A Convergence Chronicle: Signal #0 - Rise of the (Quantum) Machines

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."

— The Big Short (2015)

The Unpersoning of Joshua K.

North Parramatta, Sydney — 2030, 7:42 a.m.

Cursing, Josh disarms the third snooze alarm of the morning. Mumbling like an idiot, he allows himself several vital seconds to brace for the battle ahead. Getting through his daily "War of the Will" against the seductive comfort of his bed is the hard part. This time he wins.

Time to move. Ramping into the compact "running-late...again" protocol: he laces his left shoe as the kettle hisses to a boil. By sheer force of will, he completes the knot of the right shoe midway through the coffee pour. The twenty-minute morning routine of an organized person – crammed into four minutes flat. Now he's curbside, thumb poised over the Waymo summon with the tremor of a man with no time to kill.

The 'Request' button stares vacantly back, lifeless and gray. A grave marker, showing that a working button used to live here. Payment Method Failed. This is...unusual.

Gulping to ease the initial shock, Josh recalibrates. Attempting a strategic pivot into his wallet app, he encounters a total blank slate. What he finds: factory reset hell – but far worse. No bank cards. No public transport card either. What the fuck? No digital driver's license – all the usual forms of valid identification rendered non-existent.

Adrenaline spikes cold in his gut, and the desperate sensation of confused, gnawing dread seems to encircle his lungs like a fist. The grip tightens, and he's struggling to draw air.

Trying to contain his burgeoning anxiety, Josh formulates a plan. He stills his wavering fingers long enough to navigate to his contacts list and locate his sister's details. He jabs into the contact card – finding her name intact, but the number? Reduced to a snarled cryptographic hash, indecipherable alien gibberish from the blockchain abyss.

He glances back toward his house. The one he finally paid off last year, through decentralized fractional ownership – a smart contract. The house now feels unfamiliar; it seems to cast a long, menacing shadow over him. The smart lock embedded in the door pulses solid red. It reads: "Owner Unrecognized" – he's no longer Joshua K., according to the centralized security system that protects the house.

No one has hacked Josh.

The math that proves he's Josh just... stopped working.

. . .What just happened?

We're going to explore how two massive, seemingly unrelated trends collided and shattered Josh's world. As we follow those threads, the trajectory starts to come into focus, and the convergence becomes clear.

The aftermath of this collision reveals the deep-seated weaknesses that led to Josh's unpersoning, exposing cracks we usually cover with our preferred superficialities. When the smoke and debris settle and we finally peer through those cracks, we may find that what lurks beneath has been with us the entire time.

A subtle, insidious threat – perhaps more dangerous than the collision that forced us to look in the first place.

Trend 1: Hopeful Optimism in Decentralized Finance

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) is what an idealized, fair financial system might resemble if you really hated gatekeepers. As I let my mind's eye run wild, it conjures a classic scene: the long downtrodden underdog finally reaches out and wrenches wealth and agency back from a faceless institution that's wielded power for generations. At long last, the hegemony falls. Wealth is redistributed fairly to the public, who live out their days in a system without kings.

Nice.

What I just described is basically the "Robin Hood" story that my generation grew up with, applied to DeFi. Do you see it too? The parallels feel strong.

Anyway – I digress.

Things don't work like this at all in a world governed by physics and mathematics. What we're about to talk about is how human frailties collide with our own innovations – often in unusual ways.

Though rooted in mathematics rather than myth, DeFi has unquestionably acquired mythical status. It entered our collective consciousness with the launch of Bitcoin in 2008 (which remains the dominant cryptocurrency to this day). By the time 2009 had drawn to a close, DeFi had blown a gaping hole in the way we do finance. The hole has only grown larger with time. As for Bitcoin – the identity of its creator remains an enduring mystery almost two decades later; known only by the pseudonymous moniker, Satoshi Nakamoto.

DeFi brought a unique innovation to global finance with blockchains – these form the functional and philosophical spine of decentralization. They are permanent, public records of every single transaction that has ever been processed on-chain. While the ledger can be viewed by anyone, sensitive personal data is encrypted beyond recognition. Together, these elements represent what advocates call a 'trustless' system. The mathematical rules of the blockchain verify transactions, removing the need for banks or intermediaries while keeping everything transparent. The primary assets found in decentralized finance are cryptocoins, which share the diverse nature of fiat currency, but differ in that they have a limited total supply. This creates a scarcity effect, and their value at any given moment is speculative.

Fast forward to the present-day:

DeFi has moved far beyond coins – symbolism is where things are at now. Companies with no leadership? Those are real. Want to purchase a fraction of real estate, anywhere on Earth? That can be done.

• Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs)— companies run by automated rules. These coded rules remove central authority and human input in operations. Members holding the organization's currency gain voting power over decisions.
• Real World Assets (RWAs)— commodities (i.e gold), real estate deeds, stock certificates–are integrated onto blockchains, either directly or via smart contracts.

