According to a recent report published by Bloomberg, the long-dormant wallets belonging to Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of the original cryptocurrency, could be in the crosshairs of future hackers.
It was previously assumed that Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin wallets would never be moved or sold.
The mysterious Bitcoin creator handed over the project in 2011 and disappeared.
Due to lost private keys and the deaths of early adopters, an estimated 2.3 million coins are considered to be permanently dormant.
If quantum hackers successfully break into these dormant wallets, the economic impact on the crypto market would be catastrophic.
In 2024, the German government seized and liquidated 50,000 BTC. That relatively small sell-off alone caused a massive sell-off. If quantum thieves were to suddenly dump over two million recovered tokens onto the open market, the supply shock would likely cause an unprecedented price collapse.
Satoshi Nakamoto owns approximately 1.1 million BTC (roughly 5% of the total maximum supply).
Remaining challenges
The Bitcoin network will eventually need an upgrade to become "quantum-proof." However, deciding exactly how to handle the dormant coins is extremely challenging. Some advocate doing nothing, while others propose burning the coins.
Creating a Bitcoin fork is notoriously difficult and highly controversial, given how decentralized the network is.
The recent anxiety in the cryptocurrency community stems from a highly publicized whitepaper released at the end of March 2026 by Google Quantum AI. Researchers discovered new algorithm optimizations that reduce the required hardware by a factor of 20.
It seems like the entire blockchain industry must migrate to Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC).
Dan Burgin
U.Today Editorial Team
Vladislav Sopov
