[Cryptography] quantum Bitcoin?

[John Levine]

It appears that Bayram Å ahin via cryptography <gavinjustice69 at yahoo.com> said:
>Can quantum computers bring the end of Bitcoin?

Bitcoin wallets use ECDSA to produce the public key from the private key, so yes.
A large enough quantum computer could reverse that operation so you could
find the private key for any public key and steal all the money out of a wallet.

The proof of work uses hashing which is not quantum reversible, so as far as I can
tell you couldn't rewrite the blockchain or instantly create new blocks.  On the other
hand, the incentive to keep mining would be pretty low if people could just steal
whatever you mined.