A lot of people still think quantum computing is something way off in the future, but honestly the pace of progress has been surprising. It’s moving faster than most of us expected.right now, bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies are built on elliptic curve cryptography . The problem is, once a public key shows up on-chain, a powerful enough quantum computer could, at least in theory, reverse it and figure out the private key.
Now,i am not saying this happens tomorrow,but if bitcoin does not upgrade its cryptography in the next 3–5 years, the risk gets very real. Quantum hardware is improving step by step, and once it crosses a certain threshold, the current security model won’t hold up.
We’re talking about the world’s fifth largest asset here. If it doesn’t adapt, the idea that its security could collapse almost overnight and bitcoin price will go to zero.
So what are we worried about? Post-quantum cryptography options have already been created. The whole question will be how costly it will be to implement the new cryptography in terms of replacing equipment, if necessary. To find a private key using a public key, over the entire key space (not over a separate range, unlike in the famous puzzle), you need to have a computing power of several thousand qubits, and add twice as many qubits to correct errors. At least, that's what I read somewhere about Shor's algorithm. In my opinion, this level of progress is still far away (more than 5 years).