Chapter 1: What is Q-Day and why is it significant for the crypto industry?
One interesting shift of mindset for me in the last few months is that I've stopped thinking about post-quantum as a hurdle that we have to overcome. And I think of it more as an opportunity. It's an opportunity for Ethereum to stand out as the very first global financial system that is post-quantum secure.
not just relative to its competitors, you know, like Bitcoin and whatnot, but also relative to, you know, fiat and TradFi. And I think it would, you know, send a very strong message and kind of be a very natural security shutting point for the world to migrate over to Ethereum.
Bankless Nation, we are once again joined with Justin Drake. We're going to talk about quantum computing as it relates to crypto, Bitcoin, and also Ethereum. Justin, welcome back to the podcast.
Hi, guys. Thanks for having me again.
Chapter 2: How many qubits are needed to break current cryptography?
So quantum has become kind of a big looming threat to our industry. We've always kind of known this. We have known this. We have known that this is a thing, that quantum is a thing. It's been largely theoretical. Over the last, I'll say, six months or so, quantum has firmly moved from theoretical to something materially impacting our industry.
Chapter 3: What would a quantum attack on Bitcoin look like?
Starting with, I'll say, just like Bitcoin price, just because fund managers, even BlackRock has put out pieces about the threat of quantum to the security and therefore the value of Bitcoin. And so we have anecdotally seen Bitcoin. people de-weighting their portfolio of Bitcoin. Perhaps that is also suppressing the price of all the other assets in the industry.
Chapter 4: How vulnerable is Bitcoin to quantum attacks?
And not to just talk about price, but as we understand it, quantum really just impacts the way blockchains function. So this seems to be a fundamental problem of our industry as a whole, a hurdle that our industry has to get over that when crypto blockchain was created in the first place, we are not equipped to become post-quantum of an industry.
So maybe to start off that with context, what is the timeline here that our industry needs to be aware of, the hurdle that's coming that we need to get over? When is that hurdle coming? I've heard this become called Q-Day. When is Q Day? How much time do we have to get over this quantum hurdle?
Yeah, so I just want to back up a little bit and kind of emphasize what you said, which is that in the last six to 12 months, we've had major breakthroughs. One of them is this notion of error correction. So we're able to go from so-called physical qubits, which are very noisy and error prone, to like these perfectly logical qubits. Right now, we can basically manufacture one logical qubit
But it's still a very important zero to one moment. And now it's about scaling it to multiple logical qubits. Another big breakthrough is on the algorithmic side of things. Previously, we thought it would take millions, actually tens of millions of physical qubits in order to break our beloved cryptography.
But last year, there was a paper that made a 10x improvement, bringing it down to 1 million physical qubits. And this year, we have another 10x improvement, bringing it down to 100,000 qubits. So the goalposts are coming closer and closer and closer. And you have this double exponential in some sense that will eventually cross.
And then another thing that has happened is on the investment side of things, a lot of the quantum startups have been raising billions of dollars. So last year, I believe we're talking on the order of $5 billion. And this is unprecedented. Previously, we were talking hundreds of millions of dollars.
And I think the culminations of all of these things has really energized the public and led to this narrative, which has indeed potentially impacted the price of Bitcoin and Ether.
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Chapter 5: What are Ethereum's strategies for post-quantum readiness?
Now, projecting into the future, my personal Q Day is in 2032. This is a little bit of an optimistic take. in the sense that it's possible they'll arrive a little bit later, but we need to be prepared in some sense for the worst case scenario. So I'd say there's at least a 1% chance that Q-Day is in 2032, more likely than not double digit percentage that Q-Day is in 2032.
Various experts that are super knowledgeable in the field will tell you somewhere between 2031 and 2038 maybe,
Chapter 6: What challenges does Ethereum face in its roadmap upgrades?
And, you know, one of my friends who's in the industry, Steve Briley, who's the founder and CEO of one of the biggest quantum error correction companies in the world, who happens to be based in Cambridge, where I am, our children went to the same class. His personal Q day was 2032, but he's had this date for 15 years and it's always stayed the same.
Wow. That's impressive continuity.
And basically, you just need to extrapolate the exponentials and that's where you end up. And so what we're trying to do with Ethereum is to make sure that we have everything wrapped up well before 2032. And my completion date for Ethereum being fully post-quantum secure is 2029.
