Does Google's Willow pose a real threat to BTC?

Does Google's Willow pose a real threat to BTC? No. Does quantum computing in general? The answer is nuanced. BTC uses cryptography algorithms like SHA-256 for mining and ECDSA for signatures. If quantum computers break those, then secure communication on the internet, operating systems, email, banking systems, credit card processing, military security, etc will all be broken. If this problem goes unsolved BTC will be the least of our worries. This is a known issue and systems like Willow are going to accelerate funding and timelines to fixing it. I am not panicking and I don't think anyone else should. If you're trying to hedge against this problem remaining unsolved, selling BTC isn't really the move. Hedging would look like apocalypse prepping, hoarding guns, food, and ammo. I don't think that's necessary. But you do you. The Y2k bug posed a similarly wide spread problem. The reason why it feels like fears of the Y2K bug were overblown is because we got ahead of the problem and fixed it. Quantum computer fears are going to feel similar. People are panicking now, but we will get ahead of the problem and fix it before it threatens economic and national security. We are orders of magnitude away from a quantum computer capable of that. University of Sussex researchers estimate you'd need 13M qbits in a system, Google's Willow has 105. But people are updating their timelines to the mid 2030's for such a system to exist. And keep in mind, there might be one or two of these systems in existence by then run by Google or NASA. Best Buy is unlikely to have a quantum computer section with these kinds of capabilities. Researchers are already developing quantum resistant cryptography for important global systems. BTC may eventually be forked into a quantum resistant protocol. Bitcoin has been 'soft forked' to upgrade it several times, in 2012, '13, and '17. If BTC needs an upgrade against quantum attacks, it might be a hard fork. That would mean we would end up with, let's say BTC-Q, the new secure version, and the old BTC would still exist. It's most likely everyone would adopt BTC-Q and the world would keep turning. It wouldn't be the end of BTC in the same way that upgrading from Mac OS 15 to 16 doesn't end your laptop. Vitalik Buterin has written about paths to upgrading ETH to be quantum resistant. Funding and priorities may be shifting to accelerate that upgrade. You'll keep hearing about this over the coming years. Older and less used cryptocurrencies are less likely to have the funds necessary to devote to researching and upgrading their software. However, they'll all benefit from the global research and new software developed to solve these problems. The complexities of implementing new forms of cryptography will vary and some may not have the engineering resources. It may be that a majority of the tail end of cryptocurrencies die out, which lets face it, there's already the strong gravitational force pulling them all to zero by nature of power laws in the economy. I think such an event would just concentrate all of that liquidity into BTC. Should you panic and sell everything? There's a loud contingent of people calling for the economy to crash every other month. They're broken clocks that have successfully predicted 3 out of the last 900 economic meltdowns. I'm not offering financial advice, but the sky doesn’t fall every week. The more decisions you make, the higher your chance is of making the wrong one. I don’t think this changes the big picture for crypto. It’s still a long-term hedge against fiat inflation, a bet on decentralization, the future of finance, and a global, permissionless computer that empowers people through trustless systems.