The global asset value on blockchains is over $3.5 trillion USD according to IMF's Crypto-Assets Monitor report in May 2025. This is a figure with far too many trailing zeros for me to understand it in any meaningful way. Maybe it makes more sense to the ~8.1% of the world's population who actually own crypto assets.

Support for cryptocoins can easily approach religious temperatures – understandably. Crypto assets have a lot going for them, and have changed lives: they have greatly enriched many supporters. The community spirit around crypto makes investing more accessible and removes a knowledge barrier that other investing spaces sit behind. Adding to this, the anonymity (for good and for ill) and freedom of choice with what users do with their funds is favorable to many; these features, in addition to redundant counter-party trust requirements, directly do away with the standard pain points inherent in fiat currency.

Crucially, sensitive information is secure behind a muscular brute of an algorithmic beast. For perspective: imagine you're handed the crème de la crème of modern supercomputers. Go ahead, shoot your shot at breaking the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA). I hope you packed a long lunch my friend, you'll be waiting a while – we're talking around, like, 10+ billion years (close to the age of the universe itself...cancel all plans, indefinitely).

Obviously, serious money flows into the blockchain ecosystem. Commitment of the faithful to its innovations remain unwavering. Well, maybe a tad less now, with the hellacious beating Bitcoin is currently enduring.

On that note, Let's slow everything down a bit. We'll take a step back before we get too heady with hopeful optimism that DeFi gains immortality and restores balance to the universe. We must address the fucking ginormous elephant that lives in the same room as the future of blockchains. It traces the outline of a question mark across every technology we use today.

This is quantum computing – and you will meet it soon.

What is Quantum Computing, and why should I care?

Unlike the classical bits of today's computers, which are either 0 or 1, quantum computers use qubits that can sit in a superposition of both until you look at them. Add entanglement – linkages between qubits – and, in theory, you get a machine that can explore vast numbers of possibilities at once instead of grinding through them one-by-one. In simple terms, this is a completely different computer to the ones we know and love – and it will be able to chew through challenging problems much faster than anything that currently exists. It's basically the A24 movie Everything Everywhere All at Once: incredible, bewildering, and, much like my quantum research for this signal, it left my head spinning.

Quantum computers still face huge engineering hurdles, so widespread commercial use isn't happening just yet. How far away is the real question. R&D is accelerating, and most experts now treat their arrival as a when, not if. Outside the lab, these computers are pitched as being able to slice through problems far beyond the scope of today's tech. Think: molecular simulations for bespoke drug design that could treat Alzheimer's disease, or creating better batteries and energy storage solutions that could advance every industry. They could even be used to invent specialized materials that pull carbon dioxide directly out of the air, at scale. The imagination can't quite touch the totality of those implications. And they could do all of that with the same carefree ease experienced by some Sydney drivers when they change lanes without thinking, shoulder checking, or even indicating (easy for some, intolerable for everyone else).

Just one problem: a quantum computer that is sophisticated enough to solve those problems could also be pointed at the mathematics that modern encryption protocols are based on. Those are the gigantic strings of numbers that shield your bank account, private messages and digital wallets. If a computer this efficient were weaponized, encryption protocols that are considered the gold standard today would provide as much protection as a wet paper bag. If you close your eyes for a moment, you can just feel Josh's world beginning to wobble.

These factoids sound nuts, I'm aware. For as long as we've been talking about them, quantum computers have been too conceptually abstract to take seriously; too spooky and distant to warrant much discussion in the mainstream. Einstein himself dismissed quantum entanglement outright, calling it "spooky action at a distance" – and people fucking hate arguing with that guy.

Despite its banishment from serious mainstream contemplation (beyond sci-fi entertainment fodder, that is), serious professionals in the real world are beginning to hedge their bets that this exile has an expiration date.

Trend 2: Mixed Messages in CeFi

DeFi has conviction that the blockchain ecosystem will continue to bear ripe fruit for many years to come. This sharply contrasts with the behavior of global banks in traditional centralized finance (CeFi). Publicly, they're "business-as-usual". Bank executives and representatives respond in typically calm fashion when fielding questions about quantum computing threats. First comes the token mild acknowledgement that this technology comes with security concerns. The follow-up, tempered with reassuring confidence, is that the situation is under control. They're always watching (and squashing) any potential vulnerabilities. No sweat.

Watching the actual behavior of the global CeFi sector – away from the watchful gaze of shareholders and the public – reveals a different story. What these execs and reps say and what they actually do are contradictory. The financial sector is frantic. They're drenched – the sweating is well past the condensation phase. We'll come back to that panic. First, let's zoom out and look at where their attention is actually going – starting with the patents.

