This was an excellent overview of the threat of quantum computers on bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. And your comment that “we will have bigger problems than losing your bitcoin” is right on, as basically ALL of our national security, corporate, and home encryption is based on an methods, RSA, ECC and SHA that are vulnerable to quantum computers. Worse, lots of data is being captured, right now, by corporations and nations like China and America for decryption later when the QC technology exists.

As for crypto, you are right, it’s a Y2K event for all encrpytion coming and especially cryptocurrencies. Even QRL doesn’t solve this for two reasons, the first is a huge barrier to adoption:

NOTE With your last key you must empty your wallet. If you use all of your OTS Key Indexes with funds in the wallet, these funds will be lost FOREVER

Conditions where you can lose all your funds are non-starters for adoption of cryptocurrencies. Secondly, how do you store your OTS Keys? Most people will put them in encrypted vaults, thus disabling the quantum security of the blockchain from the start. Data at rest is a huge attack surface for bad actors who want to employ quantum computers.

Thats why I work as a company trying to solve this, and we don’t use encryption. Unlike encryption, the data we protect does not exist at the point of use of the data. So an attacker will never know where the data actually is. Our company, Kloke, provides this service for all data at rest, and we love the chance to show it off.