Willy Woo: Quantum Computing Risks Are Undermining BTC's Long-Term Valuation Advantage Over Gold

Odaily reported that Willy Woo posted on the X platform, stating that the market has begun pricing in the threat of quantum computing, which challenges the narrative of 4 million "lost" BTC and BTC's 12-year-long valuation uptrend against gold. The market has started considering the risk of a future "Q-Day" breakthrough, the moment when sufficiently powerful quantum computers could crack existing public-key cryptography. If quantum computers could derive private keys from public keys, approximately 4 million BTC, considered permanently lost due to lost private keys, could re-enter circulation, thereby undermining BTC's core scarcity narrative. These tokens account for about 25% to 30% of BTC's total supply.

Willy Woo estimates that the probability of the BTC network agreeing to freeze these tokens via a hard fork is only 25%. Freezing tokens involves altering long-standing norms such as fungibility, immutability, and property rights, which could trigger deep divisions within the community. Under the 75% probability scenario, these tokens would remain unfrozen. Investors should assume that an amount of BTC equivalent to "8 years of corporate accumulation" could become spendable again. This prospect has translated into a structural discount for BTC's valuation against gold over the next 5 to 15 years, meaning that BTC's long-term uptrend in purchasing power measured in ounces of gold is no longer in effect. Furthermore, Jefferies strategist Christopher Wood removed BTC from his flagship model portfolio in January and shifted to gold, citing the same reason that quantum machines could weaken BTC's value storage attributes for pension-level investors.