Google Study Reveals Quantum Computers Can Break Bitcoin with Under 500k Qubits

Google's Quantum AI research has brought attention to Bitcoin's potential vulnerability to quantum computers. In March 2026, Google published a paper demonstrating that breaking Bitcoin's cryptography requires fewer than 500,000 physical qubits, 20 times less than previous estimates.

This finding was led by Ryan Babbush and Hartmut Neven, with coauthors including Dan Boneh from Stanford and Justin Drake of the Ethereum Foundation. The team showed that breaking Bitcoin's elliptic curve problem requires approximately 20 times fewer qubits than prior models predicted.

Justin Drake estimated at least a 10% chance that a quantum computer could recover a Bitcoin private key by 2032 using current trajectories. Approximately $452 billion in Bitcoin sits in wallets with exposed public keys, including an estimated $70 billion believed to belong to Satoshi Nakamoto's original holdings.

Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 360 was merged in February 2026, introducing the Pay-to-Merkle-Root (P2MR) address format that hides public keys to reduce future quantum attack exposure without adding post-quantum signature algorithms.