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🔜 Bitcoin and Ethereum in the Quantum Era
Within the Bitcoin ecosystem, the most notable effort today is BIP-360 — a proposal designed to improve Bitcoin’s resistance against future quantum attacks and reduce public key exposure on-chain.
The proposal has already been registered in the official BIP repository, and an experimental implementation has even been deployed on a dedicated testnet. However, it is not yet part of the Bitcoin mainnet, and there is still no final consensus for activation.
The primary challenge is not technical — it is social and governance-related. Major changes to Bitcoin require acceptance from developers, miners, node operators, and users, a process that often takes years.
Ethereum’s Position
Ethereum is currently moving faster.
The Ethereum Foundation has established a dedicated post-quantum security team and launched an official roadmap website focused on quantum resilience. Their plans include:
• Adding post-quantum signature schemes
• Gradual wallet migration
• Replacing BLS signatures in the consensus layer
• Maintaining scalability through new signature aggregation techniques
The current goal is to have the core infrastructure prepared by around 2029.
Are Crypto Assets at Risk Today?
According to both the Ethereum Foundation and Google’s recent research:
No.
The quantum computers required to break ECDSA or BLS do not exist today. However, developers are working under the assumption that migration must happen before such systems become practical.
Key Takeaways
• Bitcoin: The problem has been identified, proposals exist, but no final solution has been adopted yet.
• Ethereum: Has an official roadmap, dedicated research teams, and a migration strategy already underway.
Google’s research did not show that Bitcoin or Ethereum have been defeated. Rather, it served as a warning that the timeline for preparation may be shorter than previously expected.
Interestingly, Bitcoin’s biggest challenge may not be finding a replacement cryptographic algorithm. NIST-standardized post-quantum schemes such as Dilithium and SPHINCS+ already exist. The harder challenge may be coordinating a global decentralized community to adopt them.
https://quantumai.google/static/site-assets/downloads/cryptocurrency-whitepaper.pdf