Onchain analyst and early Bitcoin adopter Willy Woo is warning that growing attention to quantum computing risks is starting to weigh on Bitcoin’s long-term valuation case against gold.
Woo argued in a Monday X post that markets had begun to price in the risk of a future “Q‑Day” breakthrough — shorthand for the moment when a powerful enough quantum computer exists to break today’s public key cryptography.
Roughly 4 million “lost” Bitcoin (BTC) — coins whose private keys are presumed gone — could be dragged back into play, Woo argued, if a powerful quantum computer could derive private keys from exposed public keys, undermining part of Bitcoin’s core scarcity narratives.
He estimated only about a 25% chance that the network would agree to freeze those coins via a hard fork, one of the most contentious issues in Bitcoin governance today.
Q‑day risk and “lost” coins
According to blockchain researchers, the 4 million exposed coins represent around 25%-30% of the Bitcoin supply and are held in addresses whose public keys are already visible onchain, making them among the first at risk in a quantum attack scenario.
Related: Institutions may get ‘fed up’ and fire Bitcoin devs over quantum: VC
Yet any move to freeze these coins would upend long‑standing norms around fungibility, immutability and property rights.
Freezing the coins could provoke deep splits between those prioritizing backward‑compatible fixes (upgrades that preserve existing rules and coins without invalidating past transactions or requiring a contentious hard fork), and those willing to rewrite rules to protect early balances.
With a 75% likelihood of the coins remaining untouched, investors should assume, Woo said, a non‑trivial probability that an amount of BTC equivalent to roughly “8 years of enterprise accumulation” becomes spendable again.
It’s a prospect that is already being priced in as a structural discount on BTC’s valuation versus gold for the next five to 15 years, Woo argued, meaning that Bitcoin’s long‑term tendency to gain purchasing power when measured in ounces of gold is no longer in play.
Bitcoin’s post‑quantum migration path
Many core developers and cryptographers stress that Bitcoin does not face an imminent “doomsday” situation and has time to adapt.
The emerging roadmap for a post‑quantum migration is not a single emergency hard fork, they argue, but a phased process, eventually steering the network toward new address formats and key management practices over a multi‑year transition.
Even if quantum did arrive sooner than expected and the coins were recirculated, other Bitcoiners, such as Human Rights Foundation chief strategy officer Alex Gladstein, argue that it is unlikely they would be dumped onto the market.
Gladstein sees a more likely scenario where the coins are accumulated by a nation-state rather than immediately sold.
Related: Why Luke Gromen is fading Bitcoin while staying bullish on debasement
Quantum risk goes mainstream in macro
Still, Woo’s warning lands in a market where Bitcoin is trading almost 50% off its all-time high, and quantum has already moved from a niche concern to a mainstream risk factor in institutional portfolios.
In January, Jefferies’ longtime “Greed & Fear” strategist Christopher Wood cut Bitcoin from his flagship model portfolio and rotated the position into gold, explicitly citing the possibility that “cryptographically relevant” quantum machines could weaken Bitcoin’s store of value case for pension‑style investors.
Magazine: Kevin O’Leary says quantum attacking Bitcoin would be a waste of time
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