The world of quantum computing patents is an intense competition for "quantum supremacy." You can see who's playing defense by looking at Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) patent filings. China is miles ahead of the pack. It holds roughly 60% of quantum patents (a 42% increase since 2014), with major players like QuantumCTek, Alibaba, Huawei, and China Telecom's quantum team leading the charge.

CeFi is aggressively preparing for quantum threats in ways that sharply contrast DeFi's fragmented efforts. Major banks are leading that push. Wells Fargo holds over a dozen in quantum technology and post-quantum cryptography. JP Morgan Chase has more than a hundred quantum-related patents and a quantum-secured network. Bank of America is a top patent filer, while HSBC has already piloted quantum-safe tokenized gold. Goldman Sachs has been investing in quantum ventures since 2012. Intelligence from Evident Insights reports that ~80% of the 50 largest global banks are actively preparing for PQC. They're hiring specialists, filing patents, and quietly deploying quantum-safe key distribution.

CeFi is layering these patents to build a shield against a uniquely vicious cyber threat known as Harvest-Now Decrypt-Later (HNDL). Malicious parties collect publicly available encrypted data – widespread on public blockchains – and store it for future decryption.

In September 2025, the Federal Reserve Bank published a report titled "Harvest Now Decrypt Later: Examining Post-Quantum Cryptography and the Data Privacy Risks for Distributed Ledger Networks". Using Bitcoin as their prime example, the report warned:

"We posit that while cryptocurrency distributed ledger network maintainers could successfully deploy post-quantum cryptography (PQC) mitigations to protect the network's security and data integrity against a future-state quantum computer, data privacy of the network's previously recorded transactions remains vulnerable against a future-state quantum computer due to HNDL. The difficulty in protecting data privacy lies in the risk that a bad actor can obtain a distributed ledger replica, harvest the data, and in the fullness of time reveal previously obfuscated and confidential data using a sufficiently powerful quantum computer."

Put plainly: even if future solutions are patched perfectly, systems designed in the past stay vulnerable once a capable quantum machine exists.

"Bad actors" will patiently sit like mother hens on harvested crypto assets and secret data for as long as it takes to get their hands on a sufficiently powerful machine. The moment that hardware moves from laboratory curiosity to practical reality, they will fleece everything down to dry bone. HNDL is not a hypothetical "future" thing – the harvesting is already underway.

After the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) finalized its first post-quantum standards in 2024, quantum patent filings in the UK spiked by more than 57%. Zooming out from the UK, global quantum technology patent filings have increased five-fold from 2014 to 2024. The PQC market, worth over US$300M in 2023, is expected to exceed US$17B by 2034. Key filers like IBM, Google, NXP Semiconductors, and Thales Group are concentrating on lattice-based schemes, quantum key distribution (QKD) and hybrid quantum/classical approaches. China has made quantum technology a strategic national priority – they are prioritizing quantum key infrastructure with major state investment and clear security implications. Western institutions have a preference for algorithmic defenses – lattice, hash-based, and code-based encryption – and are planning for a slower, decade-long transition.

Major FinTech and cybersecurity bodies are now mandating quantum-safe migration. In 2024, Europol's EC3 formed the Quantum Safe Financial Forum (QSFF) to sketch out a transition roadmap. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) launched "Project Leap" to test quantum-resistant payment protocols and published detailed PQC risk analysis. The emerging consensus is blunt: moving away from current public-key protocols like ECDSA and towards PQC is not optional. Depending on which authority you ask, deadlines range from roughly 2030 (for some cybersecurity groups) to around 2035 (for US/EU regulatory bodies).

What must happen for DeFi and CeFi to migrate to Post-Quantum Cryptography?

Here's an (overly) simplistic overview:

Governance

CeFi is hierarchical. Executives and regulators can enforce non-negotiable deadlines with strict accountability. This also allows them to move quickly when they need to make critical decisions to protect their shareholders – and themselves – if the shit hits the fan.

DeFi takes a very different approach to governance. Systemic changes require majority voting consensus across thousands of anonymous token holders. No central authority possesses the power to force compliance with any decision that's made.

Infrastructure

Traditional CeFi institutions can test solutions with private sandboxes. It's possible to roll back to previous versions when critical errors rear their ugly heads. When they feel like it, they can patch in more secure systems completely behind the scenes – crises averted, users none the wiser.

Unlike CeFi, fixing Bitcoin's quantum vulnerability necessitates some heavy forking (heh. I'm here all day). A hard fork is cleaner – and more likely to occur. But it would permanently split the chain, leaving the old chain vulnerable.

A soft fork is less severe. Hunter Beast's BIP-360 is a soft fork solution that replaces the current Taproot protocol with a quantum-resistant protocol, avoiding a chain split. The catch: BIP-360 only protects manually migrated coins. Older keys, reused addresses, extended public keys, or exposed wallet descriptors remain unprotected.

