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Talk of quantum computers no longer sounds like science fiction at crypto events. At a recent developer gathering, ETH Denver, engineers and security researchers focused on a practical question: what would happen to Bitcoin if a powerful quantum machine came online?
Reports discussed how new proposals are being folded into the network’s improvement process, laying early groundwork for defenses before any real crisis appears.
Hashing—used by miners and many parts of the system—would not become dramatically easier to break. Based on Lov Grover’s work, a quantum search method offers a square-root speedup, which could change safety margins but would not eliminate them.
In other words, breaking hashes at scale would require enormous, and potentially unrealistic, machines under current models.
Reports say the bigger concern is digital signatures. “What we’re worried about in the next five years are signatures, and that goes over with Shor’s,” Hunter Beast, co-author of BIP 360, said during the ETH Denver gathering.
Most wallets rely on elliptic-curve cryptography. Peter Shor showed that a quantum computer could reverse the underlying math, enabling a scenario where a public key could reveal a private key once the right hardware exists.
A blockchain cybersecurity firm has been tracking addresses that have already exposed their public keys, and the numbers are described as significant. Project Eleven’s list flags millions of coins that, if an attacker had a sufficiently powerful quantum device, would be at risk.
Bitcoin is now trading at $67,715. Chart: TradingView
Estimates have shifted over time. Older papers placed the required resources in the many-millions of qubits. More recent research from groups such as Iceberg Quantum suggests the figure could be much lower, potentially into the six-figure range.
However, raw qubit counts are only part of the picture. What matters is how many “logical” qubits can be run with acceptable error rates, how long calculations take, and whether the machine can remain stable for that duration.
Lab progress also plays a role. For example, Google has reported advances in error correction that many observers found encouraging.
Reports say teams are forming to study and build defenses. The Ethereum Foundation has a post-quantum group, and major exchanges and firms are taking part in discussions.
Coinbase has also set up advisers, and CEO Brian Armstrong said the problem can be handled with planning, calling it “solvable.”
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