I have been watching how the Hamilton anxiety scale in the markets rises every time someone mentions quantum computing and Bitcoin. But I just reviewed an analysis from CoinShares that significantly changes the narrative circulating out there.

Most people talk about that between 20% and 50% of Bitcoin could be at risk. Sounds terrifying, right? The problem is that CoinShares points out that this confuses theoretical exposure with what could actually be stolen at scale. These are very different numbers.

Here’s the interesting part: approximately 1.6 million BTC, or about 8% of the total supply, are in inherited P2PK addresses where public keys are visible on the chain. That is theoretically vulnerable. But when you look at the numbers that matter, the situation changes. Only about 10,200 BTC are concentrated enough for theft to cause a real disturbance in the market.

The rest is distributed across more than 32,000 separate fragments, each averaging 50 BTC. A quantum attacker would have to decrypt each fragment one by one. It’s slow, noisy, and frankly not very profitable even with exceptional quantum hardware. It’s not like accessing a giant address and walking away with loot that moves the prices.

Now, on the actual feasibility: CoinShares estimates that breaking Bitcoin’s cryptography would require fault-tolerant quantum computers roughly 100,000 times more powerful than the largest machines that exist today. Charles Guillemet from Ledger explained it well: Google Willow has 105 qubits, but breaking keys would require millions. That puts us at least a decade ahead.

That said, it’s not something to ignore. CoinShares advocates for a gradual transition to post-quantum signatures, which is more realistic than waiting for an emergency solution. It’s a predictable engineering challenge, not an imminent crisis. The debate you see on social media about this reflects that Hamilton anxiety scale that exists in institutional markets, but the numbers suggest the risk is much further away than it seems.