Quantum Computing a ‘Near Term’ Threat to Bitcoin & Ethereum: IBM’s VP of Blockchain

(DailyHodl) IBM executives recently discussed the threat of quantum computing against cryptocurrencies and blockchain cryptography. Jesse Lund, vice president of blockchain and digital currencies at IBM said, “It’s reverse engineering the private keys which represent the control of your wallet. . . . Your public key is essentially your wallet which holds balances. And I think that’s a real, credible threat. Bitcoin is a public ledger. So you can go out and see which public keys are holding the largest balances and you could go out and target those . . . .and say I’m gonna spend effort (computing resource) to reverse engineer the private key from the public key, which is exposed. I think that’s even a near term threat.”
To mitigate the threat of quantum computing against Bitcoin, Ethereum and most other cryptocurrencies, the team at IBM believes organizations should start quantum proofing their systems immediately.