CMC News

Bitcoin Has 3-5 Years To Prepare for Quantum Threat, Says Bernstein

Analysts at #Bernstein say the crypto industry has three to five years to upgrade $BTC's cryptographic defenses before quantum computing poses a realistic threat. The research note, published Wednesday and led by analyst Gautam Chhugani, described quantum computing as a "manageable upgrade cycle" for the network rather than an existential danger. #Bitcoin

Recent research from Google showed a roughly 20x reduction in the number of physical qubits needed to break modern encryption. That development shortened the expected timeline for cryptographically relevant #quantum computers, or CRQCs, which are machines capable of breaking the encryption protecting digital signatures. Google researchers separately set a 2029 target for post-quantum cryptography migration and urged crypto ecosystems to accelerate their preparations.

Bernstein's three- to five-year window aligns with that guidance. Scaling quantum machines to the level required for a real attack still demands breakthroughs in error correction, calibration, cycle time, and manufacturing, the analysts said. The cost of building such systems could run into the tens to hundreds of billions of dollars. #Crypto

Quantum computers use qubits, which can hold multiple states at the same time. That capability allows them to run Shor's algorithm, which could break the elliptic curve cryptography securing $BTC transaction signatures. Classical computers cannot run that algorithm at a meaningful scale, but quantum machines could, in theory, do so once they reach sufficient size.

Not all Bitcoin addresses carry the same level of risk. Bernstein identified pay-to-public-key (P2PK), pay-to-multisig (P2MS), and pay-to-Taproot (P2TR) address formats as the most exposed. Those formats leave public keys permanently visible #on-chain. Newer wallet formats and practices such as avoiding address reuse reduce exposure considerably.