Nobel Prize-winning physicist warns that Bitcoin’s quantum vulnerability window is nearing

Odaily Planet Daily reports that John Martinis, former head of quantum hardware at Google and 2025 Nobel Prize laureate in Physics, warned that Bitcoin could be among the first real-world targets of quantum computing attacks. He noted that recent Google research indicates advanced quantum computers could derive Bitcoin private keys within minutes, significantly undermining the computational security barriers the network currently relies on. Since Bitcoin depends on elliptic curve cryptography and features slow, decentralized upgrades, addressing the quantum threat is more challenging than in traditional financial systems. The public key exposure window during Bitcoin transaction broadcasting could be exploited by quantum computers to intercept funds before transaction confirmation. Martinis emphasized that while building such quantum computers remains an extremely challenging engineering task, the community must not become complacent and should plan for quantum-resistant upgrades as soon as possible, with the threat expected to gradually emerge within the next 5 to 10 years. (CoinDesk)