User Assets

CeFi institutions deploy cryptography upgrades on behalf of their customers. Institutional and custodial wallets undergo professional audits. They also receive procedural updates in much the same way bank accounts do. Customers have minimal involvement in these processes – this is supposedly what banks are there for: to take care of business.

In DeFi, the absence of hierarchy requires blockchain users to manually migrate funds to PQC protocols and wallets. "Zombie" wallets, including Satoshi's ~1.1 million bitcoins (~$100 billion USD) will remain permanently exposed. Deloitte suggests most of this ~4M BTC (about 25% of all Bitcoin) will always be vulnerable due to reused addresses. These wallets are already likely being harvested for future decryption.

Economics

CeFi institutions charge numerous fees – ATM fees, transaction fees, loan interest, interest on user holdings – if a fee can be slapped onto something, then it will be. This revenue funds CeFi's flush IT budgets, allowing them to absorb infrastructure costs while keeping customer fees relatively stable.

There are no free lunches in this life. In DeFi, computational work has a cost, called "gas," added to each transaction. Simple transfers are cheap, but complex smart contract actions have higher demands. This makes them more expensive, incurring higher gas fees. PQC signatures are very large and increase gas usage. This could price many users out, forcing reliance on older – potentially compromised – encryption.

The Timeline

CeFi is already behind schedule. PQC implementations should have begun yesterday if they want to protect their interests and meet regulatory deadlines. DeFi faces an even more dire situation: the cooperation and coordination required to move their systems towards safe havens could take much longer than their CeFi contemporaries (have you ever tried to herd cats?). If this is correct, DeFi would have needed to begin its PQC migration well before centralized finance kicked off its efforts, just for both sectors to be ready at roughly the same time.

An Accelerating Catalyst

November 6, 2025. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) confirmed that 11 Western companies had advanced to the second stage of its Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI) – the US military's R&D program for fringe defense technology.

The Quantum Benchmarking Initiative is a fully funded engineering race. Its aim: an operational "utility-scale" quantum computer by 2033. The US and China share this ambition. China's quantum "mega-project" is a core part of its 14th 5-Year Plan, targeting major breakthroughs and a functional prototype of a general quantum computer by 2030.

DARPA defines a utility-scale quantum computer as one whose "computational value exceeds its manufacturing cost." They insist they're not pushing for a cryptographically-relevant quantum computer (CRQC); what they really want is a scalable prototype. Best of intentions aside, this is still the first government-funded program explicitly aiming to build a machine that could have catastrophic side-effects. By design, the architecture of a utility-scale quantum computer enables it to run Shor's algorithm – the one piece of math that instantaneously renders today's public-key encryption standards obsolete.

So despite DARPA's claim that this isn't a race, it really is – and it's a global one. Intentional or not, DARPA has fired the starting shot; we just haven't heard the reverberations yet.

On paper, PQC roadmaps assume smooth sailing along a 2030 – 2035 runway to modernize the world's cryptography. DARPA and China are in motion, both with actionable plans to complete utility-scale quantum machines in roughly the same timeframe. Best-case scenario: the PQC migration finishes just as a utility-scale machine boots up for the first time. Worst-case: the machines arrive before the migration runs its course to completion.

The Convergence Collision

We have two financial sectors working towards outcomes that don't quite align:

• The DeFi community is busy watching Bitcoin bounce around like a pricey yo-yo (mostly down right now) while enthusiastically securing real-world assets and legal contracts on blockchains.
• The CeFi world is not-so-calmly rushing to layer tranches of patents – covering every imaginable base – in preparation for a quantum era they're expecting will arrive in the mid-2030s.

At the same time, leading Big Tech companies are barrelling ahead with quantum computing innovation. The pace should give anyone currently hyper-fixated on the AI bubble good reason to pause and consider what's unfolding here. A few recent highlights:

Hardware Breakthroughs

• Google's Willow Chip (Dec 2024): A 105-qubit processor that solved a benchmark problem in under five minutes – versus an estimated 10 septillion years for classical supercomputers. Crucially, Willow also demonstrated exponential error suppression, where error rates drop as you add physical qubits. That makes scalable quantum computers look technically plausible rather than purely theoretical.
• The Caltech Array (Sep 2025): Caltech researchers built a 6,100-qubit array that held stable superposition for 13 seconds (about 10× longer than previous records), using a non-binary atomic approach that improved error correction and showed they could precisely manipulate individual atoms by moving them around.
• IBM's Quantum Nighthawk Processor & Quantum Loon Chip (Nov 2025): IBM's 120-qubit Nighthawk uses cutting-edge tunable couplers for dynamic, directional control, yielding a smaller, more reliable processor. The 112-qubit Loon chip employs quantum low-density parity-check codes (qLDPC) to target fault-tolerant, utility-scale machines by 2029, cutting the physical-qubit requirement for some "protected" (i.e. error-corrected and stable) qubits from roughly 3,000 to about 288 – close to a tenfold reduction in hardware.

