Is there any chance advances in quantum computing will affect crypto currencies. I.e. it might be possible to shortcut mining or mess with the quorum of the distributed ledger?
I'm curious as crypto currency is so hyped, it would dismay me that advances in quantum computing might disrupt the current landscape, or even better improve it in some way. Entanglement is already deployed and in use for data transit, in curious how annealing or other physics might be a game changer
Briefly, a fully fault-tolerant quantum computer could give a square-root speedup for Bitcoin's proof-of-work, and could completely break its elliptic-curve-based signature scheme. Both issues could in principle be fixed by migrating Bitcoin to quantumly harder problems, though in practice doing so could open up security holes of its own. This hasn't been done, but I think maybe there are other cryptocurrencies trying to use quantum-secure crypto from the outset? Googling just now, I found something called "Quantum Resistant Ledger" (https://theqrl.org/) -- does anyone here know more about what's out there?
Let me stress that none of this is a concern with the QCs of the near future, which will have at most a few hundred decent qubits and no error correction, and which will not be able to threaten Bitcoin or any other cryptography.