Europol published two reports Wednesday urging the cryptocurrency industry and policymakers to begin preparing now for quantum computing threats. The reports identify wallet keys as the primary point of exposure, as a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could derive a private key from an exposed public key, allowing attackers to spend funds without authorization. Blockchain analytics firm Glassnode estimates that 6.04 million BTC, or 30.2% of the issued supply, has already had its public key exposed on-chain. A study cited by Europol estimates that making every unspent Bitcoin output quantum-safe would require at least 76 days of cumulative network downtime. IBM’s roadmap targets a fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029, while experts put the odds of a quantum machine breaking RSA-2048 encryption within the next decade at 28% to 49%.
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