Overview
- New analysis narrows potential exposure to roughly 1.6–1.7 million BTC (about 8% of supply) in legacy P2PK addresses with visible public keys.
- Only about 10,200 BTC are concentrated enough to cause appreciable market disruption if suddenly compromised, with the rest scattered across more than 32,000 small outputs.
- CoinShares estimates that breaking Bitcoin’s elliptic-curve signatures within practical timeframes would require fault-tolerant quantum computers with millions of qubits, far beyond today’s ~105‑qubit machines.
- Attacking live transactions would demand near‑instant key extraction that remains infeasible for decades, while modern address types keep public keys hidden until coins are spent.
- Developers and institutions are advancing post‑quantum options through testnets and advisory efforts as CoinShares cautions against rushed protocol changes that could introduce bugs or weaken decentralization.