Bitcoin dev says we’re ‘not prepared’ for quantum future where major players are ‘spooks’

Bitcoin is unprepared for a future in which government agencies wielding superfast quantum computers can crack the top cryptocurrency’s cryptography.

Hunter Beast, a Bitcoin developer, made that case during a panel at the ETHDenver conference on February 19 alongside Isabel Foxen Duke, host of the Bitcoin Rails podcast, and Alex Pruden, CEO of Project 11, a company focused on securing blockchains against the quantum threat.

“We are not prepared right now for all that this will affect,” Beast said. “It is a vast, multidimensional problem in ways that are really subtle until you dive into it and really come to understand it.”

Bitcoin, like much of the world’s digital infrastructure, will eventually need to upgrade its cryptography to new algorithms that cannot be cracked by quantum computers.

Yet indecision among the top cryptocurrency’s developers, coupled with recent quantum computing breakthroughs, has brought what was once considered a distant threat much closer to reality.

The turning point came in December 2024, when Google unveiled its Willow quantum computing chip, which showed the technology was much closer to being used in real-world applications.

“That architecture cannot scale to the point where it could break Bitcoin, but it showed the path,” Project 11’s Pruden said on the panel.

Then, earlier this month, researchers in Sydney, Australia, released a paper demonstrating that some forms of encrypted data, including Bitcoin wallets, could be cracked by a much less powerful quantum computer than previously assumed.

“The bar to clear keeps dropping, while at the same time, results like Google’s show that progress is happening, and at some point those two lines are going to cross,” Pruden said.

‘Spooks’

It’s not just tech giants like Google and Microsoft that race to accelerate quantum computing, according to Beast.

“The major players here are spooks — they’re the NSA and the PLA,” he said, referring to the National Security Agency, an intelligence agency of the US Department of War, and the People’s Liberation Army, the military wing of the Chinese Communist Party.

The reason? Quantum computers are not cheap, Beast said.

They cost billions of dollars to build and millions to run, and they are not just useful for stealing Bitcoin, either.

They are much more useful to governments because they can also break RSA, a widely used form of digital encryption. In other words, whichever nation develops a powerful enough quantum computer first could potentially gain access to other nations’ encrypted data.

“If you’re not going to have something capable of doing this, it’s kind of pointless to build,” Pruden said.

Yet the fact that quantum computers cannot currently be used for any meaningful real-world application has made it difficult to convince some Bitcoin developers that they will eventually pose a threat.

Some of the most influential names in Bitcoin development argue that a cryptographically relevant quantum computer is still decades away, while others dismiss the threat entirely.

“Quantum isn’t a real threat. Bitcoin has much bigger problems to address,” Luke Dashjr, a Bitcoin Core developer, said in December.

Those sceptics could be right if quantum computer development hits some unforeseen roadblock. But for Beast, it’s not worth the risk.

“I don’t think we should bet the future of Bitcoin on discounting future progress,” he said.

Tim Craig is DL News’ Edinburgh-based DeFi Correspondent. Reach out with tips at [email protected].