: Bitcoin’s Quantum Wake-Up Call: 1.79 Million Exchange BTC Have Exposed Public Keys.]”
“"With enough time". The sun will go out before that. At this point saying "When quantum computing comes out" is basically like saying "when the encryption breaking wand comes out". Technically true. But doesn't really explain how far we are from it or if it's even achievable. [re: Well that escalated quickly]”
“Correct. That upgrade started in many systems over a year ago. It's here. Now [re: Post Quantum cryptography - Top projects are working on it. So is it FUD, narrative, or maybe just reality?]”
“Used to be 100 million qubits. Funny how technology advances with a worldwide race spending billions each year [re: Post Quantum cryptography - Top projects are working on it. So is it FUD, narrative, or maybe just reality?]”
“What a load of waffle . No quantum compter has even factored a number bigger than 21. There is no soloution, its strait up a false statement. [re: Bitcoin’s Quantum Wake-Up Call: 1.79 Million Exchange BTC Have Exposed Public Keys.]”
“It's not, it's a hash of the public key. You can't calculate the pub key from it. [re: Bitcoin’s Quantum Wake-Up Call: 1.79 Million Exchange BTC Have Exposed Public Keys.]”
“The obvious risk is to data vulnerable to 'harvest now, decrypt later' attacks. So latent crypto is in this group. It's been a while so my numbers may be off but I think quantum decryption needs 100,000 qubits to work. Leading edge right now is like 1000, with fidelity hurdles still. It's down the road a bit. [re: Post Quantum cryptography - Top projects are working on it. So is it FUD, narrative, or maybe just reality?]”
“Quantum theft is going to be a non issue. A quantum computer can computer every single key at the same time, how would you use each key to ensure its the right one. They will be no faster than brute forcing the key with a normal computer [re: Satoshi-era bitcoin mined in 2010 moves after 16 years, now worth $8.5 million]”
“Public keys [re: Bitcoin’s Quantum Wake-Up Call: 1.79 Million Exchange BTC Have Exposed Public Keys.]”
“Also I want to find the guy who has a quantum computer in his basement who is after my wallet! He must be stopped! [re: Bitcoin’s Quantum Wake-Up Call: 1.79 Million Exchange BTC Have Exposed Public Keys.]”
“A surge in projects pushing to have Post Quantum cryptography asap. We saw STRK jump after posting potential plans to become an L1. TRON announced it is preparing its rollout. NEAR did the same. I think ZEC too. Some took things a step further and raised concerns over whether NIST approved algos face risks with the OpenAI math display. But there was also well written pushback to that. A handful of smaller projects jumped - QRL, CELL, QTS, etc And some didn't react to the increased awareness”
“Yea of course, they might not... that's how risk works. [re: Bitcoin’s Quantum Wake-Up Call: 1.79 Million Exchange BTC Have Exposed Public Keys.]”
“Did you grab this straight from chatgpt [re: Bitcoin’s Quantum Wake-Up Call: 1.79 Million Exchange BTC Have Exposed Public Keys.]”
“How will they avoid the quantum problem, like they avoided Y2K? [re: Bitcoin’s Quantum Wake-Up Call: 1.79 Million Exchange BTC Have Exposed Public Keys.]”
“Meh don't care about the actual PQ parts. I'm with Peter Gutmann [0] in that PQ is just a waste of time and draining resources that could be put to better use.[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa4Ok7WNFHY”
““It’s in cold storage” shouldn’t end the conversation. Glassnode’s October 8 snapshot puts 1.79 million exchange-held BTC behind public keys already visible on-chain. These figures measure exposure—not stolen coins. Cold storage keeps private keys offline. It cannot erase a public key from the blockchain. A sufficiently powerful future quantum computer could make that distinction matter. Here’s the uncomfortable part: When you outsource custody, you also outsource the timetable for protecting yo”
“If the old wallet are sneakily drained one after another, I’d say someone might have a working quantum computer already. [re: Satoshi-era bitcoin mined in 2010 moves after 16 years, now worth $8.5 million]”
“So you’re saying we need quantum safe crypto and upgrading old chains might not be the best option? Hmmmm [re: Satoshi-era bitcoin mined in 2010 moves after 16 years, now worth $8.5 million]”
“Who’s able to crack it that fast, they’re saying. Is this even a reality? Is it to prevent the threat from quantum computing, maybe? I have no idea. [re: Let's Encrypt moving to 64-day validity in early 2027]”
“You don’t think AI agents haven’t been tasked with probing BTC code yet? It’s proven unless you have 51% there isn’t a way to crack it. Quantum is the only vulnerability [re: What the hell just happened with Ledger now?]”
