BITCOIN

Quantum computing could crack bitcoin transactions in nine minutes

Tuesday, April 7, 2026 · from 4 podcasts

Bitcoin And Bitcoin Takeover Podcast Bankless Stacker News Live

Google research slashes quantum threat timeline, enabling attacks on live transactions in minutes.
Bitcoin’s governance paralysis poses a greater risk than the hardware itself.
Institutions may force a fork to burn Satoshi’s stash to save the wider market.

New estimates from Google and Caltech suggest the cryptographic bedrock of Bitcoin could shatter far sooner than expected. Nic Carter, speaking on Bankless, highlighted a chilling shift: the threat is no longer about looting dormant wallets, but executing a ‘live theft’ from the mempool. An attacker with a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could crack a private key and replace a victim’s transaction in as little as nine minutes.

Nic Carter, Bankless:
- This changes the threat from a long-range heist of dormant coins to a short-range execution of active users.
- You broadcast a spend; they broadcast a theft.
- This breaks the fundamental assumption that knowing a key equals owning the money.

This collapse of transaction finality would trigger a market panic long before a theoretical machine is even built. The research, covered across Stacker News Live and Bitcoin And, moved the goalposts, demonstrating that breaking elliptic curve cryptography requires an order of magnitude fewer qubits than previous models. The consensus window for a defensive upgrade is closing.

Bitcoin’s celebrated resistance to change is now its primary vulnerability. Carter warns its governance is a “peacetime” system, spectacularly unsuited for the “total mobilization” required to replace core cryptographic infrastructure. As noted on Bitcoin And, the ensuing civil war over what to do with 1.7 million vulnerable legacy coins - including Satoshi’s - could paralyze the network more effectively than any quantum computer.

If the community cannot coordinate, institutions will. Carter predicts major custodians like BlackRock and Coinbase, facing fiduciary duty, will dictate a canonical fork to burn the vulnerable “Satoshi coins” and prevent a market collapse. This would sacrifice the property rights of the legendary stash to preserve the value of the ETF-era supply.

Meanwhile, long-term technical solutions like Blockstream’s Simplicity, discussed on Bitcoin Takeover Podcast, are decades away from mainnet readiness. The immediate danger isn't just in the lab, but in the ledger - and in the human inability to agree on how to save it.

BTC Markets Protocol Adoption

Mentioned:Bitcoin Blockstream Simplicity Stacker News

Source Intelligence

What each podcast actually said

Bitcoin And | Bitcoin & Economic News

cAIveman Speak | Bitcoin News • Apr 7

The SEC's crypto safe harbor proposal, which would allow projects to launch without immediate registration, is now at the White House's OIRA for review before publication.
In February, Bithumb mistakenly distributed 620,000 Bitcoin to users during a promotional event but recovered 99.7% of the funds the same day.
Second's new Bitcoin wallet Bark is built on the Ark protocol and has raised $5.1 million from a private investor with a team of 11 people.
Bark implements an Ark-to-Lightning bridge, allowing users to pay Lightning invoices from an Ark balance without managing channels or liquidity providers.
Grayscale's head of research Zach Pandl argues Bitcoin's quantum threat is more social than technical, centered on community decisions about handling dormant coins in vulnerable addresses.
A Bitcoin Policy Institute study found 48.3% of leading AI models selected Bitcoin as their preferred currency in controlled experiments.
Tanero Research found autonomous agent activity on the Stacks layer-2 network doubled week over week, growing from 105 to 766 active agents transacting over 491,000 sats.

Also from this episode:

Stablecoins (1)

Polymarket is rolling out a completely rebuilt trading system and a new native stablecoin called Polymarket USD, which is backed one-to-one by USDC rather than directly by dollars.

Markets (1)

Intercontinental Exchange, parent of the NYSE, made a $600 million direct cash investment in Polymarket as part of a broader equity fundraising round last month.

Regulation (2)

SEC Chair Paul Atkins proposed a four-year startup exemption for crypto ventures to raise capital while providing investor protections, which critics argue opens the door to scams.
South Korea's Financial Services Commission now requires all crypto exchanges to conduct automated ledger-to-wallet reconciliation every five minutes and shift to monthly external audits.

AI & Tech (1)

OpenAI released a policy paper calling for a global shift in taxation and labor policy to prepare for AI dominance, which the host interprets as a push toward socialism.

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Bitcoin Takeover Podcast

S17 E17: Lukas Hozda on BIP110, Bitcoin & Rust • Apr 7

Blockstream's Simplicity is now live on the Liquid production network, marking a major milestone. Simplicity is a low-level, formalized programming language designed for consensus validators, not human programmers.
Andrew Poelstra describes Simplicity HL as the high-level language for developers, designed to compile down to Simplicity with a syntax explicitly modeled on Rust. The goal is to feel like writing Rust code for blockchain contracts.
Simplicity enables arbitrary computation and transaction introspection, which allows for covenants. This is a fundamental expansion beyond Bitcoin Script's current capabilities of signature checks, hash pre-images, and timelocks.
Poelstra argues Bitcoin Script is both inexpressive and full of unpredictable quirks, citing weird edge cases in numeric opcodes, timelock calculations, and the legacy of ad-hoc bug fixes from 2010 that crippled its original functionality.
A key advantage of Simplicity is its formal specification and multiple provably correct implementations. This contrasts with Bitcoin Script, where writing a new interpreter is culturally forbidden due to undefined edge-case behavior.
Poelstra sees Simplicity's primary short-term use in solving narrow technical problems Bitcoin faces today, like fee-bumping delegations or complex multi-signature policies, rather than immediately replicating Ethereum-style DeFi.
He states Simplicity is designed to retain Bitcoin's core fee model where transaction size is the primary cost. It uses a jetting system to optimize common operations like SHA-256, avoiding Ethereum's problem of wildly variable gas costs per opcode.
On drivechains, Poelstra remains unconvinced, citing the P+Epsilon attack and inherent incentive problems where the value secured could incentivize miners to attempt deep reorgs, creating systemic instability.
When asked about interesting altcoins, Poelstra names Monero and Zcash for privacy tech, Sia for its file storage model, and Grin for Mimblewimble. He distinguishes these from scams by their lack of ICOs and sincere technical goals.
The Starkware team has built a STARK verifier using Simplicity, demonstrating its capability for complex zero-knowledge proof verification directly on a blockchain.
Poelstra views Simplicity as a long-term direction for Bitcoin script extension, potentially a project for the 2030s. It could serve as a formal specification layer for proposing and testing new opcodes like OP_CAT before they are added to Bitcoin.

