[ Q-DAY CLOCK ]
last sync 2026-04-12 16:42:16Z
DAYS SINCE LAST MILESTONE
4
Bernstein: 3-5 year window to migrate Bitcoin to PQ signatures
ESTIMATED THREAT WINDOW
3–5 YRS
Bernstein research note, 8 April 2026 · 2026-04-09
POSTURE
ELEVATED
on-spend attacks now plausible within block time
2026-04-08 HIGH
Bernstein: 3-5 year window to migrate Bitcoin to PQ signatures
Wall Street research house Bernstein publishes a client note arguing the quantum threat to Bitcoin is real but manageable, with a 3-5 year window for the industry to upgrade to post-quantum cryptography. The note cites Google's March 2026 paper as the trigger for rewriting the timeline.
— Bernstein (via CoinDesk / Bitcoin Magazine)
2026-03-30 CRITICAL
Google Quantum AI: secp256k1 breakable with <500k physical qubits
Google Quantum AI publishes 'Securing Elliptic Curve Cryptocurrencies against Quantum Vulnerabilities' (arXiv:2603.28846). Tailored Shor's algorithm for 256-bit ECDLP now estimated at <1200 logical qubits and <90M Toffoli gates, compiling to fewer than 500,000 physical qubits under surface-code error correction. A roughly 20x reduction vs. prior estimates. First credible indication of on-spend attacks within Bitcoin block times.
— Babbush, Zalcman, Gidney et al. (Google / UC Berkeley / Stanford / Ethereum Foundation)
2026-03-19 MEDIUM
BIP-360 deployed on Bitcoin Quantum testnet v0.3.0
BTQ Technologies announces the first working implementation of BIP-360 Pay-to-Merkle-Root (P2MR) on the Bitcoin Quantum testnet. Full P2MR consensus, all five Dilithium opcodes enabled in tapscript, end-to-end CLI wallet tooling. Not adopted by Bitcoin mainnet — still a proposal under active testing.
— BTQ Technologies / Bitcoin Magazine
2024-08-13 MEDIUM
NIST finalizes first three post-quantum encryption standards
NIST publishes the first three finalized post-quantum standards: FIPS 203 (ML-KEM, lattice-based KEM), FIPS 204 (ML-DSA, lattice-based digital signatures), FIPS 205 (SLH-DSA, hash-based signatures). The PQC transition officially becomes a compliance issue, not a research project.
— NIST
2022-09-07 MEDIUM
NSA announces CNSA 2.0 with hard 2033 deadline
NSA publishes the Commercial National Security Algorithm Suite 2.0, mandating post-quantum algorithms (ML-KEM-1024, ML-DSA-87, AES-256, SHA-384/512) across US National Security Systems. Key deadlines: new NSS acquisitions CNSA-2.0 compliant by 1 Jan 2027; full compliance across NSS by 31 Dec 2031; final cutover 2033.
— NSA / CNSA 2.0
Insider Brief Actually, don’t stick a fork in Bitcoin. While quantum computing poses a known threat to Bitcoin, a new proposal suggests the network could defend itself without changing its core protocol.
XRP may be less exposed to quantum computer threats than bitcoin, experts say
When a user sends a message over a wireless network, the message does not travel as-is. It is encrypted, authenticated, encapsulated, and transformed as it descends the protocol stack from the application layer to the physical medium.
The rapid deployment of AI agents acting autonomously on behalf of human principals has outpaced the development of cryptographic protocols for establishing, bounding, and revoking human-AI trust relationships.
Maximal Extractable Value, or MEV, remains a structural threat to blockchain fairness because a block producer can often observe pending transactions and unilaterally decide their ordering or inclusion.
New research and industry timelines are accelerating efforts to replace cryptography that quantum computers could eventually break.
Post-Quantum Cryptography for the PHP Community
Ensuring ciphertext indistinguishability is fundamental to cryptographic security, but empirically validating this property in real implementations and hybrid settings presents practical challenges.
