Is there any field with as big of gap between theory and experiment than QC? You read papers like this and think they will be harvesting all Satoshi's coins in a couple years and then you remember that nobody has even factored 21 yet on a real quantum computer.
It's interesting, solar panels were in this category in the 1980s and self-driving cars were in the 2010s, and both have had the gap between theory and practice significantly narrowed since.
Here's an interesting discussion from Section 8 - Dormant Wallets:
If a nation state develops a sufficiently powerful quantum computer. Seizure of the Satoshi-era bitcoin wallets without post quantum protections would fund either rogue actors or nation states.
> Indeed, some governments will have the option of using CRQCs (or paying a bounty to companies) to acquire these assets (possibly to burn them by sending them to the unspendable OP RETURN address [321]) as a national security matter. As before, blockchain’s loss of the
ability to reliably identify asset owners combined with the laches doctrine [319] enables governments to argue that
the original owners, through years of inaction, have failed to assert their property rights
If a nation state develops a sufficiently powerful quantum computer. Seizure of the Satoshi-era bitcoin wallets without post quantum protections would fund either rogue actors or nation states.
> Indeed, some governments will have the option of using CRQCs (or paying a bounty to companies) to acquire these assets (possibly to burn them by sending them to the unspendable OP RETURN address [321]) as a national security matter. As before, blockchain’s loss of the ability to reliably identify asset owners combined with the laches doctrine [319] enables governments to argue that the original owners, through years of inaction, have failed to assert their property rights