I am getting more concerned daily with the lack of people discussing upgrading crypto systems to become quantum resistant.
The threat to 256 bit encryption is longer strictly theoretical. IBM is already running 433 qubit systems that are modular and this year will potentially be revealing setups that can run between 1000-16,000 qubits. This could easily break SHA256 and most 256 bit conventional encryption.
Quantum computing is also a threat to the conventional internet and things like bank accounts, etc. It should be discussed by developers more including the new more quantum resistant cryptographic standards that we could implement to help secure things.
Upgrading Bitcoin and most other major crypto networks to become quantum resistant is top priority. I hope that we can get some discussion going here and potentially raise awareness in the broader crypto developer community.
I recall in one video Ivan said that upgrading BTC’s consensus algorithm from SHA256 is possible. Could someone please elaborate on what it might look like to upgrade BTC and other distributed networks to quantum resistant algorithms? Please also let me know what you think are good candidates for such algorithms. There are a few that seem to be potential such as NTRU, McEliece, Kyber, Crystals-Kyber, and SPHINCS+, however there doesn’t appear to be consensus yet on what the new standards will be.
If you think this is an important subject please feel free to talk about it on social media, etc. I think many people are not aware of how rapidly quantum computing has advanced in the last year or so.
Thank you!