Charles Guilmet, chief technology officer at hardware wallet giant Ledger, said it is unlikely that a quantum computer will be able to break Bitcoin’s current encryption.
However, Guillemet believes that such a black swan event is not impossible and that the quantum threat should not be ignored.
“Smart” solution
Guilme argued that he supports aggressively upgrading the current Bitcoin protocol to ensure it remains quantum-proof. This requires defining “migration routes” that include coins presumed to have been lost (such as Satoshi Nakamoto’s vast stash of 1.1 million coins).
Guilmet warns that such migration comes with trade-offs. Ledger’s CTO cautioned that lattice-based encryption, which is considered a strong candidate for quantum-proof encryption, is still relatively new and unproven. “Lattice-based post-quantum cryptography has not yet stood the test of time, and hash-based schemes feel outdated,” Guilmet says.
Additionally, he notes that quantum-resistant schemes may not work well with existing BIP32 structures.
