Bitcoin Should Be Flying—Instead, Quantum Risk Keeps It Grounded: Analyst

According to on-chain analyst Willy Woo, a long-running rise in Bitcoin’s value versus gold has stalled. He points to a break in a trend that ran for more than a decade.

The timing, he argues, lines up with when quantum computing showed up on the radar of Bitcoin developers and when the Quantum Bitcoin Summit took place. That change, he says, has altered how the market thinks about Bitcoin’s future.

Quantum Fear And Lost Coins

Reports have disclosed that roughly 4 million BTC are effectively out of circulation because their keys are lost. That number matters. Since 2020, corporate buyers and spot ETFs have taken close to 3 million BTC off the market.

If some of those lost coins were eventually recovered using powerful quantum machines, supply would expand in a way that markets could not ignore. Woo gives the chance of a network hard fork that freezes any recovered coins at 25%.

He also estimates a socalled Q-Day — the point where quantum machines can threaten today’s cryptography — to be about five to 15 years away. Markets, however, do not always wait for an event to actually happen before they price it in.

Macro Money Favors Gold Right Now

Reports note that broader financial cycles are pushing big pools of capital toward traditional hard assets. Long-term debt cycles are often followed by moves into things seen as safe havens.

Sovereign funds and large investors have been piling into gold while Bitcoin stalls. The result: gold rallies while Bitcoin lags, and that gap is what analysts like Woo are trying to explain.

Quantum fears around Bitcoin are not universally accepted. Blockstream CEO Adam Back has said the threat is distant and often overstated, arguing that if quantum computing advances far enough to challenge current encryption, Bitcoin can upgrade its cryptography through network consensus. In his view, the system has time to adjust before any real damage occurs.

Prominent Bitcoin educator and author Andreas Antonopoulos has also pushed back, noting that quantum computers would affect banks, governments, and the entire internet—not just Bitcoin. He argues that global security standards would be strengthened long before Bitcoin faced a unique crisis, making the current concern premature.

Yet Woo points to unusual flows, including activity by early-era holders. Reports say some Satoshi-era wallets have seen transfers over the last 12 months, and that behavior can change market sentiment fast. Sometimes a few large moves are enough to tilt prices for weeks.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin (BTC) is trading at $68,700, indicating market volatility due to the inability to sustain last year’s peak at around $126,000.

Gold, for its part, is trading at around $4,950 per ounce due to safe-haven pressures driven by market uncertainty. Bitcoin is still a speculative asset, while gold is a traditional store of value, some analysts say.

The correlation coefficient between Bitcoin and gold is relatively weak, almost to the point of being nil, suggesting that these two assets are not correlated and tend to move independently.

Featured image from Unsplash, chart from TradingView