“So your models think Vitalik sees this correctly? It was only a few years ago he was dismissing the quantum threat so I am always a bit skeptical [re: So now what- even post quantum cryptography isn't good enough?]”
“Lol November 2025. Buddy ai in the last two months ago is a different beast entirely [re: So now what- even post quantum cryptography isn't good enough?]”
“The cryptographers are working diligently in the background. I work at a major exchange, we have roadmapped out post quantum algos and products. My personal view: There will definitely be ancient wallets that get pwned by super quantum machines, however the larger blockchains and exchanges where large majority of the market cap are held in will be fine. [re: So now what- even post quantum cryptography isn't good enough?]”
“Then we just get ai to code a fix, fork btc or roll it back with a patch and happy days. Remember we can do that. [re: So now what- even post quantum cryptography isn't good enough?]”
“"Never let a good crisis go to waste" [re: So now what- even post quantum cryptography isn't good enough?]”
“Yes, you need both post-quantum cryptography and AI-resistant cryptography. These are two distinct threat vectors to Ethereum. [re: So now what- even post quantum cryptography isn't good enough?]”
“What a deeply ignorant statement. There are no shortcuts to factoring a (sufficiently large) number, and that's not even touching on other kinds of PKC.But this is a great example on why appealing to authority is a mistake and how academia is full of charlatans.Only way I see that happening is if (big f... if) P = NP and some superintelligence devises a general algorithm to solve one on the other; but he's obviously not referring to that, as the timeline in that context is the next 1-5 years, i.”
“I think I agree with you in spirit but I don't think "there's no way to reverse a modulus" is the right way to say this. Like that's in a sense what Coppersmith does? (Several attacks on RSA can be thought of as in some way "reversing a modulus").”
“That's the opposite of what my gut is telling me.Hashes are so simple. There's no place for these crazy math attacks, which rely on rethinking long-standing and otherwise reasonable assumptions, to hide.Surely we can all agree that there's no way to reverse a modulus.”
“More Quantum fud? Sigh... 😒 [re: So now what- even post quantum cryptography isn't good enough?]”
“I think it will be enough, seems to be part of the doomer circle? [re: So now what- even post quantum cryptography isn't good enough?]”
“Wasn't too long ago Vitalik hardly considered quantum computing a threat. Now he's questioning if even post quantum cryptography could be at risk. Though he notes we will need some form of post quantum cryptography: "However, signatures and encryption serve different purposes. Buterin argued that public-key encryption presents a harder challenge because it needs mathematical structure beyond hashes alone." My take is you need a solution to get off ecdsa / rsa yesterday because”
“This industry is “getting ready” for ever [re: Europol urges early action to protect cryptocurrencies and sensitive data from quantum threats]”
“That sounds like science fiction, but Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake has raised exactly this possibility. The concern is ECDSA, the digital signature algorithm used to authorize transactions on both Bitcoin and Ethereum. Drake suggested that advances in AI-driven mathematics could eventually make it possible to recover a private key from a public key on conventional hardware, potentially using large GPU clusters. In the worst-case scenario, he believes this could become a problem in”
“Whatever happens, a quick reminder: some cryptocurrencies, such as Nadochain, have been quantum-resistant since their genesis block. [re: Europol urges early action to protect cryptocurrencies and sensitive data from quantum threats]”
“The fact that most blockchain data is public is not what makes quantum computing dangerous to crypto. Confidentiality and transaction authorization are two different things. The risk is to the asymmetric cryptography used to prove that you control a key and are authorized to move the asset. If the signature scheme can be broken, an attacker does not need to decrypt the blockchain. They can potentially derive or reconstruct the private key from exposed public-key material and forge a valid transa”
““Quantum computing is not involved at all” is simply false. This has nothing to do with whether a blockchain has a legitimate token use case. The quantum problem is cryptographic. Bitcoin itself relies on elliptic-curve digital signatures, as do many other chains. A cryptographically relevant quantum computer threatens the signature schemes used to prove ownership and authorize transactions. That does not mean Bitcoin instantly dies, but it absolutely means Bitcoin has a post-quantum migration p”
“https://preview.redd.it/fx86i7ku13uh1.png?width=955&format=png&auto=webp&s=a2335ab5d6034d361585d8c5765e93a66c750762 Seems there's not much more that the average person can do besides generating a new account through self-custody & storing funds there, to an address that never signs, but only receives. Safety isn't guaranteed by storing a large sum of funds on a centralized exchange for instance, as we don't know what they're doing with the wallets holding our fund”
“Companies are being told they need to be quantum ready by ~ 2030, which is pretty soon all things considered. How do you think this is going to realistically change most people's careers going forward. Are average roles going to be made a lot more difficult? Or is it really just going to be an issue for very specific high level roles? submitted by /u/Level-Tank6551 [link] [comments]”
“Same, I know this might be seen as foolish but I've been nervous about quantum computing tech because I've never really found a reliable debunking of how it could break SHA256 / the cryptographic element of the network. Also I've quite FUDded about how trustless banking may just not be adopted well enough to really make BTC a long term investment that actually makes good money or stores value. I've read the whitepaper so I get the tech and I love it, but I'm just a bit blackp”
“We can't say certainly unless we are part of the internal teams but rolling out 23/5 tokenized trading and piloting international bank transfer on blockchains is hinting on that. We can be sure that mass adoption in inevitable.”
