Nobel: Bitcoin quantum threat is real and closer than it looks, says Nobel physicist

Former Google quantum hardware leader and winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics, Dr. John Martinis, warns that breaking encryption will be among the earliest uses of quantum computing What to know : John M. Martinis, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist who helped build Google’s quantum computers, warns that Bitcoin could be among the earliest real-world targets of quantum attacks. A recent Google paper he endorses shows how a sufficiently advanced quantum computer could derive a bitcoin private key from its public key in minutes, exploiting the brief window when a transaction’s public key is exposed. While Martinis believes building such powerful quantum machines may take five to ten years and remains a major engineering challenge, he says the bitcoin community must start planning now for quantum-resistant upgrades despite the network’s slow, decentralized governance.