People may have forgotten who Nic Carter, co-founder of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Castle Island Ventures, is. He actually started systematically defining Bitcoin as a "digital asset" from a VC perspective as early as 2017, and was a crypto advocate who gave great expectations for programmable finance in the early stages of smart contract development.
This person has recently become very concerned about quantum computer attacks. He published a lengthy article on the X platform, stating that quantum computing's ability to crack Bitcoin's keys has been downgraded from a "theoretical" problem to an "engineering challenge." He believes that all sectors should seriously address this "future problem" of Bitcoin.
The quantum threat has shifted from physical theory to engineering time problems.
In his article, Nic Carter cites research by Scott Aaronson, a leading authority on quantum computing, which states that a quantum computer executing Shor's algorithm, with sufficient qubits and entanglement time, can reverse-engineer the ECDSA/secp256k1 private key. (This part is also unclear to the author and can only be quoted directly.)
He emphasized:
Quantum physics is no longer science fiction; it's explicitly on the timeline.
This contrasts with Bitcoin Core developer Adam Back's prediction of "waiting another 10–20 years".
1.7 million exposed UTXOs become on-chain bounties
On-chain data shows that early P2PK block rewards and frequently reused addresses totaled approximately 1.7 million bitcoins, and their public keys have been fully disclosed.
If quantum algorithms are the first to lock down these unattended UTXOs, it would be equivalent to acquiring approximately $718 billion worth of liquid tokens in one go. Nic Carter described these "zombie addresses" as free bounties lying around in the quantum era, and if they were stolen and dumped, the market impact could be more severe than the bankruptcy of any single exchange.
Freeze or let it run its course?
The Bitcoin development community has proposed several soft fork drafts involving "post-quantum" signatures and new Opcodes, but the real controversy lies in how to handle the older coins that cannot migrate on their own. The community discussion is currently splitting into two camps:
- Passive waiting: Maintain the status quo and let the market bear the risks itself; if the hackers succeed, the Bitcoin supply will remain nominally unchanged, but trust and price may be destroyed.
- Proactive freezing: This involves marking and freezing high-risk UTXOs via soft forks, and even considering destruction. While this may prevent a sell-off, it undermines the fundamental principle that "no one's assets should be decided by others."
Strategy CEO Michael Saylor once described the freeze plan as "supply reduction," but most developers remain extremely skeptical of using consensus to strip private key control, as this would undermine Bitcoin's decentralized philosophy.
Should Bitcoin holders start worrying about quantum attacks? Optimists are still saying it's okay, only an "engineering problem" remains, but it's unknown how long that problem will take to solve. And when quantum computing emerges, Bitcoin might not be the first to suffer. Let the big capital worry about that.
