Overview
- Alice & Bob CEO Théau Peronnin, whose company collaborates with Nvidia, told Fortune that quantum machines could threaten Bitcoin shortly after 2030 and suggested the network should plan a fork by 2030.
- Peronnin said Alice & Bob aims to deliver a fault‑tolerant system called Graphene around 2030, framing it as a step toward hardware that could eventually challenge classical systems.
- Blockstream CEO Adam Back countered that a practical quantum threat is likely 20 to 40 years away and emphasized that Bitcoin can migrate to quantum‑secure signatures via soft‑fork upgrades.
- NIST finalized first‑wave post‑quantum standards in 2024, including ML‑KEM for key encapsulation and ML‑DSA and SLH‑DSA for digital signatures, giving developers vetted options to adopt.
- Analyses building on Roetteler’s work estimate that breaking Bitcoin’s signatures within transaction windows could require on the order of hundreds of millions of physical qubits, far beyond today’s devices, while proposals such as BIP‑360, hybrid signatures, and rescue moves target a gradual migration for at‑risk coins including roughly 25% with exposed public keys.