Quantum Noise
Every few months, the fake news cycle spins up again.
You know the headlines I mean:
“Quantum Computers Will Kill Bitcoin.”
“A ‘Q-Day’ Attack Could Steal Trillions.”
“Scientists ‘Surprised’ at How Quickly Quantum is Advancing.”
It’s a great story.
A Hollywood-level threat, a high-tech boogeyman that pits a futuristic, almost magical technology against the digital gold we’ve been told is “unbreakable.” The media loves it. Your banker friends who still think Bitcoin is “tulip bulbs” love it. They do dances like this as they imagine Bitcoin’s demise:
It’s the ultimate “I told you so.”
And it’s ultimately… horseshit.
I’ve been in Bitcoin since 2013. I was in investment banking, I’ve run the full startup race and sold a company to Facebook (as a pref equity investor, not the visionary founder!) Now I run a family office, build AI tools for my portcos, and spend my days separating signal from noise.
And let me tell you: the “quantum threat” is the single most overhyped, misanalyzed, and fundamentally misunderstood risk in the entire digital asset space.
It’s not that the threat is fake. It’s that the people reporting on it have zero understanding of systems architecture, market incentives, or human coordination. They see a new weapon (Shor’s algorithm) and a target (Bitcoin’s encryption), and they declare the war is over.
As an investor, I see a gross mispricing of risk. As a builder, I see a straightforward, if challenging, systems upgrade.
The quantum threat isn’t Bitcoin’s eulogy. It’s the catalyst for its next great evolution. It’s the $10 trillion security audit that will ultimately forge Bitcoin into the most hardened, anti-fragile asset in human history.
People see “existential threat” and they panic.
I see “protocol upgrade” and I clear my desk.
Let’s break down the FUD, piece by piece, from two perspectives: the investor who allocates capital and the engineer who builds the machine.
Part 1: Deconstructing the Heist
The primary fear is simple: theft.
The argument is that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm can reverse-engineer your private key from your public key. Get the private key, get the coins.
This is, technically, true. But it’s like saying a guided missile can sink a rowboat. The statement is correct, but it ignores the entire context.
Who is vulnerable?
How?
And what’s the real attack vector?
The 25% “Vulnerable” Supply: A Legacy Debt Problem
The bears will point to a terrifying statistic: Approximately 25% of all Bitcoins are in vulnerable addresses.
This sounds catastrophic.
A quarter of the network, ready to be scooped up on “Q-Day.”
Let’s be precise. As an engineer, precision matters. These “vulnerable” addresses fall into two main categories:
P2PK (Pay-to-Public-Key): An old, legacy address type where the public key is directly used as the address. These are extremely rare today, but a lot of the very early-mined coins (think 2009-2010) are in P2PK addresses. Yes, these are sitting ducks. I am vintage 2013 to 2017 for most of my coinage, well outside this time frame.
Reused P2PKH (Pay-to-Public-Key-Hash): This is the one that matters. In a normal modern Bitcoin transaction (using P2PKH or SegWit), your public key is not revealed. The network only sees a hash of your public key. Hashes (like SHA-256) are quantum-resistant.
The vulnerability is introduced only when you spend from that address. At the moment you broadcast a transaction, you reveal your public key to the network to prove you own the hash.
If you never reuse that address again, which has been Bitcoin 101 security practice for a decade, you are safe. The transaction gets mined, and that UTXO is spent. An attacker can’t steal funds that are already gone.
Catching smoke is not easy business.
So, who is vulnerable? Anyone who received funds at a P2PKH address, spent some of them, and then left the change in the same address.
This reuse exposes their public key, and that exposed pubkey is now a target for Shor’s algorithm. The 25% statistic is almost entirely composed of these P2PK addresses and reused P2PKH addresses.
As an investor, I don’t see a 25% protocol failure. I see a 25% legacy debt.
