The Quantum panic made another round this week as a “doomsday clock” claims that Bitcoin keys could be cracked by 2028. Samson Mow, known for his bold $1 million BTC call, shut down the panic in a recent interview, saying people keep stressing over the wrong things, and Bitcoin is not one of them.
Mow maintains the same argument in every conversation: if a quantum system ever becomes strong enough to break elliptic curve cryptography, it will target the traditional banking system first. Banks still use weaker encryption and lack a viable upgrade path.
What Mow stresses is that the market does not need to worry about Tether’s reserves when your local bank uses a fractional model that would collapse under minimal pressure or worry about what price Strategy might sell Bitcoin at when most equities lose 10% a year on decaying cash positions.
Do not worry about quantum computers “killing Bitcoin” when the real nightmare scenario is that military infrastructure will be cracked long before anyone touches a blockchain, says the Bitcoin entrepreneur.
No doomsday for Bitcoin, but there’s a catch
Quantum systems would require thousands of logical qubits and millions of physical ones, as well as error rates far below what is currently available. Even under favorable assumptions, the runtime problem remains significant. P2PKH users would still have enough time to move coins before anyone tries to access them.
The bottom line of Samson Mow’s thesis is straightforward: Bitcoin is not the weak point in a quantum world, as everything else breaks first.