Why Satoshi's wallet has become the top target of quantum computers

The Bitcoin wallet containing approximately 1.1 million BTC belonging to Satoshi Nakamoto has long been regarded as the “lost treasure” of the crypto world. This estimated asset worth between 67 and 124 billion USD has remained dormant on the blockchain since 2009, with not a single on-chain transaction. However, for the cryptography and quantum physics community, it is not just a legend — but also a security risk worth tens of billions of USD.

The threat does not come from hackers or password leaks, but from a completely new computational model: quantum computers. As quantum technology progresses from the laboratory to operational prototypes, it could pose the risk of breaking current cryptographic systems — including the protection mechanisms of Satoshi's wallet, the Bitcoin network, and part of the global financial infrastructure.

The race to develop quantum computers and quantum-resistant cryptographic standards ( is currently one of the most important technological efforts.

Why Satoshi's first wallet is vulnerable to quantum attacks

Most modern Bitcoin wallets only reveal the public key when users transact. However, Satoshi's early wallets used the P2PK format, which caused the public key to always be displayed publicly on the blockchain.

Most BTC is currently stored in P2PKH or SegWit addresses, where the blockchain only stores the hash of the public key. The public key is only revealed when the user spends that amount of BTC.

In contrast, Satoshi's P2PK addresses directly record the public key on the blockchain. With classical computers, this does not affect security, but with quantum computers, publicly exposing the key is like revealing the detailed blueprint of a lock — something that could be “broken” using quantum algorithms.

How Shor's algorithm allows quantum computers to break Bitcoin

Bitcoin is based on ECDSA — a mechanism that is nearly irreversible by classical computers. Classical computers cannot typically deduce the private key from the public key due to the number of possibilities being 2^256 — greater than the number of atoms in the universe.

But quantum computers do not need to guess. They compute.

Shor's algorithm )1994( allows quantum computers to uncover the hidden mathematical structure in the discrete logarithm problem on elliptic curves. With enough stable qubits, a quantum machine can retrieve the exposed public key and compute the private key in just a few hours or days — thus signing transactions and seizing 1.1 million BTC from Satoshi.

Experts estimate that breaking ECDSA requires about 2,330 stable logical qubits. Due to current qubits being too noisy, a “fault-tolerant” machine may need more than 1 million physical qubits to achieve that number.

How far are we from Q-Day?

Q-Day is the point at which quantum computers are powerful enough to break current encryption systems. While it was previously thought that this would be 10–20 years away, many researchers now believe that this milestone is narrowing significantly.

Companies like Rigetti, Quantinuum, IonQ along with Google and IBM are announcing rapid progress. Rigetti aims to achieve a system of over 1,000 qubits by 2027. And that's just public research — not counting the secret programs of governments.

If a country achieves Q-Day first, they can possess the “master key” to unlock global financial and intelligence data.

Millions of Bitcoin are exposed to quantum attacks

According to the 2025 report from the Human Rights Foundation, approximately 6.51 million BTC are in addresses that could be vulnerable to quantum attacks. Among them:

• 1.72 million BTC belonging to early addresses are considered lost or unmovable — including 1.1 million BTC of Satoshi.

• 4.49 million BTC from P2PKH addresses have been “reused” by users, causing the public key to be exposed after spending.

Satoshi is not the only target; he is just the biggest prize.

If a malicious entity reaches Q-Day and seizes Satoshi's BTC, it would be direct evidence that Bitcoin has been compromised. This could cause market panic, mass withdrawals, and a crisis of confidence throughout the entire crypto ecosystem.

Many attack groups are now employing a “collect now, decrypt later” strategy — storing public keys and encrypted data in anticipation of a sufficiently powerful quantum computer in the future.

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How can Bitcoin become safe against quantum threats?

The solution is to transition to post-quantum algorithms )PQC(. NIST announced the first PQC standards in August 2024, with ML-DSA/CRYSTALS-Dilithium being the focus.

Many large systems have started to implement PQC. OpenSSH 10.0 has used post-quantum algorithms by default, and Cloudflare stated that most of their web traffic is protected by PQC.

With Bitcoin, a network upgrade is needed — likely a soft fork — to introduce the new “P2PQC” address format, allowing users to voluntarily move assets from vulnerable addresses to a more secure type, similar to how SegWit was implemented previously.

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