Recent Papers Compressing the Timeline

Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computers (CRQCs) using Shor's algorithm can, in principle, break both the 2048-bit Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) algorithm and ECDSA at similar speeds.

• An Efficient Quantum Factoring Algorithm (2024): Oded Regev improved Shor's Algorithm, reducing its theoretical gate complexity. This shows strong optimization potential, although hidden constants may limit its practical usefulness to very large numbers, potentially excluding smaller keys like Bitcoin's ECDSA. Its real impact on the CRQC timeline remains unknown until it's tested by someone completely crazy on actual hardware.
• How to Factor 2048-bit RSA Integers with Less than a Million Noisy Qubits (May 2025): Craig Gidney of Google Quantum AI dramatically improved the efficiency of breaking 2048-bit RSA (the internet's security standard). His 2025 paper reduced the estimated requirement for this task from about eight hours using 20 million qubits to under one week using fewer than 1 million qubits – roughly a 95% reduction in hardware. That shift still makes a CRQC brutally difficult, but moves it firmly into the "can be done with enough money and effort" category.

Government Investments

• In April 2024, the Australian Commonwealth and Queensland Governments controversially committed $940M AUD (~$620M USD) to PsiQuantum to build what they hope will be the world's first utility-scale quantum computer in Brisbane by late 2027, targeting around one million physical qubits. The deal came via an unsolicited proposal that bypassed normal processes – a pretty loud signal of government urgency.
• In August 2020, the US announced $625M USD over five years for five National Quantum Information Science Centers, plus over $1B USD for AI and quantum R&D. The $625M pledge was renewed in January 2025, but US momentum now looks lethargic compared to the pace set by China and Europe.
• A March 2025 European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE) brief reported that 30 governments worldwide have committed over $40B USD to quantum tech, with China leading at roughly $15B.

Commercial Partnerships and Strategy

• Microsoft & Atom Computing (November 2024): Microsoft and Atom Computing announced a commercial-grade 24 logical-qubit system – the largest logical-qubit count publicly reported – by using entanglement and control techniques to push logical error rates below those of raw physical qubits.
• In March 2025, IonQ and Ansys pitted IonQ's 36-qubit machine against a classical supercomputer on a medical-device simulation. The quantum system finished about 12% faster – one of the first real-world demonstrations of a quantum computer edging out today's top-end classical hardware on a practical task.

Meanwhile, all of this is happening on roughly the same timeline the financial sector likes to imagine it still has to get quantum-ready.

The Quantum Race is Accelerating Rapidly

The space between CeFi's preparation for the quantum era and the ambitions of some of the most powerful research entities on Earth is shrinking. Every time industry giants like IBM and Google unveil another breakthrough, the timelines for "when the machines will arrive" and "when global finance will be ready" slide a little closer together. It's as if a gravitational force is at work, with each scientific advancement compressing the preparation window in lockstep.

CeFi institutions still appear better positioned for PQC migration and weathering the storm than their DeFi counterparts. The pooling sweat may not be visible yet – and sweating they most certainly are – but they are at least planning contingencies. Yet despite trillions in value secured by today's cryptographic standards, and the looming specter of CRQCs, we haven't seen systematic quantum-safe upgrades deployed at scale – though early movers like Amazon Web Services and Cloudflare have begun PQC migrations. By contrast, there are effectively no meaningful DeFi PQC patent filings at all.

DeFi is in poor shape against a quantum threat. Protecting major blockchains like Bitcoin or Ethereum requires politically fraught hard forks or complex soft forks, each demanding majority community consensus. Both options amount to a "defensive downgrade": sacrificing today's fast, cheap efficiency for a slower, more expensive, and potentially sluggish system. In doing so, they risk undermining decentralization itself – the community's core strength slowly constricts it, becoming its single greatest point of failure, the very sword it falls upon.

From a distance, this information still feels abstract. So far we've been looking at the bird's-eye view – sectors, patents, timelines and roadmaps. It's time to drop down to ground level, where the picture looks very different. Up close, you start to see how the conditions that unpersoned Josh can form around real money and real records.

Which leads to the essential question: what does any of this mean for Josh – or for you?

Honey, We're Home

Josh isn't a wrinkle in the fabric of reality; he's an early sketch of what happens when three things collide at precisely the wrong moment: long-lived data, brittle identity systems and a sudden loss of cryptographic certainty.

For him, life on that day felt profoundly mundane; just another replay of his usual groundhog slog. There wasn't the slightest hint of sci-fi until an unfortunate sequence of events unfolded – beginning with trying to summon a car, and ending with his own home no longer recognizing him.

