Stanford cryptographer Dan Boneh warns that quantum computers could break the elliptic-curve cryptography protecting Bitcoin and Ethereum sooner than anticipated. A paper co-authored with Ethereum researcher Justin Drake revises downward the number of logical qubits required to solve the secp256k1 discrete logarithm problem to roughly 1,200 to 1,450, down from several thousand previously estimated. An estimated 6.9 million BTC, whose public keys are already exposed on the network, are vulnerable to such an attack. Boneh advocates migrating to hash-based signatures like SLH-DSA (SPHINCS+) while cautioning against rushing the transition, as hasty implementation could introduce catastrophic bugs.
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