A third of Bitcoin’s public keys have been sitting in plain sight on the blockchain for a long time.
Glassnode’s latest data, dated November 10: the public keys for 7.12 million $BTC —35.4% of the issued supply—are already visible, a record high in this dataset. The figure was 30.2% in May and 31.2% in October, up five percentage points in six months. Independent on-chain tracker ChainQuery puts it at roughly the same level, around 35.6%.
The exposure comes in two parts:
1. Address reuse accounts for 25.8%, including 11.6% held by exchanges;
2. Around 1.71 million coins are in old-style P2PK outputs, many believed to belong to early addresses from the Satoshi era. About 222,000 coins in Taproot addresses are also structurally exposed.
To be clear: this does not mean the coins have been stolen. A visible public key does not mean the private key has been compromised, and no quantum computer today can calculate Bitcoin’s private keys. Google’s estimate in March was that breaking Bitcoin’s signatures would take fewer than 500,000 physical quantum bits; existing machines are still several orders of magnitude away.
The real problem lies elsewhere: post-quantum migration proposals such as BIP-360 and BIP-361 are still drafts, with no mandatory migration timeline. The solution proposed by a Glassnode co-founder is actually quite straightforward: move coins from reused addresses to new ones, and that portion of the exposure disappears.
This whale’s take: the quantum threat isn’t a black swan arriving tomorrow; it’s a gray rhino growing larger over time. The 35.4% figure itself isn’t frightening. What’s frightening is that it keeps rising, while migration doesn’t even have a date. When the time to migrate really comes, who moves first, and who pays the fees and slippage, will be what kicks off the biggest arguments. In the short term, it won’t sway the market; in the long term, it’s a question Bitcoin must answer.
Glassnode’s latest data, dated November 10: the public keys for 7.12 million $BTC —35.4% of the issued supply—are already visible, a record high in this dataset. The figure was 30.2% in May and 31.2% in October, up five percentage points in six months. Independent on-chain tracker ChainQuery puts it at roughly the same level, around 35.6%.
The exposure comes in two parts:
1. Address reuse accounts for 25.8%, including 11.6% held by exchanges;
2. Around 1.71 million coins are in old-style P2PK outputs, many believed to belong to early addresses from the Satoshi era. About 222,000 coins in Taproot addresses are also structurally exposed.
To be clear: this does not mean the coins have been stolen. A visible public key does not mean the private key has been compromised, and no quantum computer today can calculate Bitcoin’s private keys. Google’s estimate in March was that breaking Bitcoin’s signatures would take fewer than 500,000 physical quantum bits; existing machines are still several orders of magnitude away.
The real problem lies elsewhere: post-quantum migration proposals such as BIP-360 and BIP-361 are still drafts, with no mandatory migration timeline. The solution proposed by a Glassnode co-founder is actually quite straightforward: move coins from reused addresses to new ones, and that portion of the exposure disappears.
This whale’s take: the quantum threat isn’t a black swan arriving tomorrow; it’s a gray rhino growing larger over time. The 35.4% figure itself isn’t frightening. What’s frightening is that it keeps rising, while migration doesn’t even have a date. When the time to migrate really comes, who moves first, and who pays the fees and slippage, will be what kicks off the biggest arguments. In the short term, it won’t sway the market; in the long term, it’s a question Bitcoin must answer.
