I take this perspective:
Quantum computers appear unlikely within the next 20 years. It’s not my field but the level of bullshit there, including the numerous startups, suggests no real progress. I could be wrong, we solved blockchain scaling but the level of bullshit in the blockchain world did not decrease. ![]()
There is no real economic gain from quantum computers, so not much reason for moon shot efforts. Yes, you could break the elliptic curve cryptography, but that’s useless once TLS and the messangers adopt post-quantum KEMs. Any “real” applications for quantum computers require much larger ones, so not realistic this century.
We do authentication not encryption. If you do encryption then you want to be 30 years ahead of the quantum computers. If you do authentication then you just need to be far enough ahead to rotate the key.
For us, post-quantum has one real advantage this decade:
We can handle more data than other blockchains, so post-quantum would let us “throw down the gauntlet” and push them into becoming even slower, while giving us good PR. Imagine if our adopting post-quantum helped push BTC to adopt post-quantum, and this dropped them from 4 tps to 1 tps, and this plus their ETFs killing them cause another alt season.
Although possible, that’s all kinda fantasy. It’s likely better to ship some really successful game.
As a fun aside, I’ve ignored DJB’s rants about the NSA backdooring the NIST post-quantum effort, way too long winded, but IACR 2025/1577 says something interesting: “One of the drawbacks of the ongoing side channel analysis research related to PQC schemes is the availability of open-source datasets. Luckily some open-source datasets start popping up.” There are different skills involved in improving power analysis side-channel attack, extracting the power traces requires one, while exploring the applied mathematics requires another. To me, this quote says we’ve never done the serious side-channel work against post-quantum primitives. It’s fine if we use hybrid PQ+ECC, but NIST wants to standardize non-hybrid PQ KEMs and the NSA wants this too. Imho that’s suspicious and should wait several years for more side-channel work.