There are about five years left until commercial quantum computers will be able to crack the elliptic curve keys that secure Bitcoin wallets, University of Calgary scientist Pierre-Luc Dallaire-Demers told DLNews.

The expert implies ECDSA 256 encryption, which protects addresses and signs transactions using public and private key pairs.

“Breaking these keys is one of the simplest applications for large quantum computers,” he said.

ECDSA 256 is vulnerable to Shor’s algorithm, which allows for efficient factorization of large numbers into prime factors and can crack private keys of cryptocurrency wallets. This algorithm represents a significant breakthrough in quantum computing, as it solves the problem of factorization of numbers in polynomial time, while classical algorithms solve this problem in exponential time.

Another Bitcoin encryption algorithm, SHA-256, which allows miners to hash and add blocks to the network via Proof-of-Work, can be fixed by doubling the hash length, according to experts at digital asset firm Galaxy.

However, protecting against Shor’s algorithm requires fundamental changes to Bitcoin’s cryptography.

Satoshi’s Billions at Risk

The first to suffer from a quantum computer will be the wallets of early Bitcoin users, including Satoshi Nakamoto. They still use the early P2PK format. It completely reveals the public key, giving attackers time to perform a brute-force attack.

Modern addresses like P2PKH are more secure because they only publish the hash of the key.

In this regard, Ava Labs founder and CEO Emin Gün Sirer proposed freezing 1 million BTC of Satoshi Nakamoto.

Early Bitcoin users can avoid being hacked by transferring coins from old addresses to newly generated ones.

“If people still have coins in P2PK addresses, they should move their assets immediately,” Dallaire-Demers emphasized.

The threat is real

Concerns about the quantum threat were renewed in December, when Google Quantum AI unveiled its latest quantum chip, Willow. It completed a standard benchmark calculation in under five minutes. One of the fastest modern supercomputers, Frontier, takes 10 septillion years to do the same—a number significantly longer than the age of the universe.

“A quantum computer will hack Bitcoin if we don’t upgrade it. The threat is real,” said Charles Edwards, founder of the hedge fund Capriole Investments.

Recall that in October, Chinese scientists carried out the “world’s first effective attack” on a widely used encryption algorithm using a quantum computer.

Later, experts said that the threat of a quantum attack on cryptocurrencies was exaggerated.