The encryption that automatically verified his Waymo subscription against his digital identity no longer worked. The digital identification documents themselves were no longer verifiable. His digital wallets and smart contract deed depended on both staying in sync. When the math stopped agreeing that "Josh is Josh", the dominoes began to fall.

Without warning, this sci-fi nightmare shifted straight into tangible reality. It felt to Josh like he'd left the warm security of his bed and plunged feet-first into deep sub-zero water he couldn't escape. Most of the icons on his phone may as well have been dead. He couldn't call his sister – or anyone else – for help. The door to his house, which he has walked through at least a thousand times, would not permit him again.

There's nothing exotic about the elements involved in Josh's situation. Swap out Waymo for Uber. Swap his digital wallet for the one you use when you tap your phone to pay at a checkout. Swap his smart-deed portal for your Social Security or MyGov account. None of this is borrowed from an imaginary future world; this is the infrastructure of today's world; the one we already live inside.

And all of it leans on the same cryptographic assumptions that may begin to look as useful as that wet paper bag – sooner than we realize. What can we do? The first step is to drag quantum out of its exile in the realm of the fantastical and discuss it openly and seriously, warts and all. The more people understand the quantum clock that's quietly speeding up in the background, the less likely we are to wake up one morning and discover it has followed us all the way home.

Counter-Arguments and Wildcards

For the record, I really hope I'm wrong about all of this. Throughout my research for Signal #0, I've searched far and wide for ways in which I could be completely out of my depth. Honestly, the best-case scenario is that my assessment of this situation turns out to be a flaming dumpster fire.

If you can't hear my inner contrarian, I'll transcribe:

"Mitch, cut the crap. This is all nonsensical bullshit. Users have hashed addresses now, and the network can be patched. If the risk becomes dire, token holders will rally together and make the switch. It probably won't even get that far – remember the whole 'quantum-winter' thing?"

Let's take a swing at these, shall we?

Exhibit A: The "Hash" Defense

The Hope:

"This is dumb. Satoshi was a genius. A cryptographic hash (SHA-256) protects unused Bitcoin wallets that even quantum computers will find seriously challenging. As long as you don't reuse an address, your private key is safe. Not to mention, quantum-resistant hardware wallets are already on the market – people can literally buy that tech today."

The Reality:

This argument sounds reasonable in theory – but it requires ignoring just how messy things get when real people and real history enter the picture.

Orphaned Wallets and the Irreversible Exposure Problem

Some estimates suggest that up to a quarter of all Bitcoin addresses, including Satoshi's and those of early adopters and exchanges, are likely lost permanently. There is no realistic recovery solution for lost, inaccessible, or compromised private keys, reused public keys, or addresses using earlier non-encrypted payment types like the original Pay-to-Public Key (P2PK) script.

The Transaction Gap

When executing a Bitcoin transaction with a hashed address, the public key must be revealed. Given the 10 – 60 minute confirmation time (sometimes longer when congested), a CRQC could potentially derive the private key from the exposed public key in the pending transaction, and empty the wallet of its contents before the transaction even registers as "complete".

The Result

The network starts to look a lot like a World War One trench: your funds are safe within your wallet as long as you never move them. Stick your head up and try to spend them – different story. Unspendable currency is dead currency. It now sits alongside other dead currencies as a historical curiosity in a museum; its only value is teaching future generations how it came to be there.

Exhibit B: The "Patch" Defense

The Hope:

"Why don't we just upgrade the code? We did it with Taproot; we did it with SegWit. We'll fork the blockchain to a PQC-ready protocol."

The Reality:

This route is the most practical in theory – it minimizes exposure. But it crucially ignores the hardest variable in the system: us. History has repeatedly demonstrated that human nature is a ridiculously difficult bottleneck to overcome, and this situation is no different.

The Governance Gridlock:

Blocksize War/SegWit (2017)
The 2017 SegWit block-scaling upgrade, intended to fix transaction malleability and increase the block size limit, followed two years of bitter disagreement, censorship allegations, and personal attacks among miners and token holders. The community ultimately introduced a soft fork, ignoring non-SegWit transactions and halting the network. This was a strategic move to create conditions that gave miners (who had the controlling vote) no other choice than to force a hard fork, creating a new chain: Bitcoin Cash.

Taproot (2021)

The Taproot upgrade, a soft-forked Bitcoin network upgrade, improved privacy, efficiency, and smart contract functionality through a trio of Bitcoin Improvement Protocols (BIPs). Unlike the SegWit upgrade, Taproot faced minimal friction and had strong community consensus. However, even without drama, network activation still took two years. Significant time was consumed in discussions over activation of the upgrade itself – and it required a 90% miner majority to pass muster. This time expenditure is concerning given the looming quantum threat.

