Bitcoin and the quantum threat
Plus: ingrained market optimism, US jobs and more
“To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.” – Raymond Williams ||
Hi everyone! And happy April Fool’s Day, I guess? As if things weren’t weird enough, as if truth wasn’t tenuous anyway, we now have to endure a day of jokes which will probably end up being not quite as strange as reality. That said, there’s usually some good ones…
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And, a very big deal, today NASA will launch astronauts around the moon, sending them further into space than any humans have gone before. Epic.
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Production note: Easter is a big deal where I live, and so I’ll be taking a much-needed short break from tomorrow, back on Monday.
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IN THIS NEWSLETTER
Bitcoin and the quantum threat
Market: ingrained optimism
Macro: US jobs
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Bitcoin and the quantum threat
One of the factors some analysts attributed to BTC’s weakness in late 2025 was the threat of quantum computing. Its astonishing speed – exponentially faster in certain applications than the fastest chips in commercial production today – would make breaking the cryptographic algorithms protecting digital signatures as well as chain integrity on Bitcoin and Ethereum possible in minutes or less.
I was never convinced that negative narrative had traction, however, despite the heated controversy on my feeds – we did hear of some investment managers reducing exposure as a result, but most of us assumed that economic incentives would do their thing and that blockchain developers would rustle up the necessary network upgrades in time. After all, quantum computing was a thing of the distant future, right?
Nic Carter has been doing great work calling for greater urgency. He got plenty of prickly pushback on his concerns, but no-one can deny that, by nature, most people are complacent about far-off threats. Nic’s main point is that the quantum future is not as far off as most believe. And there’s a lot at stake – Bitcoin and Ethereum combined have a market value of $1.6 trillion.
But anyone following AI development surely knows by now that progress can accelerate fast.
