how prepared is Ethereum for the emergence of quantum computing today?

feels like we are practically on the verge of an “any day now” moment where one or more nation states / corporations have a significant breakthrough

also, what happens to Bitcoin?…

investor, advisor & fan of crypto, ethereum, defi, NFTs & AI. posts not expert opinions or advice. http://gallery.so/dcinvestor + http://deca.art/DCinvestor

From the top of my head:

- ECDSA used for public key derivation is broken.
- Hashing algorithms are weakened by 1/2 roughly.
- BLS signature aggregation used in PoS is broken.
- KZG used for blobs is broken.

The solution is to migrate to post-quantum algorithms like lattice-based.

For Bitcoin:

- Mining difficulty will raise as quantum computers have a speed-up there. Nothing breaking I can think of for mining, just new steady state with higher difficulty.
- But private keys will be compromised. They will need a hard fork to migrate to post-quantum algorithms. Godspeed to them pulling it off.

Founder of Smoothly, the MEV smoothing pool for solo stakers. 

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I think you need of the order of 10^6 qubits to pose a realistic threat to public key cryptography. There seems to be announcements of 1000 qubit computers as of late 2023. In 2021 we were at 100 qubits. In 2019 we were around 50 qubits from a quick search.

Seems to be accelerating enough to start having a plan.

If this is the case, sounds like we’ll need L1 changes to move at a pace we’ve never seen. What are the best estimates for a timeline to QC?