Crypto: Willy Woo Warns Quantum Risk Is Eroding Bitcoin’s Edge Over Gold
Onchain analyst Willy Woo says markets are starting to price in the quantum threat, putting 4 million “lost” BTC and a 12‑year valuation uptrend versus gold into question.
Onchain analyst and early Bitcoin adopter Willy Woo is warning that increasing attention to quantum computing risk 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 narrative.
He estimated there was 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.
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.
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Still, any move to freeze these coins would upend long‑standing norms concerning 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 about “8 years of enterprise accumulation” would become spendable again.
Source: CoinTelegraph
