Quantum Computers And The Long (TAO) Hold
The most useful thing I have watched on quantum computing this year was a long-form conversation Isabel Foxen Duke recorded with Dan Boneh on her show Bitcoin Rails, running close to two hours, where Boneh, the Stanford cryptographer who co-authored the Google paper that re-estimated the resources required to break elliptic curve cryptography on a quantum machine, walked through how the field has shifted over the past two years and what the responsible posture for a long-term crypto holder now looks like. Boneh is not a crypto Twitter personality and he does not take positions on tokens. He is one of the people who actually built the field of modern cryptography over the past three decades, his name sits on the pairing-based schemes that most zero knowledge proofs depend on. The man knows his shit, so whether you are a bitcoin maxi in denial or n00b with an open mind, I recommend you watch, listen and read….
He has changed his mind, in the direction of taking it more seriously than he did two years ago, while still rejecting the panic that has become the default mode of the (Nic Carter) quantum conversation in retail crypto circles. The piece worth writing here is not the technical one explaining how the threat works, because Boneh and his colleagues have already written that piece better than anyone else will and I am redacted. The piece I find worth writing is the behavioural one, which is about how a holder of any long-hold position should think about a threat with the shape that quantum has, and what the predictable psychological failure modes are that produce bad outcomes for the people who get the response wrong.
What Boneh Actually Says
The short version of Boneh’s position is that quantum computing is real, the technology is making genuine progress, the timelines being thrown around by the panic camp are too aggressive, the timelines being thrown around by the dismissal camp are too relaxed, and the responsible posture for anyone holding crypto for the long term is to neither panic nor ignore. He puts the most aggressive credible scenario at “possible but unlikely before 2030,” he puts his own best estimate somewhere beyond 2035, and he refuses to commit to a specific date because the honest answer is that nobody knows. He compares the current moment to the years just before the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk, when the theory of flight was understood, the engineering challenges were real, the experts of the day publicly declared that human flight was impossible for a million years, and the actual answer turned out to be ten weeks. He thinks we have probably already had the equivalent of the Kitty Hawk moment for quantum, which is the Willow experiment Google ran in 2024 and a follow-up neutral atom experiment Caltech ran in June of this year. Both demonstrated that quantum error correction actually works at scales that matter, which is the technical bottleneck the dismissal camp has been pointing to for the past decade.
The reason this matters for a long-hold position is not that quantum will arrive on a specific date and break your wallet. The reason it matters is that the transition to post-quantum cryptography across the entire blockchain stack is going to take years, the panic will arrive much earlier than the actual technology does, and the price action will respond to the panic rather than to the technology. The actual danger to a long-hold position lives entirely on the holder side rather than on the technology side. The holder who sells into a panic that arrives five years before the underlying technology does loses to the panic itself, and the holder who dismisses the issue entirely loses to the transition when it starts happening.
The Two Failure Modes
The first failure mode is the panic seller. This is the holder who reads a Bloomberg headline about a quantum breakthrough, decides that the threat is now imminent, and unwinds a long-hold position into stablecoins at exactly the wrong moment in the cycle. The pattern is familiar from every previous existential narrative that has been attached to crypto over the past decade, from the China mining ban to the Mt Gox unwind to the FTX collapse to the SEC enforcement period. In each case, the narrative produced a wave of selling that turned out, in retrospect, to be the bottom of the cycle, and the holders who survived the wave by sitting through it ended up with the asymmetric outcome that the panic sellers handed them by leaving. The panic seller’s mistake is treating a distant probability as if it were an immediate certainty, and acting on the certainty rather than on the actual probability.
