Could Bitcoin's network survive if Satoshi's coins were stolen by a quantum attacker?
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Galaxy Digital's head of research Alex Thorn has argued that Bitcoin markets routinely absorb more than one million BTC of selling pressure, suggesting the network's price and property rights could withstand a worst-case scenario where Satoshi's holdings were compromised and sold. He also noted that any long-range quantum attack would need to crack each of the approximately 22,000 P2PK addresses separately rather than all at once, because each address has its own independent key pair. That means even a capable quantum attacker would face a time-consuming sequential operation rather than a single catastrophic event. Exchanges and active wallet holders would have time to migrate to post-quantum addresses before the threat reached their specific holdings, though the P2PK addresses like Satoshi's would have no owner available to initiate that migration.
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Markets routinely absorbing over one million BTC in selling pressure is a meaningful data point but assumes orderly distribution rather than a panic-driven simultaneous dump scenario.