Justin Sun said in a recent interview that quantum computing poses a potential threat to the crypto industry, arguing that the market is seriously underestimating how destructive a future "Q-Day" could be, especially for Bitcoin’s price.
Sun said mathematics is fundamental to crypto and that the industry is now focused on the possibility of quantum attacks. He said TRON is moving to implement post-quantum cryptography standards from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, so blockchains can withstand quantum-based attacks. According to him, the technology is already live on testnet and could be deployed on mainnet as early as the beginning of next year.
Sun says Bitcoin consensus moves too slowly
Speaking about Bitcoin’s ability to respond to a possible quantum threat, Sun said many people have badly underestimated the force of Q-Day. In his view, most people in crypto do not really understand how slowly consensus is reached across the Bitcoin network.
He said he entered the Bitcoin community in 2012 and has seen technical progress across the community move at a very slow pace. Even if the entire network knew with certainty that a disaster would arrive two years later, he said, getting Bitcoin to reach network-wide consensus and complete an upgrade within that two-year window would be nearly impossible.
Large financial institutions have not spent enough time on the issue, he says
Sun also mentioned large U.S. financial institutions including BlackRock. He said fund managers at those firms have not spent enough time studying the issue.
In his description, many traditional institutions may think about the problem the way they think about a software bug in an iPhone system: Apple releases a patch, users click update, and the issue is fixed. Public blockchain infrastructure does not evolve that way, he said.
Sun added that those institutions have committed tens of billions of dollars to the sector, but do not truly participate in Bitcoin development, do not understand the underlying technology, and do not pay attention to how it changes at the technical level. He compared that to a fund manager who owns Apple stock but does not spend each day studying the underlying code of iOS.
Based on that view, Sun said Q-Day would be a major problem and that the market has seriously underestimated the potentially devastating blow it could deal to Bitcoin’s price.