Google's 2029 Quantum Deadline Threatens ₱28.26 trillion ($470 billion) in Bitcoin

Google published a formal timeline for transitioning to post-quantum cryptography with a hard deadline of 2029, warning that quantum computers will pose a threat to current encryption and digital signatures.

The timeline arrives as quantum computing power has grown 10x over the last five years and researchers discovered breaking RSA encryption requires 20 times fewer quantum resources than previously thought. Google VP of Security Engineering Heather Adkins and Google Senior Cryptography Engineer Sophie Schmieg said the company has a responsibility to lead by example with an ambitious timeline, adding that quantum frontiers may be closer than they appear.

Project Eleven estimates 6.8 million Bitcoin worth ₱28.26 trillion ($470 billion) currently sit in address types theoretically vulnerable to quantum attacks once machines reach sufficient power. Ark Invest and Unchained peg the vulnerable supply higher at 35% of all Bitcoin. The new threat model from Iceberg Quantum suggests only 100,000 qubits could crack Bitcoin, down from the 20 million qubit estimate that dominated earlier analyses.

Bitcoin uses elliptic curve cryptography that Shor's algorithm could break if a quantum computer derives a private key from a public key in practical timeframe. The risk extends to harvest now, decrypt later attacks where adversaries steal encrypted data today for decryption once quantum computers arrive. Bitcoin developers recently merged BIP 360 into the formal improvement repository, introducing a quantum-resistant Pay-to-Merkle-Root address format, though migrating user funds could take 5 to 10 years.

Casa co-founder Jameson Lopp said the industry remains several orders of magnitude away from a cryptographically relevant quantum computer. He told Decrypt that if quantum innovation continues at a fairly linear rate, the threat won't materialize for over a decade or possibly several decades. Caltech trapped over 6,000 atomic qubits at once in 2025, marking a turning point in the quantum computing field alongside error correction breakthroughs the same year.

Google already deployed post-quantum digital signature protection using the NIST-standardized ML-DSA algorithm in Android 17, while IBM's 2029 target for fault-tolerant quantum systems matches Google's cryptography transition deadline.