Venture capitalist Tim Draper says fears that quantum computing will break Bitcoin (BTC) are misplaced, arguing that traditional banks and the dollars held within them face a bigger security risk.<\/p>\n
In comments published by Benzinga and amplified in an X post on June 9, Draper said he considers his BTC holdings safer than cash sitting in a bank account.<\/p>\n
Responding to concerns that quantum computers could eventually crack BTC\u2019s cryptography, Draper pointed out<\/a> that financial institutions rely on older infrastructure that would be easier to compromise than the Bitcoin network.<\/p>\n \u201cQuantum will crack the banks long before it touches the blockchain,\u201d he wrote on X. \u201cEveryone\u2019s panicking about quantum breaking Bitcoin\u2019s encryption while banks are running on legacy infrastructure that makes Bitcoin look like Fort Knox.\u201d<\/p>\n He also argued that even if something did happen to the Bitcoin network, full node operators could roll back to the last secure block. Banks, as he put it, \u201cdon\u2019t have that option.\u201d<\/p>\n The rollback point is worth examining carefully. While that type of fork is technically feasible, it needs consensus from many node operators and miners, and it is usually only resorted to in extreme circumstances. Additionally, it would contradict Bitcoin\u2019s claim of immutability, a tension that Draper did not address.<\/p>\n BTC investor Lark Davis backed Draper\u2019s broader framing, saying<\/a> that if people used \u201cbasic security hygiene,\u201d then their holdings would be safer than cash in the bank, unless their keys got stolen. He also insisted that quantum technology will break all legacy security, so people need to stop singling out the cryptocurrency.<\/p>\n Draper also repeated a long-held prediction that Bitcoin will one day eclipse the dollar. He broke down the mechanism for that in a Crunchbase interview earlier in the year, where he said a time will come when retailers will \u201conly take Bitcoin,\u201d and were that to happen, he believes there would be a run on the dollar. Such is his confidence in the asset that in April this year, he reiterated an old bet that BTC could hit<\/a> $250,000, this time giving it 18 months to do so.<\/p>\n The quantum threat to Bitcoin has been analyzed in detail by several researchers, including on-chain analyst James Check, who in April argued<\/a> that the commonly cited figure of 6.3 million BTC with exposed public keys overstates the actual risk.<\/p>\n According to him, active institutions such as exchanges and custodians, which face most of that exposure, are already working on solutions to mitigate that risk, meaning the genuinely high-risk portion is the roughly 1.716 million BTC in early-era Pay-to-Public-Key addresses, most of which he said are assumed to be permanently lost coins from Bitcoin\u2019s earliest blocks.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Draper\u2019s infrastructure argument is directly counter to security expert Jameson Lopp\u2019s. According to the Casa co-founder, who co-authored the BIP-361 proposal to freeze<\/a> quantum-vulnerable addresses, banks can upgrade<\/a> to counter quantum threats \u201corders of magnitudes faster\u201d than Bitcoin, given that the cryptocurrency needs broad decentralized consensus before any protocol change can be made.<\/p>\n He estimated that it could take<\/a> as much as a decade for a full Bitcoin upgrade to quantum-resistant cryptography, and that is the core difference. Draper is betting that banks will fail first, but Lopp thinks that Bitcoin\u2019s slowness to upgrade will be the harder problem to solve.<\/p>\n The post Tim Draper Explains Why Bitcoin Is Safer Than Banks in the Quantum Era<\/a> appeared first on CryptoPotato<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Venture capitalist Tim Draper says fears that quantum computing will break Bitcoin (BTC) are misplaced, arguing that traditional banks and the dollars held within them face a bigger security risk. In comments published by Benzinga and amplified in an X post on June 9, Draper said he considers his BTC holdings safer than cash sitting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-178316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discovery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178316"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=178316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178316\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=178316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=178316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mycryptomania.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=178316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}A More Complicated Picture From Security Researchers<\/h2>\n