Guillaume Girard: The quantum threat to Bitcoin is a governance crisis

CryptoWorld News reports that, according to Bitcoin Magazine, Guillaume Girard of the UTXO management company said that Bitcoin’s quantum problem is, in fact, a governance crisis. He believes that although a quantum computer capable of cracking Bitcoin may never appear, the network must be prepared immediately because the process of protocol changes is slow. Girard emphasized that the threat of quantum computing to Bitcoin is not only a technical issue, but also a political one. He noted that a study released in March by Google’s Quantum AI team shows that a machine with fewer than 500,000 physical qubits could potentially crack Bitcoin’s encryption, and that Google’s post-quantum readiness target is set for 2029. Currently, around 1.7 million BTC are stored in exposed payment public-key addresses, making them the most vulnerable targets. Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 360 (BIP-360) has been merged into the development library, aiming to eliminate public key exposure through a new output type, Pay-to-Merkle-Root (P2MR). Girard also pointed out that a lack of governance consensus may increase the risk of quantum attacks, especially under pressure from institutional investors.