Bitcoin's Quantum Threat Isn't ETH's Problem

“If Bitcoin dies, then crypto dies with it.”

Bitcoiners looove this line.

My friend Nic Carter is just the latest to revive the trope — that Bitcoin sits at the center of the crypto universe and everything else is just orbiting it.

This take seems to be a relentless undercurrent of Bitcoiner discourse, and semi-frequently some Bitcoiner makes a tweet rearticulating said concept to address some newer hot topic of conversation, and then all the other Bitcoiners pile on the likes until the tweet hits escape velocity. 

This overarching take is false, and can only possibly emerge from someone who believes that Bitcoin itself is at the center of the crypto universe.

This Bitcoin-centric perspective is as primitive as the geocentric model of the solar system. Just so we're clear, the other planets in our solar system indeed do not revolve around Earth. 

Starting from first principles, Ethereum has no technical dependencies on Bitcoin. Ethereum as a protocol is not aware of Bitcoin.

If Bitcoin stopped producing blocks, quite literally nothing would happen on Ethereum.

The $165 billion of stablecoins, the $65 billion of value in DeFi, the $55 million annualized ETH burn, and the countless startups, venture industry, and developer market that Ethereum has uniquely incubated would all keep chugging along the next day as usual.

As Ethereum intended. 

The Quantum Problem

This past week, there's been a resurgence in discourse around the risks that quantum computing poses to Bitcoin. Scott Aaronson is considered a leading quantum researcher, and on his blog Shtetl-Optimized, he wrote:

Given the current staggering rate of hardware progress, I now think it’s a live possibility that we’ll have a fault-tolerant quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm before the next U.S. presidential election.

This has been a discussion in Bitcoin since its inception – it’s always been known that the ECDSA signatures that the majority of early Bitcoin wallets use are not secure against quantum attacks, and Bitcoin private keys can and will eventually be attacked by a quantum computer, and their bitcoins seized by the attacker. 

On his most recent podcast, Nic even cites some of the negative Bitcoin price action as downstream of quantum risks being priced in by the market. 

The key thing to remember here is that this is all Bitcoin’s problem to deal with. Ethereum is already hardened against the exact class of attacks that Bitcoin is now sweating over.

• From day one, Ethereum hashed public keys behind addresses (keccak-256), meaning your public key isn’t revealed until you spend, drastically shrinking the attack surface for a quantum thief. 
• Further, post-Merge Ethereum moved to a validator model where withdrawal keys are also hidden behind hashes, and the roadmap explicitly includes replacing ECDSA with quantum-safe signature schemes (BLS variants or PQC alternatives) through planned upgrades like Verkle trees and EOF-layer refactors. 

Ethereum culture has always been extremely forward-looking – even perhaps to a fault, as alternative ecosystems take shortcuts to exploit Ethereum’s short-term weaknesses. But this is not one of those instances!

In the case of the quantum threat to blockchain security, Ethereum has taken this challenge head-on, knowing that one day quantum computing would become pervasive. 

Default Internet Money

“If Bitcoin dies, no one will ever trust internet money ever again”

This is just not the case. 

Bitcoin's death would undoubtedly temporarily create a vacuum of trust, but the needs and values that Ethereum serves aren't going anywhere. The saga would likely only provide Ethereum the opportunity to further flex its long-term resilience. 

I do hope that Bitcoin overcomes this quantum threat, but I'd also argue that the death of crypto’s #1 money would likely be incredibly advantageous for crypto’s #2 money.

Bitcoin has a massive monetary premium, and ETH has some too. Remove Bitcoin from that equation, and ETH has an open and uncontested path to ascend to the native money of the internet. From the perspective of someone who is exclusively interested in the value of ETH over all other cryptocurrencies, the quantum death of Bitcoin is likely the single most bullish event that could happen. 

Ethereum would still continue to produce blocks, transfer trillions of dollars of stablecoins, host the world's most resilient DeFi ecosystem, and continue to burn ETH as a result. 

So, while Bitcoin has an “unimaginably large task” ahead of it, due to it being the “biggest infrastructural change to Bitcoin that will have ever been done” (quotes from Nic Carter on his recent podcast), Ethereum has already been thinking about these things for a decade, with solutions ready to go and implement when the time comes. 

So no, Bitcoin’s technical shortcomings are not my bags' problems.