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Comment by GeoSys | Hacker News Reader

So does BTC need to hard fork? Good luck getting to a consensus again ...

If QC gets to the point where breaking RSA and ECC in the real world is actually going to happen, I'd imagine you will find a consensus rather quickly.

If an upgrade becomes necessary, it would be a soft fork. (Consensus would still be a challenge)

I’m impressed by the BTC obsession: this will definitely impact the banking sector as a whole even before. Quantum FUD, here we come.

The banking sector can relatively trivially move to a new encryption scheme - this is one of the huge advantages of centralized systems. Also, the banking sector, rather than trying to provide anonymity/pseudonimity, has KYC - they can relatively simply disable remote access if they think a current system is no longer secure, and get everyone to come in to a physical office and get a secure version, after manually verifying they are the rightful holder of the account.

Tldr; Bitcoin relies entirely on encryption, banking does not. So broken encryption is a catastrophe for Bitcoin, but just a bad week for banking.

> they can relatively simply disable remote access if they think a current system is no longer secure, and get everyone to come in to a physical office

After all these years of it not being required? I think that's... very naive with regard to how clients would respond.

I'm not saying it would be pretty, but it would still be infinitely better than what migtn happen in Bitcoin land - where people will either be able to steal money from those wallets directly, or the owners will permanently lose access.

Upgrading decades old legacy systems? Good luck with that.

External access to banks is already using the latest versions of TLS, so no luck needed, they will just need to upgrade as they do constantly.

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