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

On February 8, CoinShares said in a post that the chance of practical quantum computers emerging in the future is not zero, sparking intense debate over their potential impact on Bitcoin’s security. The quantum threat to Bitcoin is not an imminent crisis but a foreseeable engineering challenge, leaving ample time for adjustments. Technically speaking, quantum risks mainly stem from the Shor algorithm’s potential to crack ECDSA or Schnorr signatures (which could expose private keys) and the Grover algorithm’s theoretical ability to undermine SHA-256’s security. The primary potential impact is on around 1.7 million BTC held in early-era P2PK addresses—roughly 8% of Bitcoin’s total supply—mitigating the risk of near-term systemic market disruption. The market’s oft-cited claim that ~25% of Bitcoin’s supply is at risk is significantly exaggerated; much of that risk has already been mitigated via address migration. Long-term attacks could theoretically become feasible within the next decade, but short-term attacks (like cracking a private key in the mempool within 10 minutes) remain fundamentally impractical in the foreseeable future and may even be decades off. The potential influx of funds into the market from private key leaks would be roughly 10,000 BTC; even if that happened, the impact on Bitcoin’s price would be limited. Holders can proactively move their funds to more secure address formats. The remaining potential targets are spread across ~34,000 addresses, averaging around 50 BTC apiece. Even assuming an extremely optimistic quantum breakthrough, a full-scale attack would still take several decades to execute.