A toy with a point. Every crypto asset rests on a handful of algorithms. Some fall to a large enough quantum computer. Some barely notice. Some already died on a laptop. And all of them lose to a $5 wrench.
The arsenal
Shor's Cannon. Factoring and discrete logs in polynomial time. Obliterates RSA and every elliptic curve. Does nothing to hashes, AES or lattices.
Grover's Hammer. A quadratic speed-up on brute search. Halves the bits of symmetric keys and hashes. 256 becomes 128. Still standing.
Brute Force. Try every key. See you after the heat death of the universe.
Side-Channel Laser. Timing, power, cache. Attacks the implementation, not the maths. Hold to fire.
$5 Wrench. Rubber-hose cryptanalysis, per xkcd 538. Works on everything. Your key management is the weak link.
A Single-Core Laptop. How SIKE, a NIST post-quantum candidate still in round four, was broken with classical maths in 2022.
The takeaway
Hashes and AES-256 survive. RSA, secp256k1, Ed25519 and BLS do not. NIST published the post-quantum standards (FIPS 203, 204, 205) in August 2024. Chains that hold value behind ECDSA need a migration path before the hardware arrives, not after.
Simplified for fun. Not cryptographic advice. Damage values are vibes anchored to real attacks.