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Fundstrat cofounder Tom Lee issued a troubling prediction during a recent live appearance, saying that quantum computers could crack Bitcoin as early as 2028–2029. Citing Google research, Lee claimed that modern computing technologies could render its existing protection obsolete, while the crypto community still lacks a unified rescue plan.
At the same time, he believes the Ethereum and Solana ecosystems are significantly better protected against this risk.
However, behind Tom Lee's dramatic statement lies an important nuance that was quickly explained by Hashcash creator and prominent Bitcoin cypherpunk Adam Back, who directly called out the technical inaccuracy, noting that BTC does not use encryption to process transactions in the first place.
Coin ownership is protected by digital signatures, specifically ECDSA, while users' seed phrases are secured by an enormous level of entropy that a quantum computer cannot simply brute-force.
How quantum computers could steal a third of Bitcoin
Bitcoin's real vulnerability to Shor's algorithm looks different and affects a specific target. The quantum clock is ticking only for 30%–35% of the total supply — roughly 7 million BTC sitting dormant on old legacy addresses or wallets whose addresses have been reused.
The key feature of these addresses is that their public keys have already been exposed on the blockchain. From those public keys, a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could theoretically calculate the corresponding private keys and steal the coins.
As of today, cryptographically relevant quantum computers capable of carrying out such an attack do not yet exist, meaning the threat remains purely theoretical. Bitcoin developers have been testing post-quantum signature algorithms for years and are expected to upgrade the network long before the threat becomes critical.
Bitcoin could transition to new cryptographic rails through a hard fork without major difficulty, but the owners of those 7 million "old" coins — including lost wallets and the roughly one million BTC attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto — are unlikely to wake up and move their assets to quantum-safe addresses.
The network would therefore have to either freeze roughly one-third of all existing Bitcoin through the controversial BIP-361 proposal or leave those coins exposed to the first quantum hackers.
U.Today Editorial Team
Dan Burgin
