One of Bitcoin's (BTC +1.20%) very few existential risks is suddenly looming a lot closer. On March 30, Google Research's Quantum AI division published a whitepaper arguing that the encryption protecting Bitcoin and virtually every other major cryptocurrency on the market today can be broken with a dramatically less complex quantum computer than what was previously believed. That doesn't mean that someone can steal your coins tomorrow, but it does mean that the risk posed by quantum computers could be arriving a lot faster than nearly all investors assumed, so anyone holding the asset needs to understand what just changed. Some might even want to consider selling it. Here's what's going on and why. What the new paper says, and why it matters One of Bitcoin's most fundamental properties is that it provisions for ownership. If you control a specific wallet and you don't share any information about it with anyone else, you can be confident that the coins contained within will remain under your control, provided that you don't make any security errors. The blockchain's encryption scheme ensures that nobody else can pretend to be you or otherwise gain the ability to sell or transfer your holdings. If that suddenly changes, it's reasonable to expect the coin's price to crater, perhaps permanently. That encryption is itself based on complicated math problems, which are prohibitively time-consuming to solve (crack) with normal computers like the ones we use every day. But sufficiently powerful quantum computers running a complicated math problem-solving algorithm called Shor's algorithm could eventually crack the encryption quite quickly. CRYPTO: BTC Key Data Points Such quantum computers do not exist as of yet, though significantly simpler ones do. The gist of the situation is that cracking encryption efficiently with a quantum device requires the device to have a significantly