- Quantum computing has become a frontline debate in the Bitcoin community.
- Investors and some developers are concerned that computers capable of breaking Bitcoin’s encryption are just around the corner.
- Strategy chairman Michael Saylor isn’t fazed by it.
Michael Saylor has heard it all before — and he’s unfazed.
Strategy’s chairman dismissed a growing chorus of investors worried that quantum computing could threaten Bitcoin’s encryption.
Instead, he called it just another supposed existential threat to the 17-year-old digital asset.
“I don’t actually think that the quantum narrative is the greatest security threat to Bitcoin right now,” Saylor said on the Coinstories podcast on February 24.
“People joke they’ve been concerned and talking about it every two years for the past 15 years.”
Of late, quantum computing has become a hot topic for debate among Bitcoin developers and investors. Quantum computers are super-powerful computers that could eventually break Bitcoin’s encryption.
Just because quantum computing isn’t here doesn’t mean the $1.3 trillion digital asset is perfectly immune. Some of its top developers reckon that Bitcoin isn’t ready for a future in which government agencies have access to superfast quantum computers that can break the system’s cryptography.
But they’re working on it.
“Nearly everyone has been very grateful that we are taking the problem seriously,” Hunter Beast, Bitcoin developer and author of BIP 360, previously told DL News. “Our whole motto is: prepared, not scared.”
A rotating cast
Rather than pointing to specific alternative threats, Saylor rattled off what he called “a hundred narratives that people discuss that might be a security threat.”
None of which, he implied, has ever actually derailed the world’s largest cryptocurrency.
First, there was a broad debate over Chinese mining dominance, Saylor noted. Then concerns revolved around whether Chinese mining equipment had backdoors that could shut down remote miners. Finally, there was China’s broad-based mining ban.
Bitcoin carried on.
Saylor also mentioned network capacity problems, the possibility of governments taking down Bitcoin, questions about decentralisation, and even whether Bitcoin should be easier to run on an iPhone.
“The number of debates about what’s good for Bitcoin are mind-numbing and there are many of them,” Saylor said. “They will continue. Quantum will be one.”
Quantum concerns
Notwithstanding Saylor’s dismissive stance, Bitcoin investors and developers have been taking quantum computing concerns seriously.
In early February, BIP 360, a quantum-resistant upgrade to Bitcoin, was formally accepted as a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal, although this is a notoriously slow process for incorporation into the Bitcoin software stack.
Meanwhile, investors are quite vocal about their worries.
Eliezer Ndinga, global head of research at 21Shares, recently told DL News that the quantum threats rate “10/10” in terms of magnitude, citing recent research from Chaincode Labs that found that up to 50% of all Bitcoin could be stolen by quantum-computing-enabled thieves.
Nic Carter, a crypto angel investor who led an investment in Project Eleven, dedicated to assuaging quantum computing threats, previously told DL News that “virtually everyone” he talks to is quietly concerned about Bitcoin.
Pedro Solimano is a markets correspondent based in Buenos Aires. Got a tip? Email him atpsolimano@dlnews.com.
