THE REALITY BEHIND SHOR'S ALGORITHM

I've been looking into Shor's Algorithm, and I gotta say, it's still a serious threat on paper. It tackles the curve discrete logarithm problem, which means it can potentially figure out private keys from public ones, especially in those old vulnerable setups like reused P2PKH, P2PK, or even Taproot transactions. This could endanger a ton of BTC right now, with estimates showing it could be over 6 million BTC at risk from those "harvest now, decrypt later" scenarios. Just imagine how much that is when you think about its value in dollars today. So yeah, Shor's algorithm is definitely something to watch out for.

How many documented addresses have been shown to be cracked? I have yet to see any convincing evidence of addresses cracked but maybe you have some good evidence.

Yeah, what you stated it's already known and acknowledged for long time. As reminder, Bitcoin does not use encryption cryptography. None. AFAIK you need quantum computer (with sufficient qubits and very low/zero error rate) to try get private key from public key

That’s correct. Bitcoin doesn’t scramble data the way encryption does but it does reveal public keys when UTXOs are spent. Attackers who are harvesting those public keys now might try to derive the relevant private keys later once they have the tools to do so. They keep hope that with powerful quantum computers running Shor’s algorithm they will eventually be able to achieve this.

You misplaced the two script types, should be "older P2PK" unspent txn outputs which aren't addresses and "reused P2PKH" addresses. And please provide the specifics to make it more interesting. (references, technical details, etc.) Else, this is more of a "Bitcoin Discussion" topic rather than "Technical Discussion".

Hello, I work with this and we are studying Shor for Bitcoin breakages. Although Shor seems fantastic, current quantum computers don't reach tens of qubits and are extremely susceptible to errors. We did some tests on Azure Quantum and weren't even able to implement some algorithms because both SECPK256 and PBKDF require millions of qubits to perform all the necessary entanglements. The main risk for Bitcoin in the next decade will continue to be Pollard Rho applied to known public keys and the leakage of half or more of its seed, which will allow brute-force attacks in a timely manner by highly specialized FPGAs/ASICs (I have work with Verilog in my portfolio). I will post the study soon. Regards

How so? Most bitcoin are not sitting on weakly generated addresses / public keys. Most bitcoin "unlocked" this way are either because the wallet software had poor security on seed / private key generation (which is no longer the case, as most reputable software are secure), or deliberately generated with lower bits, to allow testers break those keys using Pollard Rho. The quantum threat is at least a threat.

Individual attackers won't be able to afford the number of qubits required by the quantum processing unit to crack an eliptic curve, however, it's not an existing threat, Shor's algorithm is an anticipated threat, which nobody knows when the needed qubits would be completely assembled. Few years back the whole quantum computing theory was discarded as impossible, what brought back the panicking?