Someone just broke the same encryption Bitcoin uses on a public quantum computer in 45 minutes Yesterday an Italian researcher named Giancarlo Lelli broke a 15 bit elliptic curve key in 45 minutes on a publicly accessible quantum computer It's the same math that secures every Bitcoin wallet, every Ethereum address and around $2.5 TRILLION in digital assets He used around 70 qubits on cloud hardware, no national lab, no special equipment and won 1 BTC for it The estimate of qubits needed to break Bitcoin's full key has dropped from 13 million in 2022 to under 500,000 weeks ago, then days later another study cut it 50x lower at 10,000 That's a 1,300x reduction since 2022, with most of the drop in the last six months Right now 6.9 MILLION BTC, around $520 billion, sit in addresses with public keys already exposed on chain That includes Satoshi's 1.1 million BTC, permanently visible and impossible to migrate because he's not coming back to move them BlackRock tripled the quantum risk disclosure in its $64 billion Bitcoin ETF prospectus, warning quantum computing could result in "losses to Shareholders" A Federal Reserve working paper called "harvest now, decrypt later" an active threat in September 2025, meaning state actors are already collecting public keys today to crack them when the hardware catches up Quantum has been a future problem for 15 years Yesterday the future arrived