Protocol Adoption BTC Markets Custody

Bankless

Bitcoin Has 3 Years to Survive | Nic Carter on Bitcoin’s Quantum Vulnerability • Apr 6

Bitcoin's governance is spectacularly unsuited to the quantum threat, which requires total mobilization for core infrastructural change under an uncertain timeline.
The Google and Oratomic papers published improved resource estimates for breaking Bitcoin's ECDSA cryptography, indicating the threat is closer than previously thought. The hardware does not yet exist.
A short-range 'on-spend' attack could intercept a Bitcoin transaction in as little as nine minutes using the improved algorithms, forcing the entire network to be post-quantum before the computer is built.
The authors of the Google paper suggest a fast takeoff model for quantum computing, where significant prior notice before a cryptographically relevant quantum computer exists is unlikely.
Google has accelerated its internal post-quantum transition timeline to 2029, while the U.S. government targets 2030-2035 for critical functions.
Transitioning Bitcoin to post-quantum cryptography is complex, requiring consensus on a signature scheme, a coordinated migration of all addresses, and a decision on dormant coins.
Post-quantum signature schemes are much larger than current ones, requiring a likely uncontroversial block size increase to accommodate the 10x to 1000x increase in transaction data.
The Google paper estimates 6.9 million Bitcoin are vulnerable to long-range quantum attacks, with 2.3 million considered permanently unmovable Satoshi or lost coins.
Nic Carter predicts Bitcoin's largest custodians and exchanges will eventually demand a fork where the unmovable Satoshi coins are burned, establishing that as the canonical BTC.
Ethereum is seen as more proactive on the quantum threat, having a published roadmap and an advantage as it has not hyper-optimized around small signatures like some high-performance chains.

Also from this episode:

Regulation (1)

Carter's preferred solution uses salvage law, where a trusted entity recovers vulnerable coins and holds them in trust for their original owners, with a finder's fee, rather than protocol-level burning.

Protocol Custody ETFs

Stacker News Live

SNL #218: Where you sitting...Good Friday • Apr 6

Stacker News, a Bitcoin front page platform, features `txrush.com` and `truckyard.live` which visualize Bitcoin mempool transactions as highway traffic or spacecraft, pulling data from the mempool. Carl suggested these could be useful as phone widgets.
The Unboiled family, who live nomadically and attempt to transact predominantly in Bitcoin, tracks 'SATs inflation' based on their spending on essentials in South Africa. They reported a period of 'SATs deflation' where costs were lower by 11% for electricity, 8% for fuel, and 5% for milk.
Siru's Bitcoin data project investigated Foundry's 7-consecutive-block streak, which occurred alongside a two-block reorg. The analysis, using data from the BOK project and Wumbo's node archives, suggests consecutive blocks happen more frequently than expected due to block latency, where co-located miners receive block headers faster.
Bitprojects.io demonstrated that Bitcoin node count can be easily 'sybillable' by simulating over 3,000 nodes using minimal hardware. The project aimed to show that node count is an unreliable metric for social consensus or soft fork signaling, with its shutdown causing a 'huge uptick' in incoming connections for other nodes.
Recent quantum computing breakthroughs, including Caltech's advancements in quantum operations and Google's implementation of Shor's algorithm with an order of magnitude fewer qubits, do not fundamentally alter the timeline for breaking elliptic curve cryptography. Scott Aaronson, an independent expert, suggests they might slightly shorten the indeterminate timeline, which could still be 5-10 years or longer.
Supratic outlined several privacy attacks on Lightning, emphasizing that blinded paths improve privacy but are not a 'magic shield' against tracing. These attacks include CLTV correlation, graph analysis on small nodes, payment probing, introduction, and node visibility.

Also from this episode:

AI & Tech (4)

The New York Times is blocking the Internet Archive from archiving its articles, citing protection against AI scraping. Keon argues this strategy, while aiming for short-term subscriber growth, will harm the NYT's long-term relevance by excluding its content from AI training data and future search results.
OpenAI acquired the popular podcast network TBPN, with CEO Sam Altman stating it was due to liking the show and not for promotional purposes. Keon speculates the acquisition might instead aim to subtly shape tech narratives favorable to OpenAI, similar to the Bezos-Washington Post acquisition.
Japanese and US companies formed the Portsmouth Consortium under a strategic trade agreement to develop AI infrastructure and power generation in Piketon, Ohio. The project plans to invest $500 billion to build a data center with a 9.2 GW capacity, leading Blockchain Boo to predict potential government bailouts given the scale of the AI race.
Carl and Keon debate the implications of free and abundant intelligence, with Keon suggesting it will only shift humanity's bottlenecks rather than solving all problems. Carl argues that with intelligence addressed, humanity's focus would shift to virtues, love, and internal well-being, aspects that artificial intelligence cannot fulfill.

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