A significant portion of those coins is almost certainly lost forever. We’re talking about Satoshi-era coins, hard drives in landfills, and keys forgotten long ago.
The market has, in effect, already priced these coins as “lost.” They are the network’s ghost ships. A quantum computer cracking their keys is like finding a new way to open a treasure chest that’s already at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. It’s technically interesting, but it doesn’t affect the price of gold on the open market.
The active capital, the BTC being traded, held by institutions, stored in modern hardware wallets, is not in these addresses. Modern wallets (SegWit, Taproot) are designed to never reuse addresses.
They are, by default, quantum-resistant to this “legacy” attack.
The “10-Minute Window” Attack: A Race You Can’t Win
“But wait!” the skeptic says. “What about new transactions? Even on a safe SegWit address, you have to reveal your public key for 10 minutes while it’s in the mempool waiting to be confirmed!”
This is the only truly sophisticated attack vector.
I’ll give you the theory first and then the reality.
The theory goes like this:
I broadcast a valid transaction, revealing my public key
Pub_A.A quantum attacker, “Eve” is monitoring the mempool. She sees my transaction. She’s WICKED smart and has a ton of compute.
In the ~10 minutes before my transaction is mined, Eve must:
a. Run Shor’s algorithm to derive myPriv_AfromPub_A.
b. Construct a new transaction, signing with myPriv_A.
c. This new transaction must spend my funds to her address,Addr_Eve.
d. She must broadcast this fraudulent transaction with a higher fee than mine.
e. This new, higher-fee transaction must be picked up by a miner and confirmed before my original, valid transaction.
That’s not just hard.
As a builder who has scaled systems for billions, this entire scenario is operationally absurd. It’s a fantasy.
First, the “10 minutes” is an average. It could be 30 seconds. I’ve seen 10 blocks in 30-minutes. Good luck front running that, with ANY amount of electron leverage.
Second, the cost of this operation is staggering. We are talking about a state-level quantum computer, a multi-billion dollar piece of infrastructure, dedicated to monitoring a public mempool. To what end?
To maybe snipe a single, random transaction?
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What’s the payoff? The median Bitcoin transaction value is a few hundred dollars. The mean is skewed by large exchange movements, but you can’t target a specific transaction.
You just have to watch the firehose and hope to catch a whale.
You are deploying a trillion-dollar system to play a 10-minute game of digital pickpocketing for an unknown prize.
And you will get caught.
From an investment perspective, the ROI is negative infinity. It makes no sense. A state actor with this power would not be sniping mempools.
They’d be breaking military encryption, stealing state secrets, cracking open insurance vaults or blackmailing global banks… all of which still use the exact same (and often, weaker) public-key cryptography as Bitcoin.
If “Q-Day” arrives, Bitcoin is the last thing you need to worry about.
Your bank account, your encrypted emails, and the entire global security apparatus will have already crumbled. This isn’t a Bitcoin problem; it’s a global cryptography problem.
And as we’ll see, the globe is already fixing it.
Part 2: The “Q-Day” Fallacy
The second pillar of quantum FUD is the timeline.
“It’s coming, and it’s coming sooner than you think.”
This is a sales pitch, not an analysis.
So is this all just fake news?
“Store Now, Decrypt Later”
This is the most realistic part of the threat. The idea is that state-level actors are downloading the entire Bitcoin blockchain right now and storing it. Why? To wait for “Q-Day” when they can fire up their quantum computers and retroactively crack all those “legacy debt” addresses—that 25%—and steal the coins.
This is a real threat. But again, let’s look at it practically.
It’s a Known Problem: This threat applies only to the 25% of coins in known-vulnerable addresses. It cannot be used to attack modern, non-reused addresses.
It’s a Migration Problem: The solution is not to “fix” the blockchain. The solution is for the owners of those coins to move them.
The Fix is One Transaction: If you (or I) are one of the few technically-savvy-but-lazy people who have reused an address and left funds in it, the fix is simple: create a new, quantum-resistant address and send your funds to it. Right now. That’s it. One transaction. The “Store Now, Decrypt Later” attack is now useless against you.
