THE QUANTUM THREAT
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Fear always returns in a new form. When it's not prohibition, it's energy. When it's not energy, it's regulation. When it's not regulation, it's speculation. And now, after fifteen years of surviving against political winds, media attacks, financial crises, and currency wars, fear has found a new, more abstract, more scientific, more intimidating face: quantum mechanics.
By 2025, the question is no longer simply whether Bitcoin is volatile, too slow, or too energy-intensive. It becomes more existential. Can Bitcoin be broken by a technology that doesn't yet truly exist, but which is already being projected as a radical breakthrough? Can it survive in a world where machines calculate differently, faster, more deeply, in a mathematical space that would render current cryptographic foundations obsolete? Behind this technical question lies an older, almost metaphysical anxiety: what if Bitcoin is just a parenthesis?
It is in this climate that voices like Luke Gromen's resonate particularly strongly. Gromen is neither a hysterical maximalist nor an ideological critic of Bitcoin. He is one of those macroeconomic analysts who have long placed Bitcoin in the same camp as gold: that of protection against currency depreciation, against structural government debt, and against runaway inflation. When someone like him begins to have doubts, even tactical ones, the market listens. When he suggests a possible return to much lower levels, when he mentions the rise of narratives surrounding quantum risk, it is not so much the price that is worrying as the shift in the narrative.
But we must be very careful at this precise moment. Because what is at stake is not just Bitcoin. What is at stake is our collective relationship with technology, with security, with permanence, and with the belief that some systems are eternal while others are fragile.
Quantum has become a buzzword, a kind of modern totem. It evokes both scientific omnipotence and the end of certainties. It is brandished as a vague threat, rarely defined precisely, often used as a narrative shortcut. People say “quantum will break Bitcoin” just as they used to say “the internet is a haven for criminals” or “nuclear power is uncontrollable.” These are reassuring phrases because they simplify. They give the illusion that the danger has been identified, named, and contained.
In reality, the quantum threat, if it ever exists in an exploitable form, will not target Bitcoin as an isolated anomaly. It will strike everything that relies on modern cryptography: banks, payment systems, military communications, power grids, satellites, governments, digital identities, contracts, and trade secrets. Bitcoin would not be a fragile exception in an otherwise untouched world. It would be one victim among many, and probably not the most vulnerable.
This is where the dominant narrative becomes misleading. Bitcoin is talked about as if it were an isolated castle besieged by a future quantum army, when the reality is more like an entire city built on similar mathematical foundations. If those foundations crumble, it's not just one asset that falls; it's an entire digital civilization that teeters. In this scenario, the question isn't "Will Bitcoin survive?" but "What will survive?"
It's fascinating to see how asymmetrical this fear is. When we talk about quantum computing, we almost immediately associate it with Bitcoin, rarely with traditional banking systems, rarely with state infrastructure, rarely with centralized databases that contain infinitely more sensitive information. It's as if Bitcoin alone carries the weight of the future, as if it has to be more robust than everything else to deserve to exist.
This demand reveals something profound. Bitcoin isn't judged as just another technology. It's judged as an implicit promise of stability in an unstable world. And as soon as a threat emerges, it's asked to prove that it's eternal, indestructible, absolute. No other system is subject to such an expectation. No one asks fiat currencies to prove they'll survive general AI or nuclear fusion. Their fragility is accepted as a given. Bitcoin, however, is expected to be perfect.
This paradox reflects what many struggle to accept: Bitcoin never promised eternity. It never promised invulnerability. It offered an alternative, here and now, with the tools available, in a world where money had become an opaque political instrument. To judge it by the standards of a hypothetical future technology, without applying the same standard to everything else, is intellectually dishonest.
This doesn't mean the quantum question should be dismissed out of hand. It must be examined calmly, without panic or mystique. Cryptography evolves. It always has. Algorithms considered secure thirty years ago are now obsolete. Today's algorithms will likely be replaced tomorrow. Bitcoin is not set in stone. It is slow, intentionally slow, but it is not static.
