Bitcoin Magazine says fears that quantum computing will soon break Bitcoin remain a form of FUD rather than an immediate technical threat. In the article, a cryptographically relevant quantum computer, or CRQC, is described as a machine that could let an attacker recreate secret keys from public keys and sign Bitcoin transactions that move other people’s coins. The author’s answer to whether that threat is realistic for Bitcoin’s continued growth is blunt: no.
The piece states that there is no evidence a CRQC will be built within a decade, and it remains unknown whether such a machine will ever be built. On that basis, the article argues that the quantum threat to Bitcoin is still FUD.
The state of quantum computing, as described in the article
The article says that, to date, no quantum computing machine has computed anything out of reach of a precocious 6-year-old, a claim it says has been confirmed empirically. At the same time, it describes quantum computers as extraordinary devices built on technologies such as optical tweezers, laser cooling, superconducting flux qubits, electromagnetic traps and dilution refrigerators.
According to the piece, individual qubits are pushed into specific subatomic states, entangled into superpositions, manipulated to represent computations, and then measured so their properties can be interpreted. That capability, the author says, is remarkable in its own right.
Still, the article argues that the practical gap remains vast. Using one candidate technology as an example, it says completing a calculation that a small child can do may require enough power to air condition a Texas high school, along with many hours of setup and additional hours of post-processing. The point is not that the machines are trivial, but that they are still nowhere near practical systems able to threaten Bitcoin’s cryptography.
Why money does not settle the question
The author then addresses a common argument: a lot of money is flowing into quantum computing, so practical breakthroughs must be getting closer. The article rejects that logic. It says capital flowing into a field does not reliably correlate with the pace of real-world technological progress. Before the correct underlying technology has been found and product-market fit is clear, the author argues, more money may even correlate negatively with the odds of delivering applicable technology.
To make the point, the article compares NASA’s Space Shuttle program with SpaceX’s Falcon 9. SpaceX, it says, took mostly known science and reduced it to practice to meet a demonstrated market need for reliable and lower-cost access to space, reaching its first crewed mission at a program cost of less than $5 billion. The Space Shuttle, by contrast, cost roughly $50 billion to reach its first crewed mission.
The piece adds that Falcon 9 not only cost an order of magnitude less to develop, but also has a perfect crew safety record to date. The comparison is used to argue that no amount of money can make an unready technology practical.
Applied to quantum computing, the article says large budgets can buy expensive technology demonstrations, but they do not answer the core question of whether the industry can produce stable, low-error qubits. The author argues that no amount of continued work on the Space Shuttle would have produced the low cost and high reliability of Falcon 9, and says it is entirely possible that no amount of continued development, at any cost, will make any current quantum computing approach reliable enough to break even a single key pair.
Recent advances do not mean a CRQC is close
The article splits recent progress into two categories. The first is pure mathematics. As an example, it points to a recent Google paper that the author says was considered important enough for the theoretical quantum circuit to be redacted, to avoid the risk of it being used against important cryptographic systems.
That may look like a major step toward a CRQC, the article says, but the hardware reality has not changed. Unless quantum hardware has its own Falcon 9 moment, there is still no device anywhere near the stability and scale required to run that redacted circuit. The piece goes so far as to call it theater to hide a circuit designed for a machine that may never exist.
The second category is hardware progress itself. The author acknowledges a steady stream of papers and new results each year, but asks how many of those results belong to the same candidate technology and how many simply reflect a reset after a dead end. In that framing, quantum progress is not a straight line toward eventual success. It is a breadth-first search across an effectively infinite possibility space, with researchers trying to find any path that can go even a modest distance before hitting another wall.
The article says the future of quantum computing remains hazy at best. It notes promising developments, especially in neutral atom devices, but says it is far too early to know whether any currently known branch leads to an eventual CRQC or whether more restarts still lie ahead. The author adds that the discussion could change if one candidate technology begins showing repeated iterations with more capable machines and meaningful results that a precocious child cannot also compute.
Theoretical limits raised in the piece
The article offers two possible explanations for why quantum research has repeatedly failed to produce a CRQC over many decades. One is that the problem is simply very hard and that science and engineering may eventually solve it, much as humanity produced the Internet, the smart phone, social media and Bitcoin.
The other possibility is more fundamental: a CRQC may be impossible, or may remain permanently out of reach. The article says that for a CRQC to exist, it would need to represent within a quantum superposition a field of possibilities matching the complexity of the cryptographic problem being attacked.
Using Bitcoin’s secp256k1 elliptic curve as the example, the piece says that breaking the 128-bit security of the elliptic curve discrete log would require a quantum superposition capable of representing all possible values of a 128-bit number. In classical computing, the article says, storing all such values would require far more storage than humanity has ever produced, by many orders of magnitude.
From there, the author raises two further possibilities. If there is even slight granularity in the quantum superposition, meaning it is not perfectly continuous across all possible values, then the machine can never become cryptographically relevant. If the energy required to hold a superposition scales with the complexity of the field being represented, then the machine also cannot become cryptographically relevant. The article says contemporary quantum physics does not rule out either possibility.
Bitcoin still needs cryptographic upgrades
The article closes by arguing that Bitcoin development toward new cryptographic algorithms should continue regardless. Even if a quantum attack is not imminent, the author says another flaw could be found by other means. The piece notes that some elliptic curves have been found to have weaknesses, and says secp256k1 could be next.
In the author’s view, Bitcoin has lasted because attacks on the system have strengthened it, and that pattern will continue as quantum-related FUD keeps surfacing. The article specifically points to work on P2MR, P2TRv2, SHRINCS, SPHINCS, IBC, ML-DSA and additional post-quantum signature schemes as paths that could improve Bitcoin’s resilience against future attacks, even if a true CRQC is never built.
Bitcoin Magazine says the piece appears in the latest print edition, The Quantum Issue, and that its online publication offers an early look at ideas explored in the full issue. The article is written by Brandon Black.