Fresh academic work is pushing back against some of the louder claims surrounding quantum computers and Bitcoin, arguing that one feared route of attack — using a quantum machine to dominate mining — remains so physically demanding that it would require energy on an astronomical scale. A separate paper has cast doubt on headline-grabbing “quantum factoring breakthroughs”, arguing with deliberate sarcasm that many such claims can be reproduced with primitive classical hardware and even a dog, underscoring how far the field still is from breaking real-world cryptography.
The distinction matters because public debate around Bitcoin and quantum computing often merges two different risks. One is mining: whether a quantum computer using Grover’s algorithm could gain a decisive edge in solving the proof-of-work puzzle faster than classical rivals. The other is cryptographic key theft: whether Shor’s algorithm could one day crack the elliptic-curve signatures protecting wallets and transactions. The new “energy of a star” study addresses the first problem, not the second, and concludes that once idealised query counts are translated into fault-tolerant machines, error correction, hardware overhead and electricity demand, the economics become forbidding.
That paper, by Pierre-Luc Dallaire-Demers, models what it would take for a quantum miner to attack Bitcoin under realistic physical constraints. It finds that even under favourable settings, a superconducting quantum fleet would need about 100 million physical qubits and about 10,000 megawatts of power — already comparable to a large national grid. When the analysis is tightened to Bitcoin’s actual mainnet difficulty, the requirement balloons to roughly 10^23 qubits and 10^25 watts, which the author describes as approaching Kardashev Type II territory, associated with civilisation-scale access to stellar energy. In plain terms, the paper argues that practical quantum mining collapses under the burden of engineering and energy before it can become a meaningful consensus threat.
That does not mean Bitcoin is immune to quantum disruption. Another line of research has sharpened concern around signature security rather than mining. A March 2026 paper involving Google researcher Ryan Babbush and others says Shor’s algorithm could be run with far fewer resources than many earlier estimates suggested, publishing compiled circuits for attacking the 256-bit elliptic-curve discrete logarithm problem that underpins many cryptocurrency systems. A related arXiv paper says Shor’s algorithm may be possible with as few as 10,000 physical qubits under some assumptions, although runtime and architecture still matter enormously. Nature, covering the broader implications, said the new analyses suggest quantum computers could threaten common security systems and cryptocurrencies before the decade is out.
That is why the second new intervention has drawn attention well beyond cryptocurrency circles. The paper highlighted in reporting this week, by Peter Gutmann and Stephan Neuhaus, uses humour to make a serious point: many celebrated demonstrations of quantum factoring progress have relied on heavy classical pre-processing, carefully chosen examples or unrealistic assumptions, making them far less impressive than headlines imply. The critique was summed up in a characteristically sharp line cited in coverage: today’s code-cracking claims can be replicated with a VIC-20 home computer from 1981, an abacus and a dog. The register’s account of the paper said the authors were challenging the tendency to oversell incremental or highly conditional quantum results as if they were direct threats to deployed cryptographic systems.
For Bitcoin developers, investors and policymakers, the combined message is more nuanced than either complacency or panic. The mining layer appears to have a substantial buffer against quantum takeover because proof-of-work at Bitcoin scale is not simply a mathematical race; it is a contest constrained by hardware fabrication, fault tolerance, cooling, energy supply and timing under Nakamoto consensus. By contrast, exposed public keys and older address formats remain part of a longer-term security debate because a sufficiently capable quantum computer could attack signatures directly, regardless of mining economics.
That split is already shaping industry responses. Analysts quoted by CoinDesk and market participants such as Grayscale and Bernstein have argued that Bitcoin’s quantum challenge is likely to be governed through protocol upgrades, wallet migration and incentives for users to move funds to quantum-resistant protections well before a machine powerful enough to threaten the network appears. Google’s own research updates on error correction show progress in stabilising logical qubits, but they also underline how early the industry still is relative to the scale needed for large fault-tolerant systems.
Also published on Medium.
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