According to Charles Edwards, Bitcoin faces a quantum-computing security risk that could enable spending of early Satoshi-era coins and trigger market selling, and he urges the community to act by 2026, source: Charles Edwards on X (Oct 13, 2025) and his linked YouTube video. Bitcoin transaction validation relies on ECDSA over secp256k1, which is theoretically vulnerable to sufficiently large fault-tolerant quantum computers via Shor’s algorithm, source: Bitcoin.org Developer Guide and P. W. Shor (1994). Many early outputs, including pay-to-public-key coinbase rewards used in 2009–2010, expose public keys on-chain and are therefore higher-risk if ECDSA is broken, source: Bitcoin.org Developer Guide and Bitcoin Wiki entry on Pay-to-PubKey. Independent on-chain research estimates roughly 1.1 million BTC attributed to early mining by Satoshi, underscoring potential market impact if such coins became movable, source: Sergio Demian Lerner’s Patoshi mining analysis. Governments have advanced post-quantum cryptography; NIST selected PQC algorithms and published draft standards for ML-DSA (Dilithium) and ML-KEM (Kyber) with guidance to begin migration planning, source: NIST PQC program announcements and migration guidance. Any Bitcoin move toward quantum-safe signatures would require protocol changes and broad coordination, making developer proposals and upgrade timelines important market catalysts for BTC, source: discussions on the bitcoin-dev mailing list and Bitcoin Core documentation.