This isn’t a protocol crisis. It’s a public service announcement. It’s a “check your wallet” notification. The incentive to move your funds is 100% aligned with your own survival.
As the perceived “Q-Day” gets closer, the incentive to migrate these “legacy” funds to “safe” addresses will become overwhelming.
The market will fix this itself.
The “Grover’s Algorithm” Mining Threat
This one is my favorite. It’s the most technical and the most easily dismissed.
The theory is that a quantum computer could use Grover’s algorithm to get a quadratic speedup on Bitcoin’s mining algorithm, SHA-256.
In short: a quantum miner would be faster than an ASIC miner.
This is where the “theorist” and the “builder” diverge.
A theorist says, “Oh no! A state will build a quantum miner and 51% attack the network!”
As a builder and investor, I say: So what?
Bitcoin’s security is not based on SHA-256. It’s based on economics.
The entire system is governed by the Difficulty Adjustment.
Let’s play this out.
Scenario: China spends $1 trillion to build a “Grover’s Miner” and turns it on.
Result: They instantly find the next 10 blocks. Wow!
The Protocol’s Response: The Bitcoin network’s difficulty adjustment algorithm sees that blocks are being found every 1 minute instead of every 10 minutes.
The Protocol’s Action: After 2016 blocks (about 2 weeks, or in this case, 2 days), the network automatically and massively increases the mining difficulty.
The New Reality: The difficulty is now so high that China’s $1T quantum miner is... finding a block every 10 minutes.
All they’ve done is spend a trillion dollars to permanently increase the cost of mining for the entire world, including themselves. They have not broken Bitcoin. They have not stolen any coins (they’ve just mined new ones, as intended). They have, in fact, made the network more secure by forcing the difficulty to an astronomical new high.
This is an economically irrational attack. It’s like building a billion-dollar nuclear-powered shovel to win a gold-panning competition.
You just don’t do it.
The real-world ASIC arms race, where companies like Bitmain and MicroBT shave nanometers off chips to get a 5% efficiency gain, is a market. It’s rational. Quantum mining is a “brute force the sun” solution that has no economic payoff. It’s a non-starter.
Part 3: The Upgrade Path
This is the most important part of the discussion. It’s where my builder-side kicks in.
The entire quantum “threat” has a solution. It’s not a mystery.
It’s called Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC).
PQC is simply a new set of cryptographic algorithms that is designed to be secure against both classical and quantum computers. The U.S. government, through NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), has been running a global competition for years to identify and standardize these algorithms.
The winners are already being chosen. Companies like Google and AWS are already integrating PQC into their core services. The entire internet is preparing for this upgrade.
Bitcoin will be no different.
This is Just a Soft Fork
The panic comes from not understanding how Bitcoin evolves. “It will require consensus!” they cry, as if it’s an impossible hurdle.
As someone who lived through the SegWit and Taproot upgrades, I can tell you exactly how this will happen. It will be a soft fork.
A soft fork is a backward-compatible upgrade. Old nodes don’t have to upgrade (though they’ll be incentivized to).
Here is the 3-phase rollout that is already being discussed by core developers:
Phase 1: Build & Test (We Are Here)
Core developers and cryptographers (like the “Bitcoin Quantum” initiatives) are already building and testing PQC implementations.
They are testing new signature schemes (like CRYSTALS-Dilithium, a NIST standard).
They are figuring out the data-size trade-offs, as PQC signatures are often larger than current ECDSA signatures. This drives block space and fees.
Phase 2: Soft Fork Activation
A Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) will be written. It will define a new address type. Let’s call it a “QR Address” (Quantum-Resistant).
This BIP will be integrated into a new version of Bitcoin Core.
Miners and nodes will be given a year or two to upgrade. The consensus will be trivial.
