"Deep-sea" Bitcoin diving with Quantum Computers

There's long been a worry in the cryptocurrency world about network integrity in the face of quantum computing developments.

The biggest fear is generally the dreaded "51% attack" where a rogue actor monopolizes over 50% of the network's computing power in order to "steer" blockchain completion to a different goal (i.e.; one which favors the attacker.) There are a number of ways to attempt this, and I won't get in to the gory details of mempools and UTXOs...

This attack, even with quantum computers, is still highly unlikely, as an attacker only has about 10 minutes to do so...before democratic actions on the network would likely attempt to identify and remove the rogue culprit.

There is a different attack vector which is more plausible, though still unlikely. This attack is more of an "offline" activity and isn't limited to a small timeframe.


One could potentially attempt to brute-force "old" P2PKH wallets sort of like searching for sunken treasure. The Elliptic Curve cryptography used for public and private keys are one of the only really viable attack points for (future) quantum computers.

Not all wallets would necessarily be susceptible to this brute-force attack, but ones which have flaunted their public key (at least once) could be at risk.

But imagine some of the lost wallets with thousands of BTC (and also BCH) sitting there like sunken ships waiting for discovery. :)




At some point, there will be lost wallets with literally trillions of dollars on them... Wouldn't a collaboration of governments be at least a little bit interested in trying to collectively crack some of the more vulnerable ones?

Last Edited by AkashicRecord® on 02/23/2021 09:52 PM