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weev 3 months ago
If quantum allows for dozens of orders of magnitude faster cryptographic computations (no serious quantum people are saying this, they are saying the exact opposite — this is not how quantum computing works, it isn’t magic) everyone can just use bigger key sizes and all miners will adopt the new quantum strategies. We will end up with every wallet being a n-key multisig underneath and the block difficulty will rise exponentially to reflect the new ease of mining. But within a very short time, such breakthroughs would be priced into the computation difficulty of Bitcoin.

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weev's avatar
weev 3 months ago
You would have an interim period with some severe volatility for sure — the actual thing that would happen was like when Ghash.io did enable double spends against SatoshiDice. This stuff has already happened in Bitcoin before. It isn’t the end of the world, and certainly did not permanently eliminate the viability of Bitcoin. It caused a price drop of roughly 5% when it happened. It’s bad, but it is a temporary thing that is mitigated by requiring more confirmations.