Bitcoin quantum threat timeline estimated within 10 years; community consensus proves challenging

Huo Xing Finance reports that on May 28, Scroll co-founder Sandy Peng wrote that the quantum computing threat to Bitcoin is not fundamentally a physical challenge, but a governance coordination problem. According to a white paper released by Google Quantum AI in March this year, breaking Bitcoin’s secp256k1 elliptic curve using an optimized Shor’s algorithm requires only about 1,200 logical qubits—nearly 20 times fewer than estimates from five years ago. IonQ’s official roadmap plans to reach 1,600 logical qubits by 2028, while IBM expects to launch its 2,000-logical-qubit Blue Jay system by 2033. This means the timeline for the threat is now roughly clear—“about ten years, possibly even less.” Attacks will unfold in waves, with the most vulnerable being early P2PK addresses, whose public keys are permanently exposed on-chain—including over a million bitcoins mined by Satoshi Nakamoto early on, which cannot be moved or secured due to lost private keys. Additionally, “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks may already be underway: intelligence agencies need not wait for quantum computers to be built—they merely need to store encrypted data for future decryption. Once quantum computers mature, unconfirmed transactions in the mempool will also face real-time replacement attacks within their ten-minute confirmation window. Although NIST released post-quantum cryptographic standards in 2024, migration carries a high cost—simulations show network throughput could drop by 52–57%, transaction fees could rise two to threefold, and storage requirements would expand significantly. This is a “defensive downgrade”: costs are paid immediately, while benefits remain abstract and distant in the future. Achieving consensus on such a move is extremely difficult for the Bitcoin community, which has already spent nearly two years debating the SegWit upgrade. In contrast, Vitalik has published Ethereum’s quantum contingency roadmap, allowing individual accounts to autonomously switch to post-quantum signatures without requiring a network-wide vote. Sandy Peng warns that Bitcoin will not go to zero, but its survival path is narrower than optimists believe—the window for quantum threat overlaps almost exactly with the 10–15 years needed for the Bitcoin community to reach consensus. Early Bitcoin holders are advised to check their address formats and migrate promptly; institutional investors should incorporate a “post-quantum migration roadmap” into their due diligence frameworks.