06/01 update below. This post was originally published on May 30
Bitcoin has fallen sharply since hitting an all-time high last week, down 6% despite the U.S. vice president JD Vance issuing a huge bitcoin prediction.
The bitcoin price has rocketed over the last two years, turbo-charged by Wall Street adoption led by the world’s largest asset manager BlackRock and then U.S. president Donald Trump’s embrace of the technology (with Elon Musk quietly plotting what could be a bitcoin price game-changer).
Now, as fears swirl the U.S. dollar could be teetering on the verge of collapse, a serious BlackRock warning that quantum computing could pose an existential risk to bitcoin has been escalated by a Google research paper that found encryption-breaking quantum computers could be a lot closer than previously thought.
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BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink has emerged as one of the most bullish voices supporting … More
“This is a 20-fold decrease in the number of qubits from our previous estimate,” Google Quantum AI researcher Craig Gidney wrote, referring to the number of quantum computer qubits needed to break a public-key encryption algorithm similar to that used by bitcoin.
“If this is even remotely true, combined with everything else happening right now, the only safe trade are hard assets and, dare I say, gold,” investor Chamath Palihapitiya, a vocal supporter of bitcoin who claims to have first bought some when the bitcoin price was just $100, posted to X in response to the paper.
06/01 update: The bitcoin price has now plummeted by almost 10% from its all-time high of $112,000 per bitcoin, falling to just over $103,000 and fast approaching the closely-watched $100,000 level.
“Next week will be critical for both the crypto market,” analysts with 10x Research led by Markus Thielen wrote in an emailed note that suggested long-term bitcoin holders are beginning to sell.
This coming week will see slew of economic and labor market data—topped by Friday’s monthly U.S. jobs report—as well as U.S. president Donald Trump’s controversial “big, beautiful” tax bill coming to the Senate and legal back-and-forth expected over Trump’s market-crashing barrage of global trade tariffs.
Meanwhile, bullish bitcoin price analysts are predicting small changes in “sentiment” could trigger outsized market swings, with huge volumes of cash still sitting on the sidelines.
“With roughly $7 trillion still parked in money market funds and another $2 trillion in fixed income ETFs, even a modest shift in risk sentiment could redirect meaningful capital into crypto and other high-beta assets,” Matt Mena, research strategist at crypto exchange-traded fund (ETF) company 21Shares, said in emailed comments.
“If bitcoin breaks out of the $105,000 to $110,000 range with conviction, we could see a sharp move to $120,000 and, more importantly, reach our previously year-end price target of $138,500 per bitcoin by the end of the summer.”
Earlier this month, BlackRock quietly added a serious warning about quantum computing to the list of risks to its huge spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF).
BlackRock, which manages after around $10 trillion worth of assets for investors, spearheaded Wall Street’s campaign to bring a long-awaited spot bitcoin ETF to market in 2023, with a fleet of funds debuting in January 2024.
The fund now holds around 3% of the 21 million bitcoin that will ever exist, worth $70 billion at the current bitcoin price, which some have warned could be giving BlackRock outsized control over the network.
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The bitcoin price has rocketed higher, hitting an all-time high of around $112,000 per bitcoin last … More
“If quantum computing technology is able to advance […] it could potentially undermine the viability of many of the cryptographic algorithms used across the world’s information technology infrastructure, including the cryptographic algorithms used for digital assets like bitcoin,” BlackRock’s amended regulatory filing for its bitcoin fund read.
The quantum computing risk to bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies has exploded recently, with tech giants including Google making strides in quantum computing research.
“At this point, no blockchain is ready to withstand a quantum attack when this becomes possible, which could very well be much earlier than 2030,” David Carvalho, the chief executive of decentralized post-quantum infrastructure blockchain Naoris Protocol, said in earlier emailed comments that warned bitcoin is “sleepwalking into a disaster.”
