Will quantum computers be able to retrieve billions in wealth trapped in Bitcoin?

Nope. For one thing, there is no actual wealth there.

lol. There’s no wealth in bitcoin. It’s real value is negative as it has no utility and has a massive energy cost.

However, my understanding is that future quantum computing could potentially crack cryptocurrency wallets. I’ve no idea about the technical details.

Assume for the sake of argument that there is wealth there, although as @Kropotkin and @Blackwater_Park said, that’s open to question.

The key question is how good are the encryption algorithms by Bitcoin to shield ownership of the supposed wealth? I don’t think we know yet. The way that I understand quantum computing, it’s faster than blazes. But the question is – can it decrypt something that has one way encryption? Not sure that it does.

The FBI and criminal justice system haven’t decrypted Bitcoin info so far; they have done a lot of pattern matching and good old fashioned detective work. So it isn’t clear that Bitcoin ‘secrets’ will be helped by faster computers.

At this point (April 2023) it is too early to make an educated guess to the question.

How does Bitcoin work?

@Dutchess_III Good question. People will say “well block chain yada yada yada” “the value is in the mining process yada yada yada…” Honestly, you would be hard pressed to find anyone who really understands it in depth. I don’t, so I don’t invest in it. Best I can tell it’s simply a pyramid scheme based on using real currency to buy digital “coins” that have a limited supply and can’t be faked easily because of the cryptographic nature of how they are accounted for. Where is the real value? There is none. If people stop accepting them as a form of payment then they are instantly worthless. There is no intrinsic value whatsoever. There is adjacent value in that they are accepted by many as a proxy currency because they can be used as a vehicle to exchange one currency to another without much of a paper trail. I believe this is temporary.

@Dutchess_III Bitcoins are created by solving increasingly more difficult math problems. After the solving of the problem and verification of the “proof of work”, a Bitcoin is created. Each Bitcoin has a digital identification signature which is recorded on a blockchain ledger.

The owner of the Bitcoin stores the bitcoin in an encrypted password protected digital wallet. What @RedDeerGuy1 wants to do is to crack the password for people who have lost or forgotten their password by using a superfast quantum computer.

But speed of the computer does not equate with breaking the encryption.

Some current encryption techniques would not work in quantum computing. RSA encryption depends on the inability of current computers to find, in a short time span, the factors of numbers whose factors are very large primes.

There are encryption techniques that are designed strictly for quantum computers that could be used instead.

Link