Crypto Exchanges
By Evie Vavasseur
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The Abandoned Coin Problem. That last part is where things get genuinely messy. A normal software upgrade is hard enough to…
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Build the Tech First, Argue Later. The council's clearest recommendation is basically: separate the engineering from the politics.
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Quantum computing isn't here yet. But Coinbase thinks the crypto industry needs to start worrying about it now — seriously, not theoretically.
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The company's Quantum Advisory Council put out a report dated June 11 warning that roughly 7 million Bitcoin could be compromised by future quantum computing advances.
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Around 1.7 million of those at-risk Bitcoin sit in legacy Pay-to-Public-Key addresses — the old P2PK format from Bitcoin's earliest days. Some of those coins are early-mined.
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That last part is where things get genuinely messy. A normal software upgrade is hard enough to coordinate across a decentralized network.
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The council laid out a range of options for handling this, and none of them are clean. On one end: set a hard deadline for migration, after which unmigrated funds get frozen or…
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On the other end: do nothing. Just let the situation ride and hope quantum computing doesn't advance fast enough to matter.
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The middle-ground ideas are more interesting. Rate-limiting transactions from older, vulnerable addresses would slow any attacker down without destroying anyone's funds.
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Read also: Bitcoin Mining Faces 10.3% Difficulty Drop as Miner Margins Collapse
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The council's clearest recommendation is basically: separate the engineering from the politics. Don't wait for the governance debate to resolve before starting technical work.
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That's a sensible split. Crypto governance debates are notoriously slow and contentious. Tying technical progress to their resolution would mean nothing gets built until everyone…
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It's worth being clear about the timeline, or rather the lack of one. The report doesn't claim quantum attacks on Bitcoin are imminent. No existing machine can do it.
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The 7 million Bitcoin figure is the number that'll get attention, and it should. At current prices, that's an enormous amount of value sitting in addresses that could be cracked…
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Related: Coinbase Launches AI Agents With SEC-Registered Advisor for Self-Directed Traders
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