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Comment by dandanua | Hacker News Reader

Why do they care about cryptocurrencies but not about the entire world's infrastructures that are based on RSA and elliptic curve algorithms, such as HTTPS and many other electronic signature solutions? Is this a case of cryptocurrency market manipulation?

And why do they think that the US government would care about securing cryptocurrencies? Aren't they designed to circumvent the government regulation?

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Yes they absolutely care and have been doing serious work to migrate PKI to PQC.

This was the first of several articles coming out of Google: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...

And the timeline for web migration is 2027 Q1: https://security.googleblog.com/2026/02/cultivating-robust-a...

And this was Sophie Schmieg’s talk at a cryptography conference this month (they lead PQC migration efforts at Google) tracking migration efforts and urging folks to prioritize signature migrations in lieu of accelerated quantum timelines: https://westerbaan.name/~bas/rwpqc2026/sophie.pdf

> Is this market manipulation?

> why do they think that the US government would care about securing cryptocurrencies?

Our largest institutions manage tens of billions of dollars in cryptocurrency and the US government has designated currencies appropriate for the strategic crypto reserve

> Why do they [not care] about the entire world's infrastructures that are based on RSA and elliptic curve algorithms, such as HTTPS

I'm sure they do. But if you had a working quantum computer that could a) get Satoshi's keys or b) read some emails, most people choose door a first. So it's both a smoke test and a high value target with an easy to assess dollar value.

I'm also sure that someone at Google do care about those. It is strange to see a blog post targeting cryptocurrencies while it is certainly a specific case of a much larger problem.

>> Is this market manipulation?

> No

"No" is not exactly the right answer, the authors are explicit about this in the paper:

"We the authors attest that at the time of the initial arXiv and IACR ePrint publication of this article, none of us hold any short positions against any cryptocurrency assets. Some of us hold long positions in cryptocurrencies, including some that involve the use of post-quantum cryptography. The authors reserve the right to initiate any positions in these assets in the future."

For one thing, stablecoin issuers hold more than $100B of US treasury bills, on the same level as some major countries. For better or worse, the old and new systems are interconnected now.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-rise-of-stablecoins-a...

$100B sounds like a lot of money to any sane human being, but for the T-Bill market it's really a drop in the ocean. Current T-Bill Market cap[1] is 29 Trillion give or take a little, so $100B is about 30bps of the total. Would nudge the market a little bit, but not that much.

[1] Here's my source and they should of course know https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MVMTD027MNFRBDAL

Citibank has a good report: https://www.citigroup.com/rcs/citigpa/storage/public/Citi_In...

Tradfi has way more at risk... and the hardware/software that cant be upgraded that the financial system uses every day...

https://security.googleblog.com/2026/02/cultivating-robust-a...

i think google is just a disgustingly large company lol, it's hard to talk about them "caring" about one thing but not another

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