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A third of all Bitcoin has its public key sitting in plain sight

A third of all Bitcoin has its public key sitting in plain sight

That's 7.1M BTC, about $589B. If ECDSA breaks, these coins could be taken without their owners doing anything.


Why now: on Oct 7, a day after OpenAI dropped 722 AI-made math results, Justin Drake said ECDSA could break before quantum computers do, "in the worst case in months not years". Vitalik agreed it "might fall even faster than expected".


The twist: it's mostly not Satoshi. His era's coins hold 1.71M BTC. Reused addresses hold 5.18M, 73% of everything exposed. That's wallets in use today, including Binance, Robinhood and Bitfinex cold storage, which Drake named directly.


The fix costs nothing: send to a fresh address and never reuse it.