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That is not a specific weakness of bitcoin. If encryption stops working, most of the worlds economic systems run into serious issues. Transferring money by _an

• oleganza 13y ago
  Correction: the only money that is being transferred by electronic means is Bitcoin. All the other payment channels do not transfer ownership, but promises. When your bank sends 100 bucks to another bank, there's no hard ownership being transferred, only an agreement between a bunch of people. That's why the current system is so fragile and so abused to no end.
• XorNot 13y ago
  Not really, just more risky. With a regulated financial sector and overwatch of ISP data retention, you still need to somehow gain knowledge of the encrypted bits to deploy a quantum computing attack against them. Governments have an interest in ecommerce continuuing, and there's a limited time-horizon where you can actually mount an attack - so provided you route your transactions over "known trusted" paths, everything basically continues - especially while the only quantum computers are controlled by governments to start with. BitCoin on the otherhand almost immediately runs into trouble, because it's entire basis is centered on the difficulty of cryptography problems. It can't function without distributing it's content widely (and indeed, completely), which means its immediately valueless - even if someone doesn't attack it, it's immediately known that at any point in time someone can simply create every coin that will ever exist and credit it to them.