Bitcoin and Quantum Computing: Nic Carter Explains the Threat and What To Do Next - CoinDesk

Nic Carter says quantum computing is the biggest long-term risk to bitcoin’s core cryptography and urges developers to treat it with urgency, not as science fiction. In an essay published Monday, the Coin Metrics cofounder explains in plain language how bitcoin’s keys work and why quantum matters. Carter writes that users start with a secret number (a private key) and derive a public key with elliptic-curve math on the secp256k1 curve, the basis for ECDSA and Schnorr signatures. He describes that transformation as deliberately one way: easy to compute forward, infeasible to reverse under classical assumptions. “Bitcoin’s entire cryptographic premise is ‘there exists a one-way function that’s easy to compute in one direction, and infeasible to invert,’” he writes. To build intuition, Carter likens the system to a giant number scrambler. Going from private to public is efficient for honest users, he says, because they can use a shortcut known as “double and add” to reach a result quickly. He adds there is no comparable shortcut in the opposite direction. For non-specialists, he offers a deck-shuffle analogy: you can repeat the same sequence of shuffles to reach an identical final order, but an observer cannot look at the shuffled deck and infer how many shuffles were used. Carter argues the concern is that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could erode that asymmetry by making progress on the discrete logarithm problem that underpins bitcoin’s signatures. In his telling, routine network behavior also raises exposure: when coins are spent, a public key is revealed on-chain. He says that is safe today because converting a revealed public key back to the private key is not practical, but quantum advances could change that calculus, especially if addresses are reused and more keys remain visible for longer. He is not calling for panic. Carter says the point is to plan. Near term, he highlights basic hygiene such as avoiding address reuse so public keys are not exposed longer than necessary. Longer term, he urges the community to prioritize post-quantum signature schemes and realistic migration paths, framing them as engineering work rather than a distant thought experiment. The essay is the first in a short series; Carter said on X that parts II and III will arrive in the next couple of weeks and will cover “post-quantum break scenarios.” Pudgy Penguins: A New Blueprint for Tokenized Culture Pudgy Penguins is building a multi-vertical consumer IP platform — combining phygital products, games, NFTs and PENGU to monetize culture at scale. Pudgy Penguins is emerging as one of the strongest NFT-native brands of this cycle, shifting from speculative “digital luxury goods” into a multi-vertical consumer IP platform. Its strategy is to acquire users through mainstream channels first; toys, retail partnerships and viral media, then onboard them into Web3 through games, NFTs and the PENGU token. The ecosystem now spans phygital products (> $13M retail sales and >1M units sold), games and experiences (Pudgy Party surpassed 500k downloads in two weeks), and a widely distributed token (airdropped to 6M+ wallets). While the market is currently pricing Pudgy at a premium relative to traditional IP peers, sustained success depends on execution across retail expansion, gaming adoption and deeper token utility. MegaETH mainnet to go live Feb. 9 in major test of ‘real-time’ Ethereum scaling This follows its October 2025 $450 million token sale that was heavily oversubscribed. Disclosure & Polices: CoinDesk is an award-winning media outlet that covers the cryptocurrency industry. Its journalists abide by a strict set of editorial policies. 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