The $470 billion dollar quantum threat hanging over Bitcoin

[CMPunk96]

Theres a genuinely fascinating Forbes piece digging into the quantum threat to Bitcoin, and its one of the more level headed treatments of this topic Ive seen since it actually puts real numbers and real disagreement on the table instead of just doom or dismissal

Galaxy Digital estimated back in March that roughly 7 million Bitcoin, worth about 470 billion dollars, sit in addresses that have already exposed their public key on-chain, mostly old Satoshi-era addresses plus any address thats been reused after its first spend, though Galaxy itself called the risk real but far from an existential crisis right now

The technical goalposts keep moving in a worrying direction too, a Google researcher showed breaking RSA-2048 might take fewer than a million qubits, a twentyfold cut from his own 2019 estimate, and a more recent Google whitepaper put cracking Bitcoins elliptic curve cryptography at fewer than 500,000 qubits, with an Ethereum Foundation researcher estimating a 10 percent chance a quantum computer could pull a Bitcoin key from an exposed public key by 2032

Bitcoins own developers are genuinely split on what to do about this, one proposal called BIP-360 would just add a new quantum resistant address type, but a second proposal called BIP-361 is the one that makes people uncomfortable since it would retire legacy signatures in phases and make any coins that never migrated, including coins widely believed to be Satoshis own, permanently unspendable, with supporters framing it as better than letting a future quantum thief drain them and critics calling it outright confiscation

Into this mess steps a startup called American Fortress pitching quantum resistance across chains without requiring any address migration at all, paired with an auto freeze mechanism for vulnerable dormant wallets, though its worth being skeptical here since their technical paper hasnt been published or independently audited yet despite some fairly bold claims from its founder

The whole piece ends on a nice bit of perspective from a gold executive interviewed alongside all this, who points out that gold will probably still exist in five thousand years while Bitcoin may or may not be, which is a pretty blunt way to frame the actual stakes of this entire debate

Bitcoin Quantum Threat: The Race To Quantum-Proof Cryptowww.forbes.com