Why? Because the incentive is survival. This is not a contentious debate about block sizes or scaling philosophy. This is a “do we patch the meteor shield, yes or no?” debate. Everyone will vote yes. The miners’ $150B in hardware and the holders’ $3T in assets depend on it.
Phase 3: Voluntary, Incentivized Migration
Once the soft fork is active, the network will now understand “QR Addresses.”
Your wallet (Ledger, Trezor, Swan, etc.) will pop up a notification: “Upgrade to a Quantum-Safe Address?”
You will tap “Yes.”
Your wallet will create a new QR Address for you. It will then construct a simple, on-chain Bitcoin transaction that sends all your funds from your old (SegWit, P2PKH) addresses to your new, safe QR Address.
You will pay a one-time network fee. You will wait for confirmation.
You are now 100% quantum-safe. Forever.
That’s it. That’s the “existential crisis.” It’s a software update and a one-time transaction.
This is the easiest consensus Bitcoin will ever achieve.
This migration solves every vector.
It solves the “Store Now, Decrypt Later” threat, as your old, exposed pubkeys are now empty.
It solves the “10-Minute Window” attack, as your new QR address uses PQC signatures from the start.
The Beauty of Bitcoin’s Design
This is the hidden genius of Bitcoin, something the bears never understand. Bitcoin is not a static product. Bitcoin is a living protocol. It was designed to be upgraded.
The transition from P2PK to P2PKH was an upgrade.
SegWit (which fixed transaction malleability) was an upgrade.
Taproot (which enabled new scripting) was an upgrade.
The “PQC” upgrade will be the next one. It’s just a new set of rules for a new type of address. The old rules still work, so the network doesn’t split. But everyone is massively incentivized to move to the new, safer, better system.
The “threat” of quantum computing is, in fact, the greatest gift to Bitcoin. It creates a non-negotiable incentive for the entire ecosystem to rally, coordinate, and execute a massive hardening of the protocol.
It will bring dead energy back into the system, too.
Conclusion: The 100x Opportunity in Boring Upgrades
As an investor, I’m trained to find asymmetric bets. Opportunities where the downside is known and capped, but the upside is exponential.
When I look at the quantum threat, I see a classic case of asymmetric upside.
The Downside:
The risk is that a state-level actor will secretly build a trillion-dollar quantum computer and, instead of using it to break global military and financial encryption, will first decide to attack Bitcoin... but only to steal the 25% of “legacy debt” coins (most of which are lost), and maybe try to pull off an operationally-difficult 10-minute mempool race... all before the Bitcoin community, and the entire rest of the global tech industry, rolls out the PQC patches they are already building.
This risk is, in my professional opinion, near zero.
It’s a non-event.
The Upside:
The upside is that in the next 5-10 years, the Bitcoin protocol will voluntarily and successfully migrate its entire $5T+ asset base to a quantum-resistant foundation.
Stop and think about what that means.
This will be the single largest, most valuable, most public “security upgrade” in the history of finance.
When Bitcoin pulls this off, and it will, it will have proven its anti-fragility. It will have demonstrated that a decentralized network of competing, self-interested actors can coordinate to defeat a state-level, extinction-level threat.
What happens to the value of an asset that is the only asset in the world to have publicly and verifiably faced the “quantum boogeyman” and won?
What happens when Bitcoin is not just “digital gold,” but “provably quantum-safe digital gold”?
The FUD will vanish overnight.
Every institution, every sovereign wealth fund, every central bank that had “quantum” on its risk-assessment checklist will have to cross it off.
Solving the quantum threat isn’t a crisis. It’s a feature. It’s the final boss battle that transitions Bitcoin from a “speculative tech asset” to “permanent global infrastructure.”
People see “Quantum Threat” and they panic-sell.
I see “Protocol Upgrade” and I buy with both hands.
This isn’t the end of Bitcoin. This is the proving ground for our next 100x.
Stop reading the headlines. Go build something and buy Bitcoin.
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