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Can someone explain why Bitcoin isn't crashing due to quantum?

11 points by XiphiasX ↗ HN
Institutions hold Bitcoin. Institutions are smart. Smart entities are able to extrapolate and understand that quantum computers will be able to crack encryption before 2030 due to accelerating advancements both in intelligence and quantum computers. Accelerating advancements, not linear. So smart money knows that there is not an unreasonable chance Bitcoin gets cracked at around 2027-2028. That’s about 2 years left. Yet one Bitcoin costs a two bedroom apartment in St. Petersburg. Something does not compute for me here.

Am I the only one who’s delusional or the world has gone mad?

16 comments

[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 29.3 ms ] thread
cinntaile
The world will have bigger fish to fry if "encryption" gets cracked around 2027-2028. I doubt it will, but anyway assuming it does then they will switch to quantum resistant encryption algorithms instead.
joey_spaztard
Current quantum computers are toys for physicists that are of zero practical use.

See the recent research paper about recreating quantum factoring records using a dog, an abacus, and a vintage computer

gethly
Because bitcoin is a bubble. Many do not want to hear it but that is what it it.

Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. It is no different than beanie babies, baseball cards or any collectibles from the past that people thought would make them rich.

The power of bitcoin is in hodling - convincing people to never sell, so the price will keep going up ad infinitum. Once that belief fades away, the entire thing will collapse like a house of cards.

So to answer your question - bitcoin has not crashed yet because it is all about irrationality. Once rationality pops its head up and people start waking up from the dream, it will be over. The quantum computers have nothing to do with it. Not only the hodlers do not even understand bitcoin and crypto, but even if it were out already, people would not believe it until they would read it in the news and bitcoin would be already crashing. And likely even then they would just spam the internet with diamond hands and refuse to believe it is over(again, irrational behavior).

Personally, I absolutely hate that some-people, some-where, some-time ago, hijacked the idea of crypto currency and turned it into an investment instrument, which it is not. Crypto is a beautiful idea that would have worked miraculously if deployed into the real world as intended and we could have had nice things, but we got hoodwinked and it turned all crypto to shit.

bell-cot
You seem to believe some combination of 'quantum will break all practical crypto by 2030-ish' and 'the big fish in the Bitcoin pond couldn't replace Bitcoin's crypto algorithm'.

Why do you believe those, when the smart money obviously doesn't?

Ekaros
Financial markets work on very short scales. And have been doing so increasingly. If you can still make money for 2 years. Well you will. And if you believe you are smart you try to time it. And only dump or short at moment you gain most.

Just like during 2008 lot of people noticed that there were issues in the market and assets. But stayed in as there was still money to be made. Honestly it really looks like same thing is now happening again, be it with AI or other type of lending. Cracks are showing, but there is not that much movement yet.

csomar
Quantum computing is as real as my $1bn bank account. It does exist, I just can't access it. There is a lot of money to be paid, however, to be doing this "research" and part of the fund raising is hyping. It does help that there is no target or goal to reach: This keeps the prospects of your funding unlimited. Quite fitting for quantum mechanics.
amanaplanacanal
Why do you think quantum computers are going to get that good in the next couple of years? I suspect the odds of that happening are approximately zero.
constantcrying
Bitcoin hasn't crashed because it is non-functional as a a currency, why would it crash because it's cryptography might break at some point in the future?

>Institutions hold Bitcoin. Institutions are smart.

Come on! Especially financial institutions have a serious track record of ignoring obvious problems, outright fraud and monumental incompetence.

chistev
>×Yet one Bitcoin costs a two bedroom apartment in St. Petersburg.

Rent or buy?

AgentK20
The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
lesuorac
The world doesn't operate with code as law. If somebody steals all the bitcoins in the world then they'll just fork it [1].

A significant amount of bitcoins are held by known entities (exchanges) so it's pretty trivial for institutions to keep their coins after a fork. Those of you self-hosting might have some losses.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum_Classic

ArtTimeInvestor
The way I understand it:

Introducing quantum resistant addresses is possible via a soft-fork, so rather easy.

Work on it already started: https://github.com/jlopp/bips/blob/quantum_migration/bip-pos...

If capable quantum computers become more probable and the soft fork is not already happening, it will be accelerated. And then everybody will move their coins to quantum resistant addresses.

So it does not look like a major problem. It will lower the price a bit though. Because old, lost coins will be revived and come to the market.

There will also be some type of war around "code is law" because some people will suggest to invalidate old coins on non-quantum-resistant addresses. That will be interesting to watch.

einsteinx2
> Can someone explain why Bitcoin isn't crashing due to quantum?

Because the current state of the art in Quantum can only factor 2 digit numbers (maybe) and are probably decades away or breaking traditional encryption or Bitcoin.

> Smart entities are able to extrapolate and understand that quantum computers will be able to crack encryption before 2030 due to accelerating advancements both in intelligence and quantum computers.

This is false. What “smart money” do you know that has indicated they believe this?

>Accelerating advancements, not linear.

Also false. What gives you the impression that this is true? Quantum computing is definitely not increasing at an exponential rate, and LLMs have already hit the top of the S-curve and new models are not exponentially better than previous models, they’re incrementally better.

> So smart money knows that there is not an unreasonable chance Bitcoin gets cracked at around 2027-2028.

Again false. Why do you believe that “smart money” believes this?

Could it be that you believe it, but smart money does not which is why they are still investing in Bitcoin?

gus_massa
Close to "2 digit numbers in base 2". There are some paper about factoring bigger number like 15, but they assume some structure of the factors.