CoinShares: Bitcoin's Quantum Risk Manageable, Market Concerns Overblown

BlockBeats News, February 8th, CoinShares stated in a post that the possibility of practical quantum computers emerging in the future is not zero, sparking intense debate on the potential impact on Bitcoin's security. The quantum threat to Bitcoin is not an imminent crisis but a foreseeable engineering problem, allowing ample time for adjustments.

From a technical perspective, the so-called quantum risk mainly stems from the Shor algorithm's potential ability to break ECDSA or Schnorr signatures, exposing private keys; the Grover algorithm could theoretically weaken the security strength of SHA-256. The main potential impact is on the approximately 1.7 million BTC in early-use P2PK addresses, accounting for about 8% of the total supply, thus limiting the possibility of near-term systemic market shock. The common notion in the market that approximately "25% of the supply is at risk" is considered significantly exaggerated, with a considerable portion of the risk being mitigated through address migration.

A long-term attack may be theoretically feasible in the next decade, but short-duration attacks like cracking a private key within 10 minutes in the mempool are still fundamentally impractical in the foreseeable future, even possibly decades away. The potential impact of funds entering the market due to private key leakage is roughly around 10,000 BTC; even if it were to occur, the impact on the price system would be limited. Holders can proactively migrate to a more secure address format. The remaining potential targets are spread across approximately 34,000 addresses, with an average of about 50 BTC each. Even under an extremely optimistic assumption of a quantum technology breakthrough, a comprehensive attack could still take several decades to complete.