Charles Guillemet, chief technology officer at hardware wallet giant Ledger, has opined that a quantum computer is unlikely to break Bitcoin's current cryptography.
That said, Guillemet believes such a black swan event is not impossible, and the quantum threat should not be ignored.
The "prudent" solution
Guillemet has argued in favor of proactively upgrading the current Bitcoin protocol in order to make sure that it remains quantum-resistant. This would require defining a "migration path," which would include those coins that are presumed to be lost (such as Satoshi Nakamoto's enormous 1.1 million stash).
Guillemet has warned that such migration would come with trade-offs. The Ledger CTO has warned that lattice-based cryptography, which is considered to be the leading candidate for quantum-resistant encryption, is still relatively new and unproven. "Lattice-based post-quantum cryptography hasn’t yet stood the test of time, and hash-based schemes feel archaic," said Guillemet.
Moreover, he has noted that quantum-resistant schemes might not work properly with the existing BIP32 structure.
Dan Burgin
Vladislav Sopov
U.Today Editorial Team