We all know the warnings: "if you invest in crypto be prepared that you could lose all your money" yada yada. My belief is that either bitcoin becomes THE reserve currency, or it fails completely. There’s not really much middle ground. In 10 or 15 years it will either be worth (almost) EVERYTHING or nothing.

So I’m interested to hear opinions on what could cause bitcoin to fail and become worthless. The way I see it there are two possibilities.

First,the price gradually declines over time towards zero.And the second,some major black swan event happens and destroys the price overnight.

Another,Quantum computing would seem to be the most likely (near term) risk for that.This whole quantum computer argument is so irrelevant. If quantum computing becomes possible, it would not only affect crypto, but also regular fiat. Goodbye to your online passwords, since a quantum computer would just crack that in milliseconds.

Savvy investors have already priced in risk,While more mainstream investors may not be aware of the potential security issues arising from quantum computing advances on Bitcoin, Miko Matsumura, general partner at San Francisco-based Cryptos Capital, says most knowledgeable investors have priced in the risk of quantum cybersecurity breaches. He is not concerned about quantum computing risk because attackers have two ways to breach Bitcoin, neither one of which presents a catastrophe for the blockchain.

"You could attack Bitcoin’s signing mechanism, which would create havoc during an attack, but the attack would be very visible," adds Matsumura. "If such attacks were to take place, Satoshi had a plan, which was simply to hard fork Bitcoin (a complete protocol change leading to divergence from the original) and replace the signing mechanism."

On the point of consensus, Matsumura is much more buoyant than Barmes. "Satoshi already wrote about what to do in case the signing algorithm was penetrated, so it is likely that the community would just agree to do what Satoshi proposed," he says.

Most encryption relies on the relationship between public and private keys, which is mining crypto worth it 2023 called asymmetric cryptography. Quantum-vulnerable Bitcoins include those created before 2010 when public keys had not been hashed into a different and safer format. Also at risk are Bitcoin addresses that have been already used once and have therefore become visible on the blockchain. There are four million Bitcoin addresses that could in theory be hacked by a quantum computer large enough to derive the corresponding private key to unlock and transfer the value to another address. This is known as a storage attack.

The second kind of attack – a transit attack – attacks Bitcoin transactions in transit. In contrast to the storage attacks, where only a subset of addresses is vulnerable, all transactions are vulnerable.

In January 2022, a team at Sussex University spin-out company Universal Quantum published research on transit attacks, which calculated that it would require a quantum computer with a 1.9 billion qubit-capacity to break Bitcoin’s encryption in the required ten-minute window. Even at 317 million qubits it would take an hour and 13 million qubits for bitcoin mining profitability chart a day.

Therefore, if one day the value of virtual currency returns to zero, a series of disasters will inevitably occur in the world, the economy will decline, the credibility of the government will drop to a freezing point, and some countries will even stop operating, and a new world economic structure will be formed again.

But is it worth the wait?