The key point is that most of the potentially exposed bitcoin isn’t sitting in a handful of giant, juicy targets. It’s scattered across more than 32,000 separate wallets.

What to know:

A new CoinShares report argues that fears of an imminent quantum computing threat to bitcoin are overstated, with only a small portion of supply realistically at risk in a way that could move markets.

The firm estimates that while about 1.6 million BTC, or roughly 8% of supply, sits in older P2PK addresses, only around 10,200 BTC is concentrated enough that its theft could cause appreciable market disruption.

CoinShares says breaking bitcoin’s cryptography would require fault-tolerant quantum computers about 100,000 times more powerful than today’s, framing quantum risk as a long-term engineering challenge to be addressed via gradual adoption of post-quantum signatures rather than an immediate crisis.

A quantum attacker would have to crack those chunks one by one to steal them, instead of breaking into a single address and walking away with a market-moving haul. That makes the job slower, noisier, and less profitable, even if one assumes the attacker has unusually strong quantum hardware.

Quantum fears aren’t new for bitcoin, but they’ve been creeping back into market conversations as prices wobble and investors look for structural risks to blame.

In December, CoinDesk reported that most bitcoin developers view quantum computing as a distant, non-issue, arguing that machines capable of cracking bitcoin’s cryptography are unlikely to exist for decades.

Critics counter that the real problem is not the timeline, but the lack of visible preparation, especially as governments and major tech firms begin rolling out quantum-resistant systems.

Proposals such as BIP-360 aim to introduce new wallet formats that could allow users to migrate gradually, but the debate has highlighted a growing gap between developers and increasingly institutional capital that wants a clearer long-term plan.

View sources >> Here's why the quantum threat to Bitcoin may be smaller than people fear