Cryptocurrency gets its name from “cryptography,” which quantum computers could crack, threatening not just crypto but the entire internet.
With the rise of quantum computers, one of the biggest concerns in the blockchain is their alleged ability to break cryptographic encryption algorithms, allowing them to rip apart the security that blockchains were designed to provide. Much of the internet is built on cryptographic algorithms that even the world’s fastest supercomputers cannot break (fast), but a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could crack all of it in moments. Because quantum computers could one day crack the cryptography that provides protection to crypto wallets, they are viewed as a looming existential threat.
Cryptocurrency gets its name from cryptography, a field of mathematics dedicated to encrypting and decrypting messages. Thanks to cryptography, e-commerce websites, social media, banking apps and pretty much any exchange of sensitive data can exist without the threat of hackers intercepting the data. Bitcoin was the first blockchain in existence, a computer network that uses cryptography and cryptocurrency mining to store data on a public ledger that cannot be censored or modified. Blockchains, especially Bitcoin, use the SHA-256 hashing algorithm to produce unique, fixed-length ‘fingerprints’ for each data block that ties it to all previous data blocks in the chain. This algorithm is impossible for digital computers to reverse and is why crypto mining is so energy intensive.
As CoinTelegraph discusses, quantum computers could (theoretically) break through the SHA-256 hashing algorithm that Bitcoin and many other blockchains rely on for producing blocks and signing transactions. If this happened, then a quantum computer could forge transaction signatures, recover private keys from public keys, change data in the…
