AI Lowers Quantum Attack Costs, Bitcoin's Post-Quantum Migration Window Narrows

According to Cryptopolitan, over 100 researchers used AI coding agents to reduce the quantum attack resource score for Bitcoin's secp256k1 elliptic curve point addition subroutine by 86.1% (from 10.75 billion to 1.496 billion). This optimization only targeted a single step within Shor's algorithm and did not crack any private keys or transfer funds; a full-scale attack still requires fault-tolerant quantum hardware that does not yet exist. However, each efficiency gain is compressing the time window for blockchains to complete their post-quantum migration. According to Glassnode data, approximately 6.04 million BTC (30.2% of the circulating supply) currently faces potential quantum risk due to publicly exposed on-chain public keys. Ethereum plans to achieve full quantum resistance before December 2029, while the Bitcoin community faces greater governance challenges, including how to handle approximately 1.7 million dormant coins held in P2PK addresses suspected to belong to Satoshi, which remains unresolved.