Project Eleven warns Bitcoin faces quantum threat by 2030 A new report estimates 6.9 million BTC are vulnerable to quantum attacks, and the window for migration may be closing faster than anyone expected. Here’s a thought experiment that should keep Bitcoin holders up at night: what happens when a machine can crack the cryptography protecting your wallet in minutes instead of millennia? According to quantum computing research firm Project Eleven, that scenario isn’t science fiction anymore. It’s a planning horizon. The firm’s latest report argues that quantum computers could breach the encryption underpinning Bitcoin by 2030, putting roughly 6.9 million BTC at direct risk. At current prices, that’s approximately $560 billion worth of Bitcoin sitting in addresses with exposed public keys, essentially waiting for a sufficiently powerful quantum computer to come along and pick the lock. The vulnerability, explained The 6.9 million BTC figure comes from older address formats that expose public keys directly on the blockchain. Newer address types, like those starting with “bc1,” hash the public key before recording it on-chain, adding a layer of protection. But millions of coins, including some believed to belong to Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto, sit in legacy addresses where the public key is visible to anyone who cares to look. Project Eleven’s report estimates a greater than 50% likelihood that quantum computers will be capable of breaking these protections by 2033. The 2030 date represents a more aggressive but plausible timeline, depending on the pace of hardware breakthroughs. Why “gradual” isn’t how this works One of the more unsettling arguments in the report is that quantum computing progress won’t arrive like a slowly rising tide. It’s more likely to come in explosive bursts. Recent research has validated cracking a 15-bit elliptic curve key using quantum methods. That sounds impressive until you