Michael Saylor, the CEO of the billion-dollar business intelligence firm that made a $425 million bet on bitcoin this year, revealed in a recent interview he is tired of defending BTC against the threat of quantum computing.
Speaking to analyst and investor Scott Melker, Saylor noted that anyone who is able to build a quantum computer that is capable of cracking any cryptographic algorithm being used on the internet today – which would include that of Bitcoin – would have other ways of gaining money and power.
Per Saylor, is a quantum compute rise created the entity controlling would be able to “start a war, topple a government, destroy and kill anybody or anything, take anything they want from anybody they want.”
The CEO added that it wouldn’t make sense for the person behind a quantum computer, if they chose to be a bad actor, to “try to take 0.1% of the wealth in the world when they could have the other 99.9%.” He added there are people who could have mor power than billionaires, and that there are other things which are more interesting to do with it.
The treat of quantum computing against BTC, as CryptoGlobe covered, is that it could render real-world uses of cryptography obsolete overnight. This would also make online banking, messaging, and e-commerce completely unsafe and cripple the internet as we know it. It would also render other cryptocurrencies inoperable.
The current versions of quantum computers we have are “primitive,” according to Peter Todd, which on social media point out we still don’t even know if it’s viable to scale quantum computers to the point they would be able to break our cryptography.
In his interview, Saylor added that with a quantum computer capable of cracking BTC’s cryptography, it would also be possible to crash or hijack Facebook’s network, and to hijack the accounts of presidents and declare war, or even control nuclear launch codes.
As an example, Saylor pointed out that people investing in tech firms like Amazon, Facebook, or Google do not worry about the threat quantum computing could pose as they “would never make any money.”
Featured image via Pixabay.