The second failure mode is the dismissal holder. This is the person who reads the same Bloomberg headline, decides that quantum is Star Trek technology, that will never arrive, has Adam Back notis on, and refuses to engage with the transition planning that is already happening at the protocol level. The dismissal holder’s mistake is the mirror image of the panic seller’s mistake, which is treating a distant probability as if it were a zero probability. The dismissal holder will be the one who is unprepared when the transition starts arriving in the form of protocol upgrades, address migrations, and wallet revocations that they have not done the work to understand. Their losses will not come from quantum at all, because quantum will not arrive in time to take their money from them. Their losses will come from the transition itself, through missed deadlines, ignored upgrades, and the morning they wake up to discover that their pre-quantum address has been deprecated and the assets in it are no longer recoverable through the standard channels.
Boneh’s argument, translated into investment language, is that both of these failure modes are predictable, both are common, and both are avoidable by adopting the response that sits between them. The response is to take the threat seriously enough to track the transition planning that protocols are doing, while not taking it so seriously that it changes the timing of a long-hold position that is based on entirely separate fundamentals.
What The Rational Holder Actually Does
The rational holder treats quantum the way a homeowner treats earthquake risk in a region with elevated seismic activity. The earthquake might arrive next year, it might arrive in fifty years, it might never arrive in any form that matters. The homeowner stays in the house and accepts the underlying risk, because the timeline is too long to justify moving and the alternative location carries its own costs. The homeowner also takes the small set of practical precautions that make the household resilient when the rare event eventually arrives, which is to bolt the foundation, maintain insurance, and keep enough cash and spam on hand to absorb a disruption when one comes. The rational response is to live in the house, hold the position, and do the small amount of preparation that makes the household resilient when the rare event eventually happens.
For a long-hold crypto position, the equivalent preparation is to hold assets in wallets that support deterministic seed-phrase derivation, to keep custody simple enough that a future migration can be executed without losing access, and to track the actual protocol-level work being done on post-quantum signatures rather than the panic-cycle commentary on social media. None of this preparation requires changing the position itself. None of it requires selling into a panic. None of it requires switching the thesis underlying the hold. It requires only that the holder remain attentive to the transition as it happens, in the same way that a sensible homeowner remains attentive to building codes without rebuilding the house every time the codes change.
The deeper point is that this is the same behavioural pattern that the previous articles in this publication have been advocating for entirely different reasons. The patience-as-job thesis from the Pabrai piece was about producing asymmetric returns by holding through the noise that pushes other participants out of their positions. The macro thesis from the Aster piece was about positioning ahead of a competitive response that will arrive over a timeline most participants are too impatient to wait through. The quantum thesis is the same shape. The threat arrives on a timeline that is long enough to favour the patient holder and is structurally set up to punish the impatient ones, because the panic will arrive before the technology does and the dismissal will leave the unprepared holder exposed to the transition when it actually starts.
TAO And The Long Hold
For a TAO position specifically, the quantum question is worth thinking about because the asset is held on a thesis that depends on a four-year halving cycle and a multi-cycle institutional repricing. That timeline overlaps with the most aggressive quantum scenarios but sits comfortably inside the more realistic ones, which means a holder who is positioned for the TAO thesis to pay out across the next two cycles is also positioned for the post-quantum transition to be substantially complete by the time the thesis fully matures. The cryptography securing Bittensor is the same family of primitives that secures Bitcoin and every other major blockchain, which means the transition path is the same path, the timeline is the same timeline, and the threat is not asymmetric to TAO relative to the broader market. The risk that quantum represents to TAO is the same risk it represents to every long-hold position in the asset class, and the response is the same response, which is to track the transition without letting the threat reshape a position whose underlying thesis has nothing to do with the cryptography.
The same logic applies to Bitcoin, to Ethereum, to every chain that uses elliptic curve signatures, and to every position that is meant to be held across multiple cycles. The quantum threat does not change the case for being in those positions. It only changes the case for being attentive to the transition work that the protocol teams are doing. A holder who confuses the two has either panicked too early or dismissed too thoroughly.
The threat that arrives slowly is the threat that the patient holder is positioned for, because the patient holder is already living on the timescale that matters, and the “nothing ever happpens” holder is already losing the cycle to the noise that the threat produces long before the threat itself arrives.
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