Recently, I came across an analysis report from CoinShares that provides an in-depth interpretation of the widely circulated Bitcoin quantum threat theory. The conclusion is quite interesting—this risk isn't as urgent as many think.

You may have heard claims that 20% to 50% of Bitcoin could eventually face threats from quantum technology. But CoinShares points out that this figure confuses theoretical risk with the actual coins that could be attacked. Their detailed analysis shows that the real concern should be Bitcoin stored in older P2PK addresses—these addresses' public keys are permanently exposed on the chain. If quantum computers can reverse-engineer the public key, these coins would indeed be more vulnerable.

On the data side, about 1.6 million Bitcoins (8% of the total supply) are stored in these addresses. That sounds like a lot, but there's a key detail—only about 10,200 BTC could cause significant market impact. The rest are scattered across over 32,000 UTXOs, averaging around 50 coins each. What does this mean? Attackers would need to crack these individual wallets block by block to steal the assets; they can't just attack once to gain a large market share. Even with super-powerful quantum hardware, this process would be slow, inefficient, and barely profitable.

More importantly, CoinShares believes that breaking Bitcoin's encryption requires a fault-tolerant quantum system with computational power 100,000 times greater than the current maximum machines. Ledger's CTO Charles Guillemet noted in the report that Google's Willow is a 105-qubit device, but cracking Bitcoin keys would require millions of qubits. This means the threat is at least ten years away from becoming a real concern.

Therefore, CoinShares's stance is clear—rather than treating quantum risk as an immediate crisis, it should be seen as an engineering challenge that can be anticipated. They support the industry gradually transitioning to post-quantum signature technologies, allowing Bitcoin to absorb this risk over time.

However, this topic has indeed sparked disagreements among developers and institutional investors. Critics argue that the real issue isn't the timeline but the lack of concrete preparations. Proposals like BIP-360 aim to introduce new wallet formats for gradual migration, but this reflects an expanding gap between developers and institutional capital seeking clearer long-term plans.

Overall, quantum risk isn't a new topic for Bitcoin, but recent price fluctuations and investor risk attribution have brought it back into focus. Those interested can check out the related market performance and discussions on Gate.