quantum of bitcoin: the end of money as we know it

Magic internet money is quietly racing an existential threat from quantum computing, as is all encryption used today.

Cryptocurrencies get a bad rap, and it's not hard so see why it seems deserved. It was developed by people still obsessed with the gold standard, it doesn't offer any profound new way of managing money, there are over 13,500 kinds of coins with exchange and valuation mechanics so complex, you need a PhD in economics just to handle them, and the vast majority of them are used either for pump and dump schemes, or as a way for the economically desperate and frustrated to maybe get a leg up as they abandon hope in the global fiat system.

On top of all of that, it seems like crypto is propping up some of the world's worst and most noxious people. From Andrew Tate, to the Trump family, to the Wolf of Wall Street fame fraudster Jordan Belfort, to anarchist gentrifiers in Mexico, to full blown neo-Nazis, many of whom want the technology to create "Jew-proof coins" as their way to lash out against modern banking, imaginary billions that could be made real at any time are lining the wallets of predatory sociopaths.

But hey, money is money. It's not like the world's criminals don't use fiat currency, especially for the kind of schemes that steal billions and ruin thousands of lives in one fell swoop with tactics juries barely even understand. So, even if crypto has a less than sterling reputation and is extremely volatile, turbulent, unregulated, and prone to scams and fraud, tens of millions of people around the world will buy in thanks to FOMO and desperation, especially in today's K-shaped economy.

For all of this to work, however, you need strong cryptography to make sure that a digital token moved between the right wallets, cannot be spent multiple times, and the transaction cannot be arbitrarily reversed. Blockchains do this by using work-intensive cryptographic hashes to link blocks of transactions together, so unless you can break the encryption of the block, every move the token makes is final. It sounds solid, but as the Ephors of Sparta once noted to Phillip II, the if is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

Funny enough, these kinds of fun little ripostes is where we get the modern term laconic phrase, after Laconia, a region of Sparta that Phillip II invaded, pillaged, and de-Spartaned very effectively in the end. And in a similar turn, advancements in nascent quantum computing are putting the promise of trust in crypto through cryptographic hashes to the test, because it turns out that quantum operations can break through today's crypto's defense mechanisms with far less processing power than anticipated. Needless to say, the community is a tad worried.

Now, there are solutions on the horizon, with a lot of trust placed in the QRL and Abelian protocols, which are trying to get ahead of quantum computing by figuring out new ways of encryption, ones not relying on very large prime numbers chained in keys, but one time digital signatures, mathematical topology, and special error-correcting codes with randomization.

None of them are guaranteed to succeed, of course. One post-quantum candidate called Rainbow was recently broken. The others are still being tested but we won't know how successful they are until we can throw more powerful quantum chips at them. If the next five years show weaknesses in every existing scheme, then crypto would effectively be worthless as every coin is about as compelling as a plain text file with the string I.O.U. sent to you from an anonymous email, hence the race for something a little more solid.

But before you point at laugh at the crypto bros, note that the P2P nature of crypto means that over 99% of coins won't and couldn't adapt the new standard, and you aren't worried about some of the world's most awful people deprived of their go-to scam, keep in mind that the same cryptography used by all of their Chuck E. Ponzi tokens are also used to keep your fiat money safe when you buy something, or look at your banking information online.

So, as hard and unpleasant as it may be to admit, you and the crypto bros are in this together. Even thought your fiat money is highly regulated by banks able to print near infinite money on demand – even though they shouldn't – and can be insured and restored, having to do this twice a day for billions of people would push any financial system to its breaking point within months. Let's just hope we can figure out how to either beat quantum computers, or learn how to use them to secure our money by 2035 at at latest.