On-chain reports indicate that approximately 6.7 million Bitcoins are currently sitting in quantum-vulnerable addresses. These tokens have not moved in years, and some have not moved in over a decade. It is also believed that a portion of these coins belong to Satoshi Nakamoto.
Currently, these coins are the most valuable target in the history of financial crimes.
Bitcoin exposure is not fixed
new Google Quantum AI whitepaperpublished on March 30, 2026, charts the exact scale of Quantitative weakness of Bitcoin For the first time.
The research identifies 100,000 Bitcoin addresses that are vulnerable to so-called passive attacks, meaning that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could extract their private keys without the owner ever initiating a transaction.
In total, these addresses contain approximately 6.7 million Bitcoins.
Resource estimates and mitigations
Why are old Bitcoin addresses the most vulnerable?
The most exposed currencies are those locked in public key payment scripts From the early Bitcoin mining era, the so-called Satoshi era of 2009 and 2010. These scripts store the public key directly on the blockchain, and it is permanently visible to anyone.
A quantum computer equipped with Shor’s algorithm can use this public key to derive the corresponding private key and exhaust the address.
At around rank 6,000, a concentration of 50 BTC addresses appears, each holding only one early mining reward, many of which have been untouched since Bitcoin’s early years.
“Progress on quantum from Bitcoin core developers is important, because there are parts of the Bitcoin community — whether they should be or not — who are concerned about quantum and want to see it taken seriously and addressed. As more information comes out and people see it being worked on, that will be positive.” Matt Hogan saidChief Investment Officer at Bitwise, BeInCrypto Expert Board.
A problem that cannot be corrected
Unlike active wallets, dormant addresses cannot be upgraded. They cannot move to post-quantum cryptography. They represent a fixed, permanently visible target that will become more dangerous as quantum hardware advances.
Google researchers estimate that approximately 1.7 million bitcoins are locked in P2PK scripts, and that the total supply exposed to quantum vulnerabilities across all types of scripts could reach 6.9 million bitcoins when address reuse is taken into account.
Google’s research argues that the community and regulators will soon face an unprecedented question: What happens to these coins when a quantum computer can simply take them?
The options being discussed range from destroying vulnerable coins at the protocol level to legal frameworks for regulated recovery: a concept the paper calls digital rescue. There are no easy answers, but the window for preparedness is closing.
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