Quantum Alliance forms as 6.4 million bitcoin have exposed public keys

Nine crypto companies unveiled the Quantum Alliance on Thursday to draft security standards for bitcoin, Ethereum and other blockchain networks.

CoinDesk reported the launch on Friday, along with the group's estimate that 6.4 million bitcoin, 30.2% of supply, have public keys already exposed. The Alliance says no existing quantum computer is powerful enough to reach those coins. The count tallies keys already visible, not coins currently stealable. A future machine could reverse-engineer a publicly visible key to recover the secret key behind it and move the funds, according to the group.

Richard Carback, chief technology officer at Postquant Labs, named 2028 as a realistic date for a machine able to break today's cryptography, according to CoinDesk. Bryn Bennett, chief revenue officer at The Vault, said nobody knows the date. Recent research has reduced estimates of the computing power needed to attack bitcoin and Ethereum, but no existing machine can break either, and predictions about when one might arrive remain disputed.

"Nobody knows the date, but the estimates keep falling, and the risk is one we can already plan for," Bennett said. "The question for custodians isn't whether the date is 2028 or 2035; it's whether you can migrate in time if it arrives early."

Carback would rather see vulnerable coins moved than frozen, per CoinDesk. Bennett said: "A custodian protects its clients' assets, not abandoned ones." He added: "Freezing coins is a governance decision for the Bitcoin network, not for the industry." He said any freeze would trade quantum risk for a precedent on property rights and neutrality.

The best-known candidate for that treatment is Satoshi Nakamoto's estimated 1.1 million bitcoin. Christopher Smith, chief executive of the quantum-resistant layer-1 blockchain Quantus, told CoinDesk that whoever builds the first cryptographically relevant quantum computer would most likely take coins exposed this way, "probably with the blessing of whichever national government," adding, "Hopefully it's a government that likes bitcoin." CoinDesk notes that Binance founder Changpeng Zhao has suggested freezing Satoshi's coins, and that the argument over the holdings has run for some time.

On Oct. 8, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake urged large holders to rotate to fresh addresses, saying AI models could break wallet signatures "in months, not years." CoinDesk noted no practical attack of that kind has been demonstrated.