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February 24, 2026, 08:45:58 PM |
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Been thinking about this after the recent quantum computing headlines.
Every time the topic comes up people say the same thing:
“it’s decades away”, “Bitcoin will upgrade”, “not a real threat”.
But what if the danger isn’t public research?
Tech breakthroughs don’t always appear in a press release first. Sometimes they appear quietly — and only later the world understands what just happened.
Let’s imagine a scenario.
Someone (not necessarily a government, could be a small lab, private group, or even a crazy well-funded individual) manages to run Shor’s algorithm on secp256k1 keys before the tech becomes public knowledge.
They don’t publish it.
They don’t announce it.
They just start sweeping old exposed public keys.
From the outside it would just look like very strange transactions.
No warning, no time to migrate coins, no consensus discussion beforehand.
By the time the community agrees on a fork, the attacker already moved early coins and disappeared.
People always say: “network will upgrade”.
But upgrade happens after awareness.
And awareness might happen after the first damage.
So the question isn’t “can Bitcoin adapt?”
It’s whether adaptation can happen before the first real break.
Do you think quantum risk requires public scientific progress first…
or could the first sign actually be coins moving?
I’m honestly not sure anymore.
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