The "Zombie Chain" Risk

In a quantum scenario, a blockchain hard fork can create two separate chains. One is PQC-secure, while the old, vulnerable chain retains unmigrated wallets. A hypothetical, yet empirically supported scenario: the vulnerable chain effectively becomes a hacker playground. They could crash the market, damage the "secure" chain's reputation and value, and fleece old wallets. The old chain may devolve into a testing ground for hackers to refine strategies, signalling steadily increasing quantum hacking sophistication.

Plausible Wildcards

Here are a few "black swans" that potentially soften, worsen, or even completely overturn my thesis:

Layer 2 / Nodes / Custodians adopt PQC first (Softener)

Centralized providers like Coinbase and Kraken might shift their customers to PQC-ready systems, protecting funds while the core infrastructure remains vulnerable. This creates a multi-tiered system where accessing protected funds requires trusting an intermediary. This is problematic, as it introduces a centralized bottleneck – directly compromising the fundamental decentralization ethos of crypto.

Court-ordered "Undo" of quantum hacks (Softener)

To avert economic crises, governments might mandate rollbacks or blacklist quantum-stolen funds. This echoes the controversial 2016 Ethereum DAO hack; the result was a hard fork, which recovered $60 million in stolen Ether. Such a move, while ensuring financial stability, damages the promise of an immutable ledger and crypto's anti-censorship ethos. A similar maneuver by Bitcoin would destroy community faith in immutability and the "code is law" principle.

"Quantum Winter" / Engineering Wall (Thesis hits its head on the way out)

The theoretical basis for scaling up to a fault-tolerant quantum computer is solid enough for industry giants to get dizzy with excitement and set their corporate gazes ambitiously high. But the scenario where quantum hardware scaling stalls well into the next decade remains possible.

In this scenario CeFi and DeFi get a welcome time window to thoroughly prepare, migrate, and reinforce quantum defenses. I hope novel solutions emerge that allow exposed currencies to be migrated to safe havens, and that the HNDL threat somehow loses its teeth. This is a wild world we live in, full of smart people who surprise me every day with their ingenuity. So, I hold high hopes in this scenario!

Google "Willow" scales to 10k logical qubits by 2028 (Worsener)

Given Google's rapid pace of breakthroughs, the quantum error-correction timeline is unlikely to slow or drastically accelerate. Instead, compounding improvements will act as force multipliers. This chain of events makes the arrival of a cryptographically relevant quantum computer before the global financial system is ready a plausible scenario. If this happens by 2028, then the 2030-2035 PQC runway becomes extremely tight; far too tight to be realistic.

Side-Channel Attacks on PQC Hardware (Worsener)

Even if the mathematics behind PQC are solid, the hardware – the machines – we run that math on could still be vulnerable to attack. Imagine a lock so robust that the best pick in existence couldn't get through it. A crafty thief can still listen to the lock, and watch how long each turn of the dial takes. They don't need to attack the lock directly. They can simply exploit the mechanisms that make the lock function as a lock.

This is called a side-channel attack: instead of attacking encryption protocols themselves, hackers can form inferences from how long a process takes to complete, how much power a chip uses, or where it stores specific information on its memory. By measuring these values, it is possible to find patterns that can be reverse-engineered to reconstruct secret keys.

Researchers have found leaks of this kind already exist in widespread consumer and cybersecurity hardware:

• Apple's M-series processors (widely present across Apple products, including all recent Mac computer models) can unintentionally reveal patterns that help attackers reverse-engineer supposedly secure algorithms.
• ARM processors are present in 99% of smartphones worldwide, and in many laptops and PCs. Some ARM designs have a feature that tries to help the user with a function called speculative-execution that "works ahead" of them so that the next time the user issues the same request, it can be executed faster. While helpfully efficient, this leaves temporary "footprints" in processor memory – footprints that can be measured for clues that reveal secret keys.
• Even newer RISC-V processors – used in security, AI, high-performance computing applications and hardware – have been found to have design flaws that give attackers total access to devices. They are free to read and write to memory, bypassing protections entirely.

This is what scares me shitless: these are precisely the kinds of chips we'll be running PQC on. So even if we successfully exchange today's vulnerable encryption protocols for quantum-safe ones, rushed or careless implementations on compromised hardware could reopen the door from a different angle.

In short, successful PQC migration doesn't mean we're in the clear and the danger is safely behind us. If we don't treat hardware side-channels as a critically serious threat, we might as well upgrade every lock in the house but leave the windows wide open, right after we finish hanging "Welcome!" signs outside the windowsills.

Harvest Now Decrypt Later (Worsener)

As previously noted, HNDL is the long shadow trailing behind all of this. Adversaries are already scraping up encrypted blockchain traffic – currency, contracts, secret messages and communications – storing as much as they can. When CRQCs finally arrive, they can retroactively decrypt years of captured data. Side-channel vulnerabilities in PQC hardware would only make that easier.