“Why? Because RSA’s weakness comes from the computing advances in number factorization. Bigger number = more time required. That said, this is only really a problem without forward secrecy in place, which no longer is much of a concern on modern web browsers.”
“It’s not a massive gap. Why is commercial availability any sort of meaningful bar? They aren’t going to sell access to a cryptographically relevant quantum computer. What matters is what is technologically feasible, and they have internally created hundreds of trapped-ion qubits. They have demonstrated these to researchers. I’m happy to see skepticism, but in this case it seems clear that there is a verifiable trajectory. It’s not just marketing hype or “trust me bro.””
“Because there is a massive gap between a theoretical whitepaper timeline meant for investors and actual fault-tolerant quantum engineering. To put it in perspective: IonQ currently has zero stabilized, hardware-running logical qubits available in a commercial system. All their recent 'breakthroughs' in error correction were done purely on simulated circuits. Yet, according to their own recent paper, they need exactly 1,457 fault-tolerant logical qubits (built from 19,397 physical qubits)”
“Of course it has never been done before. Every day somebody does something that has never been done before. I don't understand how that is even any kind of criticism. If they had done it already then everything would be completely, epically fucked right now. The point is that we can see it coming and we have to prepare for it.”
“Fair, I’ll rephrase: ‘never been done before by a publically traded company’. I know this has been a topic for a good bit of time. No doubt if this is achieved by 2030 we won’t be ready and it would be a serious challenge to a lot more than just lost wallets. Just stating the standard hype machine for newer tech companies with novel technologies.”
“Never thought achievable by who? I don’t need to research anything, I am a cryptographer who works on PQC. There are proposals, but the time from proposal to actual implementation can be many years. Taproot is still not fully adopted after five years, and that isn’t even controversial. Nobody agrees how to implement PQ signatures in Bitcoin because it doesn’t have a simple answer. There are options, of course, but they all have their own downsides. People are going to be arguing about it for a w”
“Reality of projected dates by publicly traded companies trying to hype stock on something never thought achievable? Also research what can be done on the blockchain to fortify against it. I recall a plan to accommodate against future quantum unlock threats.”
“Everything is estimated and projected until it actually happens. What specific problem do you see with their estimate?”
“It’s not one company or one paper. It’s dozens of companies and hundreds of papers. There is a clear and consistent trajectory. This is just bumping it up a bit more.”
“They are already well underway in upgrading their systems to using post-quantum ciphers. It’s also much easier for them because they can do it unilaterally and don’t need to manufacture consensus.”
“A new paper from IonQ shows that their trapped-ion quantum architecture can be optimized to run Shor's algorithm against 256-bit ECDSA signatures (which underlie most cryptocurrencies) with only 20,000 qubits in less than a month. Part of it is algorithmic improvements (more efficient circuit to run the algorithm) but most of the significant drop in the qubit estimate comes from their new architecture, which requires only approximately 5 physical qubits per error-corrected logical qubit. The”
“I think the part that gets lost in headlines like this is that the threat isn’t that quantum computers can break crypto today. In fact, ESMA says that current machines are still far from being able to break the public-key cryptography used in financial systems and blockchains. The real issue is migration time. If a sufficiently powerful quantum computer becomes a reality, networks that rely on elliptic-curve signatures won't be able to redesign wallets, protocols, and user behaviour overnigh”