This point is often misunderstood. Bitcoin's slowness is not a technological weakness; it's a survival strategy. It allows for observation, debate, coordination, and caution. If a credible quantum threat were to materialize in a truly measurable and exploitable way, Bitcoin would not face it alone. The pressure to adapt cryptographic systems would be global. And Bitcoin, unlike many centralized systems, would not need to convince a board of directors or a government. It would need a social and technical consensus—difficult, certainly, but achievable.
Here again, the debate reveals more about those who are speaking than about Bitcoin itself. Much of the talk surrounding quantum computing is actually about price, timing, and opportunity. It serves as intellectual justification for tactical repositioning, reduced exposure, and short-term caution. This is precisely what Luke Gromen's case demonstrates. His argument is not a condemnation of Bitcoin in the long term. It's a narrative adjustment in a tense macroeconomic environment, where gold, the dollar, or certain stocks seem to be better suited as short-term safe havens.
There is nothing scandalous about that. What becomes problematic is when this type of analysis is taken as existential proof of Bitcoin's fragility, as if the protocol should be judged on its ability to perform in every macro cycle, in the face of every technological innovation, in the face of every emerging fear.
Bitcoin is not an asset that needs to constantly reassure the markets. It is a system that continues to function even when markets panic. This distinction is crucial. Confusing price performance with structural resilience is a mistake that monetary history has already witnessed far too often.
We must also ask a troubling question, rarely formulated clearly. If quantum computing were to become an immediate and universal threat tomorrow, what would be the first reaction of states and major institutions? Protect Bitcoin or protect their own systems? The answer is obvious. In such a scenario, the effort to transition to cryptography would be massive, coordinated, and a top priority, because the stakes would far exceed those of a digital asset. They would affect sovereignty, national security, and the continuity of critical infrastructure.
In this context, Bitcoin would not be a marginal problem to be addressed after the fact. It would be integrated into a broader movement of global cryptographic overhaul. And paradoxically, its transparency, its open-source nature, and its distributed technical community could become assets rather than weaknesses.
Quantum fear, therefore, reveals a simple truth. It reveals that Bitcoin is now important enough to be considered in the long term, in the distant future, in scenarios of technological disruption. The question is no longer whether a gadget will survive quantum leaps. The question is whether a fundamental infrastructure will. The mere fact that the question is being asked demonstrates the extent to which Bitcoin's status has changed.
Fifteen years ago, Bitcoin was a fringe experiment. Today, it is integrated into macroeconomic, geopolitical, and technological debates. It is compared to gold. It is held by institutions. It is criticized with arguments from theoretical physics. This shift is not insignificant. It shows that Bitcoin has moved from the status of a curiosity to that of a structure.
The central question remains, the one that runs through all the articles on 100Blocks: Is Bitcoin becoming what it fought against? Is it being absorbed, diluted, normalized? Quantum fear is also part of this question. It is sometimes used as a tool for narrative domestication. By constantly reminding us that Bitcoin could be broken, we reposition it as dependent, tethering it to the system it had begun to circumvent.
But the reality is more nuanced. Bitcoin doesn't fight the system like a revolutionary fights a regime. It offers a different, parallel, indifferent logic. It doesn't need the system to collapse to exist. It doesn't need to be perfect to be useful. It doesn't need to survive all possible futures to be relevant today.
The real question, therefore, is not whether Bitcoin will survive the quantum era. The real question is whether we are capable of accepting a system that guarantees nothing, not even its own eternity. Bitcoin is not a promise of absolute security. It is a collective experiment in responsibility, conducted on a planetary scale, in a world where money had ceased to be questioned.
If quantum computing ever forces a transition, Bitcoin will have to evolve, like everything else. And if it ever fails to do so, it won't be the failure of an asset, but the end of an entire technological era. In the meantime, it continues to produce blocks, indifferent to narratives, fears, price predictions, and macroeconomic cycles. And perhaps this, once again, is what is most unsettling. Bitcoin doesn't ask us to believe in its future. It exists in the present. It works as long as it works. The rest is merely human projection onto a protocol that, itself, promises nothing.
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