Isolating the Real Signal – Fear Contagion

Let's check in on Josh – our "unpersoned" companion from the beginning.

He's doing just fine. The real threat isn't that, in 2033, some adversary armed with a CRQC will vaporize his house, his money and his entire digitized identity in a single glorious hack.

Make no mistake: everything that happened in Josh's nightmare is possible. But this is where we change direction. We're now veering away from mere possibility and toward stark probability – something that lives much closer to human nature.

Our nature – human nature – is the real threat.

Hovering at the surface of who we are is a force that drives change faster than any technology ever could.

That force is fear.

We fear inevitable change and the uncertainty of whether we – or the people and institutions we depend on, the ones who promise to protect us – can adapt to changes we can barely comprehend. Can anyone?

That question alone is enough to trigger a crisis of faith in institutions and freeze entire markets long before a single qubit is fired in anger.

The Architecture of Panic

From a distance, markets look rather devoid of emotion – just numbers and charts. Up close, they're tightly entwined with how secure most people feel at any given moment.

People don't rush to clear their accounts because the markets are going to hell. Most people take their cues from everyone around them. We watch other people; if they start to panic, we start to panic too. Monkey see, monkey do. Everyone else is rushing for the exit, so you follow suit. You don't want to be the one left behind, holding the empty bag.

Right now, it's the end of November 2025. The popular consensus is that the AI bubble is very fucking stretched – hanging on by a micrometer at its weakest point. OpenAI and NVIDIA haven't yet gone up in a smoldering inferno, leaving a mushroom cloud that blankets the sky and blocks out the sun – but patience is a virtue.

Objectively, reactive fear is already hard at work in the markets. NASDAQ is shaking – not because the head of the AI hydra was severed (and even if it were, three more would quickly grow back). The reason NASDAQ's fine motor control is shot-to-shit is because the narrative that generative AI will endlessly improve itself and our lives has started to sound very tired.

Investors are catching up with reality. LLMs, while useful, are not the ultimate reasoning machines we twisted them into. The light of day finally exposed a cold truth: trillions in capital expenditure don't automatically equate to an ROI that has gone forth, multiplied and nose-dived straight back into their pockets. The foundational faults in the story widened into cracks big enough to jam your fingers into. When a shiny narrative like this finally crumbles – the pile of money propping it up crumbles too.

The 1907 Parallel

DeFi today looks a lot like the unregulated New York "trust companies" of 1907. When the United Copper stock scheme blew up, fear contagion triggered a rush to pull deposits out of banks across the entire interconnected system – despite no fundamental reason for most of those institutions to collapse. The Federal Reserve didn't exist yet (it was actually born in response to this crisis); all you had was J.P. Morgan lording over bankers, locking them up in his library and refusing to let them leave until they bent the knee.

The Quantum Contagion

DeFi is that shadow system all grown up: interdependent, sophisticated, unregulated – and without JP Morgan slamming doors and throwing his weight around.

When the first fault-free, utility-scale quantum computer boots up and someone announces "the quantum era has begun," we'll respond with the same animal instinct we've always responded to threats with.

Even if the device looks like Oscar the Grouch lives in it, and it sounds like a horde of rats are frantically fucking at the bottom – even if it couldn't crack a walnut, let alone a wallet – it will crack something more important: the mythology of invincibility.

When that confidence finally gives way – the same way it did during the late-2025 wobbling of the AI bubble – the story collapses first, and the prices follow closely. The threat of HNDL hoarding we see today will harden into something much more blunt: question time is over; sell everything now, we'll worry about explanations later.

That panic is the real signal. Hearing it in mono is realizing that the quantum threat doesn't just stalk obvious prey like state secrets and spy agencies – it also circles your tokenized savings, your digitized assets, your carefully curated online life. And whether or not Josh's exact nightmare becomes real, the question we're left with is the same:

When the story of invincibility cracks, how fast do we follow it?

Afterword — A Window into the Future

Today's information environment is engineered for constant overwhelm – a 24/7 surround-sound scream of conflicting signals: technological disruption, geopolitical conflict, infinite feeds draining finite attention, experts promising both utopia and apocalypse. It's disorienting by design.

I'm Mitchell (MonoMitch). Born with profound hearing loss in my right ear, I literally can't process the world in surround-sound. I had to develop a refined signal filter: identify what's useful, discard the noise, understand the difference, and act on what matters. I call this "Operating in Mono" – listening for the faint signals hiding behind the noise.

The most potent indicators of tomorrow's technologies are already here – buried in obscure patent filings, dense papers and overlooked GitHub repositories.

Welcome to Dark Matter Foresight. This is where I go hunting for the most important convergence collisions and bring them to your attention.

You've just read Signal #0: The Rise of the (Quantum) Machines

Signals drop most Tuesdays (Sydney time).

Join DMF now, at the edge of the event horizon.

You're early. That's the whole point.