@jerrybanfield in my mind is a great contributor to the Steemit community. He takes a very analytical approach to his decisions. I had a pretty in depth conversation with a couple people in 2014 who had been into crypto currencies for a few years before I first found out about them in regards to the threat of Quantum Computers. Jerry brought up this concern in a recent video he posted on YouTube and he got tons of hate and was accused of spreading FUD. Anytime someone says something that is perceived to be negative these days everyone hates on them no matter how much what they are saying makes sense.
You can seriously just explain an aspect of how Bitcoin works and it will scare a lot of the non-technical n00bs who simply like the idea of digital cash and they keep seeing the price go up and they want a piece of the action. One thing that non-technical n00bs typically don't realize is that Bitcoin is essentially secured by extremely large numbers. It is like knowing all the possible doors but not having enough time to check all of them.
Imagine having a ton of filing cabinet drawers and you have to check each on to see if there is money inside. If there is a room full of them then you can probably get it done. But what if the amount of drawers is the number of stars in the universe times the number of grains of sand on Earth? That is a VERY VERY big number of drawers to check. Quantum computers will eventually be able to break that type of cryptography and check all the combinations.
Others have been thinking a lot about this coming situation as well. @smooth who is a whale here and also a Monero / Aeon developer knows it is coming eventually. Here is a question that @smooth answered regarding the threat of Quantum Computers.
There are givens in this world. Driverless cars are here and will continue to increase every year, more accounts will be on platforms like YouTube and Steemit next year then there are this year, Earth's population will be bigger next year then it is this year, and eventually Quantum computers will be here.
Does The US Government Have Quantum Computers?
Yeah they have them but I think it is doubtful that they have ones that can break our current cryptography or do things beyond the capability of our traditional transistor based machines. The reason I feel this way is because companies like Google and IBM have a lot of money and personally I don't think that the US Government is automatically going to attract the absolute brightest individuals on the planet. Of course there are smart people working there but what I'm saying is that just because a person is the smartest in a particular field doesn't automatically mean they will agree to work for the US Government or a government contractor even if the money offered is more than what IBM or Google can offer. I just way in the past that it was more possible for large governments to have far superior technology then was even known by the public like the Atom bomb or stealth fighter aircraft. Now with the Internet and private companies having extremely talented people working for them the gap is likely pretty close. For instance even with rocket tech we see a company like Space-X having a system to save the first stage of the rocket and have it return to Earth and land on an autonomous barge. That wasn't first implemented by a large government.
Let's just pretend that quantum supremacy is a couple years out. Well it would still take a couple more years for it to get to a point where the quantum computer would be fast enough to break our current cryptographic methods.
So let's say that is 10 years out for industry to achieve that. Well let's pretend the US Government is way ahead of the curve and they are 5 years out from that. Let's be super conservative and say they are 3 years away from it. People already known this is a threat and will be ahead of the curve. Just like adaptations that have previously been made like multi-sig wallets or more advanced blockchains like STEEM that have faster transactions times we will keep evolving and be ahead of the curve.
Conclusion
In my opinion I don't think the government is capable of stripping every Bitcoin wallet at this point or anything like that. The Quantum computer threat isn't sneaking up on us. I was having the conversation in 2014 and even as fast as computing evolves we still aren't close in 2017.
I think that in near future there will be a lot of crypto's coming out that are claiming they are Quantum resistant. I guess IOTA is already claiming that because of it's use / future use of a variation of Lamport signatures.
I think just being aware of this shouldn't worry you but that is a future route these crypto currencies will take. They will implement systems to protect against Quantum attacks. It will be like the last couple of years how the crypto currencies that have anonymous features like Monero, DASH, and ZCash have been popular. There will be future coins that will utilize systems that they will claim will be quantum resistant. Those will likely be popular and a marketing ploy. Even when quantum supremacy is achieved there won't suddenly be a machines that can break everything right away. If those calculations would take a Million Years to complete on the most powerful comuters now then even once a Quantum computer is better it isn't suddenly going to break it in 10 minutes or something. It would still be at hundreds of years and then maybe decades. We will see it coming.
Earn $10 Of Free Bitcoin From Brian Phobos!
Thank you for reading my post and please consider following me @brianphobos