EUROPOL SAYS WALLETS, NOT BLOCKCHAINS, ARE THE QUANTUM TARGET — ITS REPORT NEVER COUNTS THE EXPOSED BITCOIN — AND IT GETS WRONG WHO CHANGES BITCOIN’S RULES

Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre published “Quantum computing and cryptocurrencies” on October 7, 2026. Its main call is right and checkable: “Cryptocurrency wallets, which utilise public-key cryptography to authorise transactions and control funds, are the primary point of exposure to quantum threats.” It also says “Cryptocurrencies will not collapse due to quantum computing.” The risk is to the signatures that guard coins, not to the chain of blocks.

What the 21-page report does not do is count. Coverage put the bitcoin with exposed public keys at 6.04 million BTC (Decrypt) and 6.9 million BTC (CoinDesk). Neither number appears in Europol’s document. And exposure is not uniform. A coin in a hashed address shows only a hash of its key until it is spent. A reused address, an early pay-to-public-key output or a Taproot output shows the key itself. The report says “the public visibility of blockchain keys” lets adversaries “proactively target wallets” without drawing that line.

Page 19 says “Bitcoin’s 90% miner consensus requirement for significant protocol changes” could delay a migration. Bitcoin has no such rule. Ninety percent was the signaling threshold Bitcoin Core set for Taproot’s activation in 2021. BIP 9, the method used for SegWit, set 95%. Miners signal readiness; nodes enforce the rules. The SegWit fight the report cites is the one where node operators proposed enforcing the change without the miners, in BIP 148.

The recommendations are aimed at officials: a working group led by the European Commission, briefings for policymakers, and watching central bank digital currencies with the ECB. For holders, the checkable step costs nothing today. Don’t reuse addresses, and know which of your coins have already shown a public key. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $82,958.