Quantum Computing: A threat to BTC? Yes and No.

I was digging around about the implications of quantum computing ‘cracking’ the security of cryptocurrency protocols like BTC and others. In theory you could escalate how many layers of security you apply (e.g. 128 vs 256 vs 512 (? is that even a thing), but the promise of quantum computing suggests it wouldn’t matter in a material way. As a tangent, in this world, there should be some new quantum computing encryption standard (I assume — have not looked in to this).

The reason why the answer is yes and no to the answer of whether this is a legitimate threat to cryptocurrency protocols is that if you broaden out the context of encryption security, not only does quantum computing fuck up cryptocurrency’s day, it fucks up encryption in general across everything, because BTC is already at the (reasonable) edge of encryption.

So the answer is yes and no.