Chapter 7: How does AI intersect with quantum computing and crypto?
So a year ago, we had you on with Scott Aronson, who is kind of a godfather in this space of quantum as well. And we asked him questions about kind of when Q Day and is a good definition of Q Day, Justin, that that's the day in which quantum computers can break our signature schemes like ECDSA. Is that what Q Day actually means?
Yeah, exactly. So we have this new term called CROC, cryptographically relevant quantum computer. If you squint a little bit, the Q in the middle becomes an O and it's like a crocodile croc. Yes, that is when, you know, for us, it becomes relevant. It's possible that there will be other applications that make quantum computers useful for chemistry or physics, but that will come a bit later.
Okay. I recall him saying he was kind of hedging at that time. This was a year ago. This was, I think, in January 2025. And he said within 10 years, we should have useful fault tolerant quantum computers. But he was very careful to say that doesn't mean that we would be breaking, able to break ECDSA.
And generally, he wouldn't commit to a date because he said it was a staggeringly hard engineering problem. I have noticed that his tone has changed a little bit over the past year. And indeed, he's actually joined some organizations and foundations to help cryptocurrencies navigate quantum. It seems like maybe his thinking has changed on this. Is this for the three reasons you emphasize?
We've got breakthroughs and algorithms. We've got... some fault detection, I think you called this, which allows us to scale logical qubits, which I think that is the main thing that must be scaled in order to break ECDSA and then also all of the billions in VC and funding that is poured into it.
Has his opinion changed on this? Yeah, I mean, I can't speak for him, but one thing that I guess we should note is that Scott is primarily a theoretician. So for a very long time, he was working on the theory, not so much on the day-to-day of quantum computers. And I think that was partially the reason why he was so hedged.
I think what's happening more and more is that there's like real companies, real entrepreneurs building these things. And he has an insider view and he's basically ingesting all this information. One of the things that he said recently is that the US government is starting to intervene with the publication of ideas. So we have
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of quantum computing for society at large?
Okay, so we have just talked about the soft social issue that quantum computing brings up. There's a lot of technical challenges that we also have to face in order to make the rest of the chain post-quantum secure. I want to bring out this tweet that I saw from Haseeb Qureshi, friend of the show. He said this, and he was quote tweeting a Vitalik post on Ethereum's quantum roadmap.
And he said this, Ethereum has a tougher roadmap to become post-quantum Actually, a lot of dependencies before you can tackle EOAs and private keys due to post-quantum proof sizes. So his take is actually the challenges and the roadmap ahead for Ethereum are much tougher than Bitcoin. What do you think about that?
So there's two problems that need to be solved. There's the technical one and the social one. If you look at the technical one, Haseeb is correct that there's basically three problems that Ethereum has to solve. Each of the different layers of Ethereum. So there's the consensus layer where we have this cryptography called BLS. There's the data layer where we have KCG.
And then we have the execution layer where we have ECDSA. And each three of these pieces of cryptography are vulnerable. And that is a superset of what you have in Bitcoin where you only have the ECDSA problem. So in some sense, we have like three times more things that we need to upgrade. But when you zoom out, I would argue that the bigger issue, maybe 80% of it is social.
We've already touched on whether to burn or not to burn. But there's something even more fundamental, which is, do we accept that this is even a problem? And in Bitcoin land, you have this immuno response, which basically just rejects any kind of narrative, which could potentially be bad for the price.
And you have people like Adam Back that are saying, quantum computers are at least decades away from today. And so step zero is to have some sort of acceptance that there is a problem. And it's possible that Bitcoin will be slightly too late and that would have much bigger consequences than on the technology side of things.
So you think generally Bitcoin will have a harder problem because of their social layer is just like not acknowledging this reality and is less willing to engage with new developments on chain?
Yeah, let me say this. I'm willing to bet a large amount that all three layers of Ethereum will be upgraded prior to the single layer of Ethereum.
Right, right, right. So we have three times larger of a problem, but it is on the Ethereum side of things, just an engineering problem at the end of the day. And not only that, it is an engineering problem that Ethereum is taking head on. So while the Bitcoin engineering problem is a smaller engineering problem,
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