"I think we're four years away from Bitcoin going away," David McAlvany, chief executive of the gold app Vaulted, said on the On The Margin podcast. "Within four years we have quantum computing, and that is the end of Bitcoin. You can solve all the math problems instantly." "I have no idea if it's four years from now, five years from now, or two months from now," he added. No machine that could do it exists in mid-2026. But the threat now carries a number. 'Attackers understood that before security teams' "What's a bit unfortunate about it is that attackers understood that before infrastructure teams and before security teams," Ido Sofer, founder of the key-management firm Sodot, said on the On The Margin podcast. "We're meeting every new attack vector first." Galaxy Digital estimated in March 2026 that roughly 7 million Bitcoin sit in addresses that have already exposed their public key on-chain, worth about $470 billion. Glassnode put it at 6.04 million, or 30.2% of supply. Both are estimates, not protocol counts, and Galaxy called the risk "real, but far from an existential crisis." The exposed coins are Satoshi-era addresses that reveal the raw public key, plus any address reused after its first spend. Exposure is not theft. It becomes theft only when a machine can reverse the math, and that machine does not exist yet. 'Bring your own locks' "When you’re on Bitcoin, when you're on Ethereum, when you're on Solana, right now, you're locked into whatever lock they permit you to use, which is just one kind," Yoon Auh, chief executive of BOLTS Technologies, said on the podcast. "When you see quantum advances, these locks can be broken, and that's what they're scared of." Those locks look more breakable every year. Google researcher Craig Gidney showed in