IBM CEO Arvind Krishna's prediction that quantum computing will start contributing to the company's revenue and profit by 2028 or 2029 is sharpening an uncomfortable debate around Bitcoin's cryptographic defenses. While Krishna described quantum systems nearing a commercial breakthrough and projected $1 trillion in economic value by the late 2030s, parallel research has slashed the estimated qubits needed to break elliptic curve cryptography by roughly 20-fold—now below 500,000. This timeline convergence is fueling urgency among industry players.
According to a TL;DR report, more than 34% of Bitcoin’s supply sits in addresses with revealed public keys, representing about 6.8 million BTC (worth approximately $437 billion). The network still lacks an accepted migration route. Developers added BIP-360 to the proposal repository in February, while the broader BIP-361 draft remains disputed. Institutional preparation is accelerating: Galaxy Digital launched a $5 million Bitcoin Quantum Readiness Initiative on July 21, Coinbase formed an independent advisory board, and both joined the Bitcoin Security Consortium alongside BlackRock, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Strategy, with $15 million in pledges.
IBM’s commercial roadmap does not imply a machine capable of stealing Bitcoin will exist in 2028, but commercialization can accelerate hardware progress faster than network governance usually moves. The unresolved question is whether Bitcoin’s defenders can coordinate protections before quantum capability shifts from specialized demonstrations to practical threats against widely used public-key cryptography.
