Quantus, American Fortress, Intmax, Keystone, Midnight Foundation, Postquant Labs, Abelian, The Vault and Hacken launched the Quantum Alliance in Lisbon on October 15, built around an estimate that roughly 6.04 to 6.4 million BTC, close to a third of supply, sit at addresses whose public keys are already visible on chain. About 1.1 million BTC associated with Satoshi Nakamoto falls inside that figure. The exposure is a consequence of how spending works: some transactions reveal a public key, and it stays on the ledger permanently. No existing computer can derive the private key from it, and no quantum computer capable of running Shor's algorithm at the required scale exists either, so nothing here is spendable by an attacker today. The disagreement is entirely about when. The Quantum Doom Clock, built by Postquant Labs co-founders, points to March 2028 as an early possible window on a model assuming about 856,000 physical qubits are needed; other researchers put the real risk in the 2030s. Google Quantum AI's reported Willow result, cutting errors by a factor of 40 and reaching 99.99% accuracy on specialized quantum states, is the kind of datapoint that moves those estimates. The Alliance is not building a chain. It intends to publish standards and migration guidelines across four areas, moving existing funds to safer cryptography, evaluating privacy technology, protecting wallets and making security tools work across chains, modeled on the Internet Engineering Task Force. Quantus chief executive Christopher Smith expects "post-quantum cryptography" to eventually just be called cryptography.
October 17, 2026
Nine Firms Form a Quantum Alliance Over 6.4 Million Exposed Bitcoin
Original reporting: news.bitcoin.com ↗