A new online tool, the Quantum Doomsday Clock is predicting that quantum computers will be capable of cracking Bitcoin’s (BTC) private keys in about two years.
Specifically, the tool has set March 8, 2028, as the critical date to watch. As of November 8, 2025, the clock shows a countdown of 2 years and 4 months remaining until a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) can execute Shor’s algorithm to break ECDSA secp256k1, the elliptic curve standard securing Bitcoin and most cryptocurrencies.
The project was developed by Dr. Richard Carback, a cryptography researcher and co-founder of the xx network, and Colton Dillion, a cryptocurrency entrepreneur, under Postquant Labs and Hadamard Gate Inc.
According to the model, approximately 1,673 logical qubits would be sufficient to derive Bitcoin private keys from exposed public keys within a practical timeframe, based on recent academic papers and public quantum hardware roadmaps from IBM (NYSE: IBM), Google, and others.
If realized, this would make Bitcoin addresses that have ever spent funds, revealing public keys, including legacy P2PK and reused P2PKH addresses, instantly vulnerable. Unspent Taproot (bc1p…) and segregated witness addresses would remain secure longer since only their hashes are public.
While some experts view the 2028 timeline as aggressive, major institutions including NIST and the Global Risk Institute place a credible quantum threat window between 2028 and 2035.
On the other hand, Google researcher Craig Gidney’s 2025 paper suggests that breaking RSA-2048 could require 20 times fewer resources than previously believed, compressing timelines to 2030-2035. Naoris Protocol CEO David Carvalho also warns of potential risks within five years, by 2030.
Meanwhile, the Global Risk Institute’s 2024 report, surveying 32 experts, suggested the threat may be closer than previously thought, estimating a 50% chance within 15 years (by 2039) but rising rapidly through the 2030s.
On the conservative side, Blockstream CEO Adam Back argued there’s no serious threat for at least two decades, though he acknowledged, as reported by Finbold, that future breakthroughs could force holders to migrate coins to quantum-resistant addresses.
Overall, concerns continue to grow amid major quantum computing advances. For instance, IBM plans to debut the world’s first fault-tolerant quantum computer, dubbed Quantum Starling, by 2029, following Google’s 105-qubit Willow chip milestone.
