Crypto: What Btq’s Bitcoin Quantum Testnet Reveals About “old Btc” Risk

How BTQ’s Bitcoin-like quantum testnet highlights where post-quantum risks may emerge and why mitigation is an engineering challenge.

Bitcoin’s quantum risk centers on exposed public keys and signature security.

BTQ’s testnet explores post-quantum signatures in a Bitcoin-like environment.

Post-quantum signatures significantly increase transaction size and block space demands.

“Old BTC risk” is concentrated in legacy output types and address reuse patterns.

BTQ Technologies said it had launched a Bitcoin Quantum testnet on Jan. 12, 2026, a Bitcoin-like network designed to trial post-quantum signatures without touching Bitcoin mainnet governance.

The idea is that BTQ would replace Bitcoin’s current signature scheme with ML-DSA, the module-lattice signature standard formalized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 204, for post-quantum security assumptions.

It is worth remembering that in most Bitcoin quantum-threat models, the key precondition is public-key exposure. If a public key is already visible onchain, a sufficiently capable future quantum computer could, in theory, attempt to recover the corresponding private key offline.

Did you know? BTQ Technologies is a research-focused firm working on post-quantum cryptography and blockchain security. Its Bitcoin Quantum testnet is designed to study how quantum-resistant signatures behave in a Bitcoin-like system.

Most Bitcoin quantum-risk discussions focus on digital signatures, not on Bitcoin’s coin supply or the idea that a quantum computer could magically guess random wallets.

Source: CoinTelegraph