Breaking Bitcoin With Quantum Computing Would Need More Energy Than the Sun – So About That Existential Threat…

Quantum computing doomsayers keep sounding the alarm like it’s Y2K with extra steps. Supposedly, some future quantum über-machine will crack Bitcoin’s crypto like a walnut and send the whole network into digital oblivion. But here’s the plot twist: actual research says most of these claims are about as solid as a meme coin’s whitepaper—flashy, loud, and fundamentally broken under scrutiny. Turns out, physics has a sense of humor, and it’s currently roasting the quantum hype squad on loop.

Some of the most-cited “breakthroughs” in quantum computing rely on problems so simplified they might as well be cribbed from a math coloring book. When it comes to attacking Bitcoin? The energy demands are literally stellar—like, “power output of a small star” levels of absurd. That nugget comes courtesy of papers shared on X by Rodolfo Novak, a Bitcoin hardware hustler who clearly enjoys watching quantum panic dissolve under basic arithmetic.

Bitcoin’s fortress rests on two uncrackable (for now) math problems, and quantum computers theoretically poke at both—but in wildly different ways. Shor’s algorithm could, given enough qubits and a miracle, reverse-engineer private keys from public ones—basically turning your wallet into an open-air museum. Grover’s algorithm, meanwhile, offers a theoretical turbo boost to mining, letting quantum rigs brute-force SHA-256 faster than classical machines. But “theoretically” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here—like, “build a Dyson sphere just to run a single app” levels of theory.

The media, of course, treats these two threats like interchangeable plot devices in a sci-fi B-movie. In reality, they’re about as similar as a paper cut and a black hole—one sounds scary in headlines, the other actually matters when you account for, you know, reality.

Mining runs into a wall made of physics

A paper from Pierre-Luc Dallaire-Demers and the brain trust at BTQ Technologies dared to ask the forbidden question: Could a quantum computer actually out-mine Bitcoin using Grover’s algorithm? The stakes are real—mining secures the chain against 51% attacks, where a bad actor rewrites history like a vengeful screenwriter. But here’s the catch: turning theory into practice requires more energy than your average civilization can reasonably spare.

Running Grover against SHA-256 isn’t just inefficient—it’s cosmically impractical. Each computational step involves hundreds of thousands of fragile quantum operations, each needing its own entourage of error-correcting qubits just to stay coherent. And with Bitcoin spitting out new blocks every ten minutes, you’ve got a hard deadline—like trying to win a sprint while assembling a spaceship mid-stride.

At Bitcoin’s January 2025 difficulty, the authors estimate a quantum mining fleet would need around 10²³ qubits slurping up 10²⁵ watts—energy output that flirts with the brightness of a star. For context, that’s roughly 3% of the Sun’s total power. Meanwhile, the entire Bitcoin network today uses about 15 gigawatts. So yes, quantum mining dominance is possible—in the same way that winning the lottery every day for a year is possible. The odds are so low they might as well be written in invisible ink.

The quantum factoring records are mostly theater

Meanwhile, Peter Gutmann from the University of Auckland and Stephan Neuhaus of Zürcher Hochschule decided to fact-check two decades of quantum “progress” in breaking encryption. Their replication toolkit? A 1981 VIC-20, an abacus, and a dog named Scribble, trained to bark exactly three times on command. Spoiler: they replicated every “breakthrough” with ease.

The joke writes itself, but the point hits hard. Factoring large integers is the backbone of modern crypto, and Shor’s algorithm is the boogeyman that could one day slay it. But nearly every public “demonstration” so far has been a rigged game—like hosting a chess tournament and letting your opponent see your screen. Some teams picked numbers where prime factors were just a few digits apart, trivial for any basic algorithm. Others did the hard work on classical computers first, then handed the quantum machine a participation trophy disguised as a problem.

One high-profile case involved a Chinese team claiming progress on cracking RSA-2048 using a D-Wave machine. They published ten test numbers as proof. Gutmann and Neuhaus fed them into a VIC-20 emulator. Each solution popped out in about 16 seconds. Turns out the primes were hand-fed to be easily guessable—like hiding your password under the keyboard and calling it “security theater.”

Why does this keep happening? Because quantum factoring is a prestige game with a shortage of real wins. Publish or perish meets “please don’t ask how the sausage is made.”

What still deserves concern

Let’s be clear—neither paper is saying “quantum = no problem.” The real long-term risk isn’t mining, it’s wallets. Millions of bitcoins sit in old or reused addresses where public keys are already on-chain, just waiting for a future quantum machine to reverse the math and say “thanks, I’m here for the keys.” That’s the actual attack vector, not some galactic-scale mining rig.

A recent Google paper suggests the computational ceiling for such attacks could drop faster than a degen’s net worth during a liquidation cascade. They claim the Bitcoin blockchain’s encryption could fall in minutes—if you have the machine. But here’s the fine print: building it is currently impossible. Like, “we haven’t even invented half the parts” impossible. It’s less “imminent threat” and more “engineering fantasy with footnotes.”

Developers aren’t sleeping, though. Work is underway on fixes—reducing key exposure, rolling out quantum-resistant signatures, and baking resilience into the protocol. The future might be scary, but at least it’s not unprepared.

Markets, ever the cynics, are pricing this like a slow-burn drama. Traders give near-zero odds that Bitcoin will ditch its mining algorithm before 2027. But the probability of upgrades like BIP-360—focused on wallet-level quantum defense—lands around 40%. Not a bet the house on, but enough to keep the dev chat channels buzzing.

The quantum threat to Bitcoin is real. But building the machines to exploit it is bottlenecked by physics, engineering, and a suspicious number of rigged benchmarks. So until someone builds a quantum computer powered by literal starlight, maybe ease up on the doomsday tweets—your timeline will thank you.