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Sleeping beauty bitcoin wallets wake up after 14 years to the tune of $2 billion
(www.morningstar.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
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Its possible some country or corporation has built a secret quantum computer with enough qbits to run Shor's Algorithm. But if its a secret, we wouldn't know about it.
Eventually all the "lost" wallets will bet cracked by quantum computers.
I hear this a lot but I don’t put any confidence behind it. This argument suggests that one day we’ll be able to brute force into lost wallets when we can break the encryption. Who knows how far in the future that will be.
But if I recall correctly, Bitcoin’s protocol is consensus driven. If there is an imminent threat of quantum computing, the developers could just improve the code base to resist it. Or fork the protocol to one that is resistant (Bitcoin 2). Then it’s up to 51% of the Bitcoin node operators to adopt the protocol. As soon as 51% of them upgrades, you immediately stop the threat.
I think the only reason Bitcoin is around is for two reasons: speculation, or the persons that actually believe it’s decentralised hard money free from control. I’d like to believe that there are a ton of people out there that run the BTC nodes to keep it decentralised. If there is an update that will resist quantum computing, I’m sure they’ll be eager to immediately upgrade their nodes and secure the network and those wallets. At least that’s how I believe it works, it’s been years since I first began researching it.
As an aside, Bitcoin isn’t for me because I hate the environment impact. I hope one day it will become green, because it’s never going to go away. But I don’t blame the people that believe in it. In a world where the rich own everything and control the rules, these people are trying to opt out I guess - use a form of money that can’t be easily controlled or censored. Granted it’s all based on speculation, and whenever we run out of Bitcoin is probably when the system will become useless. Spending is discouraged when you run out of coins, so I don’t know how the Bitcoiners defend that argument. So definitely not for me.
Edit, on mobile so fixed some typos and clarified the 51% attack.
This is correct for a given transaction, but there's no consensus needed to open a Bitcoin wallet. That is usually just a private key in an encrypted envelope.
Got it, thanks for that distinction. It’s been years since I last looked into this stuff. Makes sense for a dormant wallet.
If a wallet is not dormant in this scenario, then active users could just migrate their wallet to another wallet and then they’ll be good to go.
Nobody knows if a quantum computer is actually possible to build, but in theory, if a quantum computer is built, RSA would be exponentially easier to crack.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UrdExQW0cs
At that point though the whole concept of bitcoins will be moot. If quantum computers can crack lost wallets they can also crack active wallets, and at that point there's no reason to buy bitcoin at all, which will tank the value of bitcoin making it mostly not worthwhile to crack wallets.
So if we get to that point, there will be one proof-of-concept wallet crack, and instantly after that bitcoin will cease to exist in any relevant fashion.
There's a window between the proof of concept success and Bitcoin being worthless where the attacker could attack any wallet and collect/sell while people figure out what is happening. The only question at that point is do you attack and sell aggressively to beat the clock, or do you slowly and carefully attack to try and stay under the radar? If one person has the ability to break crypto, then it follows that other people working towards it only have to align the same pieces before the window shuts.
Crypto is and always has been a scam.
Considering that you'd need a paradigm-breaking revolutionary and incredibly expensive device to do so, I'd find it hard to believe that you could stay under the radar with it.
What I'd expect to happen is that some big corporation and/or university manages to build a quantum computer capable of breaking 256bit encryption, and quite instantly after the announcement bitcoin will tank into nothingness or will change the algorithm to something quantum-computer safe. Well before some shady actor will get their hands on a quantum computer to crack wallets.