Emin Gün Sirer, co-founder of blockchain company Ava Labs считает , that belong Satoshi Nakamoto Bitcoins worth $97,1 billion at the current rate could be stolen.
There is one problem with the 1 million BTC owned Satoshi . I was just reminded that the mined Satoshi The coins are stored in a wallet that uses an outdated Pay-to-Public-Key script that reveals the public key, giving an attacker time to learn the crown of all cryptographic rewards, Sirer said.
Obviously, Emin means the crown of cryptographic awards as a private key that allows access to bitcoins stored in a crypto wallet. According to Sirer, advanced quantum computers will be able to figure out the private key by brute force in a short period of time when Nakamoto's public key becomes known during the transaction. In this case, the BTC creator's coins will be at risk of theft.
To protect the crypto industry from disruption caused by the theft of bitcoins belonging to Satoshi , Emin suggests freezing coins that were stored using the Pay-to-Public-Key script. This is necessary so that the owners of these coins have time to transfer them to storage facilities with more advanced scripts.
It is no coincidence that Sirer spoke about the threat now. On December 9, Google presented a new quantum chip called Willow that outperforms the fastest supercomputers. Willow can perform calculations in less than five minutes that would take the most powerful computer in existence 10 septillion years – a time span that far exceeds the age of the universe.