Grayscale, a digital asset management firm, has emphasized the need to accelerate efforts to make public blockchains resistant to quantum computing in a recent research note, arguing that while the technical solutions already exist, the main hurdle lies in achieving consensus among decentralized communities to implement these solutions. This follows a week of intense industry response to a paper by Google Quantum AI, which found that breaking bitcoin's elliptic curve cryptography would require fewer than 500,000 physical qubits and could be executed in approximately nine minutes. The note highlights four key takeaways from the Google research, including the unpredictable nature of progress toward a cryptographically relevant quantum computer, the maturity of post-quantum cryptography, and the varying levels of quantum risk across different blockchains. Grayscale notes that from a purely engineering perspective, bitcoin has a lower quantum risk than other chains due to its UTXO model, proof-of-work consensus, and lack of native smart contracts.
However, the firm identifies the roughly 6.9 million BTC in wallets with exposed public keys as a significant challenge, including an estimated 1 million coins believed to belong to Satoshi Nakamoto. The options for addressing this issue include burning the coins, taking no action, or deliberately slowing their release. Grayscale notes that the bitcoin community has a history of contentious debates over protocol changes, which could hinder efforts to achieve quantum resistance.