TL;DR:
- White House Decree: Donald Trump’s administration is preparing an executive order aimed at accelerating the migration toward post-quantum cryptography and mitigating foreign espionage.
- On-chain Vulnerability: As of March 1, 2026, more than 34% of all Bitcoin in circulation keeps its public keys exposed on the blockchain, according to data from the BIP-361 technical draft.
- Reduction in Estimates: Research by Craig Gidney published in May 2025 reduced the theoretical requirement to break RSA-2048 encryption from 20 million to less than 1 million noisy qubits.
The White House, through a post on its official account, reignited the global discussion on Bitcoin security after enigmatically hinting at a strong government push in the field of quantum computing under President Donald Trump’s administration.Â
So now the official White House account has now resorted to click bait?
Go make some arrests, end the war in the Middle East, arrest the deep state, and ramp up deportations.
You know, the things we voted for.
If you do that you won’t have to post click bait.
— Derrick Evans (@DerrickEvans4WV) June 22, 2026
The message invited citizens to stay tuned for the new guidelines of the U.S. administration. According to reports released by the Nextgov portal, the initiative will take the form of an executive order scheduled for this week, which will assign the FBI and intelligence agencies the primary task of protecting local quantum research against foreign espionage.
The order will directly instruct the Departments of Energy and Defense to build a functional quantum computer, while the Department of Commerce will expand funding to private technology firms to accelerate cryptographic migration schemes.
This regulatory and institutional progress generates mixed readings within the crypto ecosystem. The accelerated development of these machines inches the horizon closer to the so-called “Q-Day,” the moment when a quantum computer possesses the technical capacity to breach the traditional cryptography that currently safeguards digital asset wallets.
The Technical Dilemma Behind the BIP-361 Proposal
The speed of this advancement has forced drastic mathematical revisions in recent months. In 2019, Google researcher Craig Gidney estimated that breaking RSA-2048 encryption would require close to 20 million physical qubits. However, an update to his models published in May 2025 reduced that figure to under one million qubits. In parallel, global surveys by the Global Risk Institute currently give a 50% probability to the emergence of a machine with these capabilities within a 15-year timeframe.
The impact on Bitcoin security centers on the exposure of legacy data. Data from the BIP-361 technical draft indicates that more than 34% of the total Bitcoin supply reveals its public key on the blockchain (on-chain). This includes the approximately 1.1 million BTC mined in the network’s early days by Satoshi Nakamoto, a hoard valued at around $71 billion based on a market trading price close to $64,545.
Given this scenario, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao recently debated with Alex Thorn, an executive at Galaxy Research, the controversial alternative of freezing early-era dormant coins through community consensus to prevent their mass theft via future quantum attacks.
The BIP-361 draft, signed by specialist Jameson Lopp alongside five co-authors, proposes to preemptively block transactions to vulnerable addresses and definitively void legacy signatures two years after its implementation. However, critics of the measure point out that forcibly restricting any balance would violate the network’s immutable principle that a user’s funds cannot be confiscated by third parties.
The ecosystem awaits the specific content of the North American decree to determine the real impact on the current cryptographic infrastructure.
