Bitcoin's BIP-360 Quantum-Resistant Upgrade Merged in February; Google Study Shows 500,000-Qubit Attack Threshold

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According to Bitcoin developers, BIP-360 was merged into Bitcoin's code repository in February 2026, introducing quantum-resistant bc1z addresses via a pay-to-merkle-root approach. Concurrently, Google's Quantum AI team published research showing Bitcoin's elliptic-curve cryptography could theoretically be broken with fewer than 500,000 physical qubits, reducing previous estimates by roughly 20-fold. BIP-360 does not yet activate consensus changes on mainnet, establishing quantum resistance on Bitcoin's technical roadmap for the first time. Over $700 billion in Bitcoin sits in legacy wallets with exposed public keys, representing the primary attack surface. Analysts estimate a full migration to quantum-resistant cryptography could take five to seven years.
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