At TOKEN2049 Singapore, Capriole Investments founder Charles Edwards set aside his well-known Bitcoin bullishness to deliver an unambiguous warning: a quantum “Q-Day” could arrive far sooner than most of the industry expects, with potentially existential consequences if Bitcoin’s core cryptography is not upgraded in time. “Within two to eight years, a quantum machine will break Bitcoin’s current encryption,” he told the audience, urging developers, companies and holders to treat the issue as urgent engineering, not distant theory.

Edwards framed Q-Day as the moment a sufficiently powerful quantum computer can break widely-used classical cryptography such as RSA—and, by extension, the elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) underpinning Bitcoin’s public-private key model. “Q-day is the day in

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