Towards Post-Quantum Cryptography in TLS (2019)
Bitcoin and quantum computing
Post-quantum migration in TLS 1.3 should not be understood as a flat substitution problem in which one signature algorithm is replaced by another and deployment cost is inferred directly from primitive-level benchmarks.
We present a layered and modular network architecture that combines Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) and Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) to provide scalable end-to-end security across long distance multi-hop, trusted-node quantum networks.
Post-quantum signature schemes such as ML-DSA-65 produce signatures of 3,309 bytes and public keys of 1,952 bytes over 50 times larger than classical Ed25519.
This paper studies how post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) security assumptions can be represented and communicated through a structured, layered framework that is useful for technical interpretation but does not replace formal cryptographic p
Quantum computer researchers: Bitcoin encryption breakable in a few years
Factoring is not a good benchmark to track Q-day
Solving the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem (ECDLP) is critical for evaluating the quantum security of widely deployed elliptic-curve cryptosystems.
Why full-stack post-quantum cryptography cannot wait
Reducing Shor's algorithm T-count via Z/6Z tensor network
Google Paper Warns of Quantum Computing Risk for Bitcoin
The impending arrival of cryptographically relevant quantum computers (CRQCs) threatens the security foundations of modern software: Shor's algorithm breaks RSA, ECDSA, ECDH, and Diffie-Hellman, while Grover's algorithm reduces the effectiv
Google warns quantum computing may break Bitcoin earlier than thought
Shor's algorithm is possible with as few as 10k reconfigurable atomic qubits
Algorithms & Theory
This whitepaper seeks to elucidate implications that the capabilities of developing quantum architectures have on blockchain vulnerabilities and mitigation strategies.
Quantum computers have the potential to perform computational tasks beyond the reach of classical machines.
The transition to a cloud-native 5G Service-Based Architecture (SBA) improves scalability but exposes control-plane signaling to emerging quantum threats, including Harvest-Now, Decrypt-Later (HNDL) attacks.
This paper considers two challenges faced by practical quantum networks: the bootstrapping of seedless Quantum Random Number Generators (QRNGs) and the resilient combination of Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) and Quantum Key Distribution (Q
Bitcoin already faces a quantum threat through Shor attacks on elliptic-curve signatures. This paper isolates the other component that public discussion often conflates with it: mining.
Google sets a timeline for post-quantum cryptography migration to 2029
With the rapid evolution of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), the boundaries and scale of the Internet are continuously expanding.
Deploying ML-DSA (FIPS 204) in threshold settings has remained an open problem: the scheme's inherently non-linear rounding step defeats the additive share techniques that underpin practical threshold schemes for elliptic-curve signatures s
Hamming Quasi-Cyclic (HQC) was chosen for the latest post-quantum cryptography standardization. A concatenated Reed-Muller (RM) and Reed-Solomon (RS) code is decoded during the HQC decryption.
Post-quantum cryptography currently rests on a small number of hardness assumptions, posing significant risks should any one of them be compromised.
The migration to post-quantum cryptography is urgent for Internet of Things devices with 10--20 year lifespans, yet no systematic benchmarks exist for the finalised NIST standards on the most constrained 32-bit processor class.
Quantum computing provides the feasible multi-layered security challenges to classical blockchain systems.
Post-Quantum Cryptography Beyond TLS: Remain Quantum Safe
I built CIFER, a distributed encryption + access-control system designed so that no component ever holds a complete decryption key at rest.<p>Core idea: each “secret” (per user or per dataset) has its own independent post-quantum keypair.
AI agents are making decisions that affect money, infrastructure, and users — but most systems rely on editable logs.<p>I built PiQrypt to explore whether an AI agent can have a cryptographically verifiable decision history.<p>Each event is
Quantum Byzantine Agreement (QBA), a cornerstone of quantum blockchain, offers inherent advantages in security and fault tolerance over classical protocols, guaranteed by the laws of quantum mechanics.
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