Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet: There are issues with the view that approximately 70% of BTC is secure due to public key hash protection
2026-09-28 22:51:03
According to CoinMeta, Charles Guillemet, the chief technology officer of Ledger, stated that the view that only about 30% of BTC is at risk from quantum computing, while the remaining 70% is safe due to public key hashing protection, is problematic. Previous data from Glassnode showed that currently, about 30.2% of BTC have exposed their spending public keys on the blockchain. However, Guillemet pointed out that this only measures the static state on the blockchain; unexposed public keys may still exist in xpub, devices, psbt, logs, or backups, etc. Moreover, BTC noted that once a transaction is initiated, the public key will become visible before the transaction is confirmed. Guillemet cited research by Google Quantum AI which suggests that, assuming there are no high-speed quantum computers available at present, attacks on secp256k1 could be completed in about 9 minutes. Therefore, simply hiding public keys will not solve the quantum computing risks, and Bitcoin will ultimately need to migrate to post-quantum cryptography.
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