Is the threat of quantum computing currently a threat? No… not yet.

Today’s most advanced quantum computers operate with around 1,000–4,000 noisy qubits. For a quantum computer to threaten Bitcoin’s ECDSA encryption, researchers and IT experts estimate you’d need approximately 4 million stable qubits.

We are decades from reaching that potential, but it’s certainly possible. The gap between quantum computing today and where it needs to be to crack Bitcoin is basically like the gap between a a magnifying glass and the James Webb Space Telescope. If you’ve read my previous articles (which I’d highly suggest so that you have some context) you’ll notice I like to use real world comparisons to give an idea of scale!

The timeline that most researchers estimate for a cryptographically relevant quantum computer is between 10 to 20 years minimum, and that’s is optimistic.

But what is the crypto world doing about this? Well, there’s many, what I’d call ‘panic articles’ that conveniently leave out the fact that the crypto and cybersecurity communities are already working towards fixing this problem.

NIST (the US National Institute of Standards and Technology) has already finalised its first post-quantum cryptographic standards in 2024.

Multiple security measures are being worked on and explored, because ultimately the internet’s entire security infrastructure faces the same quantum threat as Bitcoin. If quantum computing reaches a certain level, we’ll have much bigger problems than crypto prices - entire real world economies could collapse, global defence networks could be breached, servers and data centres containing billions of terabytes of private information are at risk of being leaked.

Quantum computing will have a ripple effect and, if not controlled or if safety measures aren’t developed and put in place beforehand, the downward spiral may have catastrophic consequences.