ARK Invest Quantifies Quantum Risk to Bitcoin's Supply

The crypto industry is facing a growing concern over the risk of quantum attacks on Bitcoin, with a recent white paper by ARK Invest providing new insights into this threat. The report estimates that around 6.9 million coins (35% of the supply) are vulnerable due to exposed public keys, but notes that this is still a long-term engineering problem rather than an imminent crisis.

The risk arises from the fact that most Bitcoin held today has its public key visible on-chain, making it theoretically possible for a sufficiently powerful quantum computer to derive a private key. However, the report emphasizes that current quantum systems are far below the error-correction capabilities needed to execute such an attack reliably.