A new crypto research paper argues that warnings of quantum computers instantly destroying Bitcoin misrepresent the actual threat timeline. The real risk lies in lengthy, complex migrations rather than a sudden collapse, according to the analysis.
What Happened: Research Paper Published
Justin Thaler, a research partner at a16z and computer science professor at Georgetown University, published the analysis arguing that "timelines to a cryptographically relevant quantum computer are frequently overstated — leading to calls for urgent, wholesale transitions to post-quantum cryptography."
He defines a cryptographically relevant quantum computer as a fully error-corrected machine capable of running Shor's algorithm to break RSA-2048 or elliptic-curve schemes like secp256k1 in roughly one month.
Thaler assesses that such a system is highly unlikely in the 2020s and probably won't arrive before 2030, noting that no current device across trapped-ion, superconducting or neutral-atom platforms is close to the hundreds of thousands to millions of physical qubits needed for cryptanalysis.
The paper distinguishes between encryption and signature vulnerabilities.
Harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks make post-quantum encryption urgent for sensitive data, but signatures face different risks since attackers can only forge them going forward once a quantum computer exists, not retroactively decrypt historical blockchain data.
Bitcoin faces "special headaches" due to slow governance and low throughput, according to Thaler, who writes that "any contentious issues could trigger a damaging hard fork if the community cannot agree on the appropriate solution."
He adds that "even once migration plans are finalized, migrating all quantum-vulnerable funds to post-quantum-secure addresses would take months at Bitcoin's current transaction rate."
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Why It Matters: Industry Divided
Castle Island Ventures co-founder Nic Carter immediately challenged the research, stating it "wildly underestimates the nature of the threat and overestimates the time we have to prepare."
Alex Pruden, CEO of Project 11, laid out a detailed rebuttal arguing that "the threat is closer, the progress faster, and the fix harder than how he's framing it." He pointed to neutral-atom systems now supporting more than 6,000 physical qubits and noted that "surface code error correction was experimentally demonstrated last year, moving it from a research problem into an engineering problem."
Pruden highlighted that Google's updated estimates show a quantum computer with about one million noisy physical qubits running for roughly one week could break RSA-2048, a twenty-fold reduction from Google's 2019 estimate of twenty million qubits.
He reframed blockchains as uniquely attractive quantum targets because "these public keys are distributed & directly associated with value ($150B for Satoshi's BTC alone)."
Once a quantum adversary can forge signatures, attackers can steal assets regardless of when the original transaction was created, making "the economic incentives simply and clearly point to blockchains as being the first cryptographically relevant quantum use case."
Pruden argued that blockchain migrations will prove far slower than centralized system upgrades.
"The closest thing was the ETH 1.0 to 2.0 transition which took years, and as complex as that was, a PQ migration is much harder," he wrote, warning that "the most likely failure mode is that the industry waits too long, and then a major QC milestone triggers a panic."
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