Quantum-Computing

Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the Quantum Computing Question

• whackur
• Blockchain
• July 5, 2026

On March 30, 2026, a joint paper from Google Quantum AI, the Ethereum Foundation, and Stanford shook up the crypto community. It estimated that the physical qubit count needed to recover a private key on secp256k1 (the elliptic curve behind Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures) had dropped nearly 20x from the previous best estimate. A threat that used to sound like “millions of qubits, decades away” now reads as “under 500,000, maybe within this decade.”