Last updated on March 8th, 2026 at 11:00 pm
Renowned on-chain analyst Willy Woo has warned that Bitcoin’s long-term valuation is under significant pressure as investors begin to price in the existential threat posed by quantum computing.
Speaking on Monday, February 16, 2026, Woo highlighted that while the Bitcoin network can be patched with quantum-resistant signatures, such upgrades may fail to protect approximately 4 million “lost” bitcoins.
The market has started pricing in the return of these lost coins ahead of time.
This process completes once the Q-Day risk is off the table.
Until then BTCUSD will price in this risk.
Q-Day is 5 to 15 years away… that’s a long time trading with a cloud over its head.
— Willy Woo (@willywoo) February 16, 2026
These early coins, whose private keys are long forgotten, could potentially be hacked and re-entered into circulation by advanced quantum machines, creating a massive supply dilution equivalent to eight years of corporate accumulation.
Quantum “Q-Day” looms as sovereign buyers favour gold over BTC
Woo argued that the uncertainty surrounding “Q-Day”, the moment quantum computers can break modern encryption, is already impacting Bitcoin’s performance relative to gold. He noted that sovereign entities like China are accumulating gold as a fallback for state readiness because they plan for 5-to-15-year horizons, a timeframe that overlaps with anticipated quantum breakthroughs.
According to Woo, the market has recently broken its 12-year trend of valuing gold higher than itself, as fiduciary institutions hesitate to allocate capital to a “nascent” asset with unresolved quantum vulnerabilities.
Bitcoin developers accelerate BIP-360 to mitigate “long exposure” attacks
In response to these growing concerns, Bitcoin core developers have recently updated and merged BIP-360 into the official repository.
This proposal introduces a new output type, Pay-to-Merkle-Root (P2MR), to eliminate the “key-to-spend” path that currently exposes public keys on-chain. By keeping this data private, P2MR reduces the surface area for long exposure attacks, where a quantum adversary harvests public keys today to crack them years later.
While BIP-360 provides a foundational step toward quantum-hardening, it does not fully address short-exposure attacks, such as those targeting unconfirmed transactions in the mempool.
This update comes as Taproot address dominance has plummeted from 54% to 22% in early 2026, as users proactively migrate funds to more resilient address types to avoid potential vulnerabilities. However, contrary to fears of a quantum sell-off, Galaxy Digital confirmed that a $9 billion Bitcoin whale sale was for strategic estate planning.
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