Is quantum Bitcoin hacking here?
Bitcoin was built on the principle that once funds are secured by a private key, only the holder can access them. But what if that assumption no longer holds?
In what was reportedly a now-deleted post on X, former Wall Street trader Josh Mandell alleged that quantum computers are being used to siphon Bitcoin (BTC) from long-dormant wallets — especially those of owners presumed inactive or deceased.
According to him, a “large player” has found a way to extract BTC directly from these wallets without going through the open market, leaving blockchain analysts as the only means of detection.
If true, the implications would be profound: Such activity would undermine the very foundation of Bitcoin’s security and ownership model. But what does the onchain evidence actually show? And can it be demonstrated that the technology needed to achieve this even exists today?
This article unpacks Mandell’s claims, expert reactions, the current state of quantum computing and more.
Did you know? Over 2.3 million-3.7 million BTC are estimated to be lost forever due to forgotten private keys or inactive wallets.
What Josh Mandell claimed
Mandell alleges that old, inactive Bitcoin wallets are being quietly drained using quantum computing. He contends that a major actor is accumulating BTC not via exchanges, but by accessing the private keys of wallets whose owners are unlikely to be aware or respond.
Key points of his claim:
- Targeted wallets: Long-dormant accounts, often assumed abandoned or tied to deceased owners.
- Off-market accumulation: Coins are extracted without creating price disruptions or large sell orders.
- Detection risk: Only blockchain forensics could reveal suspicious movement patterns, yet Mandell admits no clear proof exists.
- Quantum leap: He implies that quantum technology has reached a point where it can crack Bitcoin’s cryptographic defenses in ways classical computing cannot.
Crucially, Mandell offers no hard evidence. His position is that the scenario is technically possible — and may already be unfolding — but this remains unverified.
Did you know? Scientists at Oxford have achieved an error rate of just 0.000015% (one error in 6.7 million operations) for certain quantum operations — a new world-record fidelity.
Technical feasibility: Can quantum tech do this now?
Mandell’s claim hinges on quantum computers being advanced enough to break the public-key cryptography that secures Bitcoin wallets. Assessing this requires examining what such an attack involves and how close current technology is to making it possible.
Bitcoin relies on the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA), specifically the secp256k1 curve.
When coins are spent, a wallet’s public key becomes visible onchain. If an attacker could derive the private key from that public key, they could seize any remaining funds.
Shor’s algorithm, a quantum algorithm, could, in theory, perform this exponentially faster than classical methods — but only with quantum hardware far beyond today’s capabilities.
In practice, however, several technical hurdles remain:
- Logical qubits and error correction: Physical qubits are unstable. To build fault-tolerant logical qubits, error correction multiplies the hardware requirements.
- Scale of qubits needed: Estimates suggest hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of physical qubits would be required to break a single secp256k1 key once error-correction overhead is included.
- Gate fidelity and error rates: Operations must be nearly flawless. Current chips, like Google’s 105-qubit Willow, are just reaching thresholds where error correction begins to help, but they remain far from full fault-tolerance.
- Expert projections: Most researchers put a realistic ECDSA-breaking quantum computer at least a decade away and longer without breakthroughs in coherence times, scaling and error suppression.
Mandell implies this stage has already been reached — that someone has hardware powerful and discreet enough to crack private keys from dormant wallets without detection.
But, based on public knowledge, today’s devices are nowhere near the required scale or stability.
Did you know? One Bitcoin wallet tied to the Mt. Gox hack still sits dormant and holds 79,957 BTC, making up about 0.4% of Bitcoin’s total supply.
Pushback from the Bitcoin and crypto communities
The response from the Bitcoin community has been swift and skeptical.
Harry Beckwith, founder of Hot Pixel Group, stated, “There is literally no chance this is currently happening.” Matthew Pines of the Bitcoin Policy Institute called the theory “false” and criticized its lack of evidence.
Their…
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