Bitcoin Consortium Pledges $15M to Harden Network Against Quantum Threats
Nine major institutional players in Bitcoin have formed the Bitcoin Security Consortium to fund research and development aimed at protecting the network from quantum threats. The consortium, which includes BlackRock and Coinbase, has pledged a combined $15 million over three years to address the issue.
The threat of quantum computing is significant because it could potentially allow an attacker to derive private keys from public keys, effectively making it possible to steal Bitcoin holdings. Currently, around 34% of all Bitcoin in circulation, or approximately 6.5-7 million BTC, has a public key permanently recorded on-chain, making it vulnerable to quantum attacks.
The consortium's efforts are driven by the recent publication of a Google Quantum AI paper that estimated the hardware requirements for executing Shor's algorithm against Bitcoin's secp256k1 curve to be around 500,000 physical qubits, down from the previous estimate of 9 million. This reduction in required hardware scale has significant implications for the timeline of quantum attacks.
The consortium is focusing on developing a post-quantum security upgrade through two proposals: BIP-360 and BIP-361. BIP-360 introduces a new output type called Pay-to-Merkle-Root (P2MR) that commits only to the Merkle root of the script tree, reducing exposure to quantum attacks. BIP-361 proposes a phased, five-year timeline for holders of coins in legacy addresses to migrate to quantum-safe formats.
While some experts estimate that Bitcoin has approximately three to five years to complete a post-quantum security upgrade, others are more cautious, citing the complexity and resource-intensive nature of the task. Justin Drake, co-author of the Google paper, estimates at least a 10% probability of a quantum computer recovering a Bitcoin private key by 2032.