What is Actually At Risk For BTCBefore we go on to discussing in depth what the poll reveals, it’s important to clarify that Bitcoin does not encrypt anything. The security in both methods rests on one assumption, which is that deriving a private key from a public key is impossible. Given a large enough quantum computer, it can work backwards from a public key to the private key that generated it. Coins held in modern addresses that have never been spent from do not expose a public key at all. The scheme Bitcoin eventually adopts will most likely be ML-DSA or SLH-DSA, the algorithms NIST has already finalised.