Bitcoin’s quantum countdown has already begun, Naoris CEO says

A veteran hacker warns how quantum computing can silently dismantle the encryption that protects bitcoin and blockchains. A hacker who has become a defender warns that most of the industry is sleeping with Crypto’s existential threat: quantum computing.

David Carvalho, CEO of the Post-Quantum Infrastructure Company, Nonis Protocol, began to invade 13 years old, experimenting with spam emails to attract job offers and gain attention from employers.

Eventually, this curiosity changed to the formal cyber safety work, where he used the same skills to defend systems instead of probing them. Today, it builds quantum resilient systems for decentralized networks and states that the cryptographic foundations of blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum are dangerously outdated.

“The cryptography behind almost every chain is as weak as the rest of the world’s encryption,” Carvalho told Cointelegraph. “Quantum is coming for everything, as meteors came to the dinosaurs.”

Although Bitcoin and other blockchain developers often say there is still plenty of time to adapt, the window may be closing quickly. Efforts to implement quantum resistant signatures are underway, but Carvalho said it is far from being widespread or treated with the urgency that threats require.

Quantum threats by gathering bitcoin data today
For years, the idea that quantum computers could threaten Bitcoin seemed science fiction. But real -world developments suggest that the threat is changing from theory to initial practice.

Governments and giants of technology are already preparing for what is known as the “harvesting model now, decrypting later”. US federal agencies, such as the National Institute of Standard and Technology, have warned since 2022 on the urgency of adopting quantum resistant algorithms.

, while a White House memorandum led the NSA to advise government contractors to migrate to post -cantum encryption by 2035.

Today’s quantum technology is still short of Bitcoin’s hash sha-236 function or the digital signing algorithm of the elliptical curve (ECDSA) that protects encryption keys. But researchers like Carvalho argue that exponential advances – especially when combined with AI – can come abruptly. State-sponsored actors and cybercriminal groups are already collecting encrypted blockchain data now, hoping to decrypt them when quantum hardware recovers.

“The opponents who collect data from encrypted blockchain at the moment are not waiting to attack today,” said Carvalho. “They are building data sets for tomorrow. When technology reaches, they will unlock a decade of secrets in minutes.”
Despite these warnings, most of the Bitcoin community do not see quantum computing as an immediate threat, and there is no sense of widespread panic.

Current Bitcoin encryption is still considered robust against existing quantum machines, and developers have begun to explore defenses such as BIP-360, which propose quantum resistant addresses. Projects such as Nonoris de Carvalho Protocol are also working to help the transition from blockchains to post-quantum cryptographic patterns.

Quantum AI AI is the true apocalypse of Bitcoin
Although most conversations about quantum threats focus on brute strength attacks on cryptographic keys, Carvalho believes that the real danger is in the convergence of quantum computing and artificial intelligence. Together, he argues, they could allow stealthy and asymmetrical attacks that do not overload cryptographic systems with power, but dismantle them accurately.

“Everyone is waiting for a countdown that won’t come. You won’t receive a warning that a 10 -year -old bitcoin wallet has been cracked. You will only see the moved funds and no one can prove how or whom,” he said.

AI is already incorporated into cyber security – used for intrusions, intelligent contract audit and anomaly detection. But in the wrong hands, the same tools can be reversed. An AI attacker can automatically scan the open source wallets in search of bugs, simulate validator responses, and adapt real time to network behavior. If paired with a quantum computer capable of breaking private elliptical curve keys, the result would not be a high violation, but what Carvalho calls “silent collapse.”

“It’s not just about stealing coins,” he said. “It is about confidence to invisibly. Entire blockchains can be compromised, falsified governance systems and no one would know who did it or how.”

AI -oriented tests found vulnerabilities in cryptographic libraries that traditional tools ignore. Combine this with opponents that stock off encrypted data under the “now harvest now, decrypting” and the bases for a systemic violation may be in force.

Carvalho warned that this could mark Bitcoin’s true apocalypse if left without solution-a dramatic live crack from the Sha-236, but a slow and silent erosion of the trusted layers that keep the system united.

Bitcoin cannot defend against weak links
Despite all the conversation of Bitcoin decentralization, its real -world infrastructure remains deeply centralized. Cloud platforms, mining pools, and validator networks have vulnerable strangulation points that opponents with quantum capacity can explore. If a single cloud provider that hosts hundreds of complete nodes is compromised, the damage may shake throughout the network, regardless of how decentralized the protocol itself claims to be.

“Decentralization is great on paper, but if everyone is routing the same few spaces or trusting a handful of third party Apis, the game is already lost.”
The quantum threat can explore blind points in the systems around it: centralized infrastructure, aging technology and confidence premises.

Some projects are already being prepared. Oak Non-Noris, for example, are based on national security structures to build decentralized systems designed for a post-quantum world. Others are developing quantum -resistant rollups, new key formats, and protocol updates through Bitcoin (beeps) proposals or leveraging inherently secure technologies such as Starkware Starks.

The threat is approaching, but the answer is also growing. What remains is whether the cryptographic ecosystem will act before it is too late.