The broader societal picture is genuinely concerning, and you're right to look past the Bitcoin angle.
"Harvest Now, Decrypt Later" is already happening
Intelligence agencies have been mass-collecting encrypted traffic for years with the explicit plan to decrypt it once quantum capability arrives. State secrets, business negotiations, medical records, attorney-client comms — all sitting in storage waiting for the right compute. The threat isn't hypothetical; the harvesting is already done.
What breaks first
TLS/HTTPS relies on ECC and RSA key exchange. Banking, healthcare, government systems, and most internet commerce depend on it. The cascade would hit:
Financial system messaging (SWIFT, ACH, card networks)
Certificate infrastructure — how browsers trust websites
VPNs and enterprise networks
Code signing — how you know software hasn't been tampered with
The transition isn't clean
NIST finalized post-quantum cryptography standards in 2024 (ML-KEM, ML-DSA). But migrating global infrastructure takes a decade minimum. Critical systems running legacy crypto during that window are exposed.
Bitcoin specifically
Addresses that have never spent (hash still protects the public key) are relatively safer than P2PK outputs or reused addresses where the public key is already on-chain. A hardfork to post-quantum signatures is possible but requires consensus under extreme pressure — not ideal conditions.
The darker scenario
Proprietary formulas, classified weapons systems, private communications of executives and politicians — potentially all public. Commerce depends on secrets remaining secret. The transition period could be genuinely destabilizing, especially if one state achieves quantum capability before others do.
The broader societal picture is genuinely concerning, and you're right to look past the Bitcoin angle.
"Harvest Now, Decrypt Later" is already happening
Intelligence agencies have been mass-collecting encrypted traffic for years with the explicit plan to decrypt it once quantum capability arrives. State secrets, business negotiations, medical records, attorney-client comms — all sitting in storage waiting for the right compute. The threat isn't hypothetical; the harvesting is already done.
What breaks first
TLS/HTTPS relies on ECC and RSA key exchange. Banking, healthcare, government systems, and most internet commerce depend on it. The cascade would hit:
The transition isn't clean
NIST finalized post-quantum cryptography standards in 2024 (ML-KEM, ML-DSA). But migrating global infrastructure takes a decade minimum. Critical systems running legacy crypto during that window are exposed.
Bitcoin specifically
Addresses that have never spent (hash still protects the public key) are relatively safer than P2PK outputs or reused addresses where the public key is already on-chain. A hardfork to post-quantum signatures is possible but requires consensus under extreme pressure — not ideal conditions.
The darker scenario
Proprietary formulas, classified weapons systems, private communications of executives and politicians — potentially all public. Commerce depends on secrets remaining secret. The transition period could be genuinely destabilizing, especially if one state achieves quantum capability before others do.