Bitcoin has struggled so far into U.S. president Donald Trump’s second term, though that could be about to change.

Bitcoin bulls scramble for post-quantum protection as Google drops bombshell paper

And others simply see crypto as a way to build wealth and devote more time to worship. The ongoing conflict in the Middle East has kept oil prices above $100 per barrel for over a month, complicating central bank policy decisions around rate cuts or further tightening. At the same time, renewed concerns around quantum computing risks have added another layer of uncertainty. Google has set 2029 as its internal deadline for migrating authentication services.

• As President Donald Trump has embraced crypto and bitcoin — including by launching his own meme coin — and rejected the Biden administration’s previous crackdown, synergies have begun to form between culture warriors and crypto enthusiasts.
• Gatewood, the Nashville-area real estate agent, has given talks about bitcoin to a Christian private school and Catholic priests.
• Others have warned that cryptocurrency poses something spiritually worse than a financial risk.
• At least one nonprofit, the Magnalia Foundation, started by an ordained Presbyterian minister Tim Fox, is also dedicated to this effort.
• “I don’t want it to start climbing back up and I miss that climb,” she later told NBC News.
• While American churches have been fast to adopt new technology, it’s still the case that most Americans don’t own any cryptocurrency.

How to navigate a crypto meltdown: ‘Be willing to hold on’

Bitcoin’s first step arrived in February, when BIP-360 was merged into the official Bitcoin Improvement Proposal repository. The proposal creates a new output type, Pay-to-Merkle-Root, that hides public keys and supports future post-quantum signatures. But it doesn’t replace ECDSA or Schnorr with quantum-resistant alternatives. It’s important to understand that no quantum computer can execute this attack today. But the distance between current hardware and a machine capable of cracking bitcoin’s cryptography is shrinking faster than projected.

The post-quantum transition can’t be postponed any longer

A quantum computer with enough stable and error-corrected qubits running Shor’s algorithm could derive a private key, forge a digital signature and drain a wallet. Last year, she attended Michelle Renee’s crypto workshop at a church in Chicago. In the days leading up to the event, bitcoin’s value dropped from highs above $120,000 to below $100,000. During the class, Renee didn’t explicitly dwell on the price drop, instead choosing to emphasize the highs. But she told the room they should get excited about dips, which she sees as a time to buy. From churches now allowing congregants to tithe with digital coins to blogs promoting bitcoin as biblically sound, there’s an emerging Christian crypto subculture.

On a superconducting architecture with standard assumptions, those circuits translate to fewer than half a million physical qubits. The previous state-of-the-art estimate, from a 2023 paper by Litinski, required roughly 9 million physical qubits in a photonic architecture for a single-instance attack. The team compiled two quantum circuits implementing Shor’s algorithm for the secp256k1 curve. One uses fewer than 1,200 logical qubits and 90 million Toffoli gates.

When someone broadcasts a bitcoin transaction, their public key becomes visible in the mempool. An attacker intercepts it, derives the private key, and broadcasts a fraudulent replacement before the original confirms. Google’s paper estimates a superconducting quantum computer could complete the cracking in about nine minutes, using a technique where the machine precomputes half the algorithm and waits in a “primed” state until a target appears. With 11 primed machines running in parallel, the speedup reaches 6.5 times, bringing it well under the block time. According to CoinDesk, the single-machine scenario gives an attacker roughly a 41% chance of beating the original transaction to confirmation.

The all-time low value for ethereum was $0.4209 on Oct. 21, 2015. Pezeshkian’s unconfirmed remarks are raising the prospect of a diplomatic off-ramp, easing fears of a wider conflict that could disrupt oil flows, fuel inflation and continue to rattle global markets. Watch for post-quantum compatibility from wallets, exchanges, and custody providers. Its coauthors include Justin Drake of the Ethereum Foundation, Dan Boneh of Stanford, and six Google Quantum AI researchers led by Ryan Babbush and Hartmut Neven.

While some churchgoers puzzle over what to make of crypto, Renee has found that at least one pulpit is welcoming. In his radio show, Ramsey has equated buying crypto to investing in Beanie Babies. For some Christians who got into crypto before Trump came around, the president’s embrace has been welcomed. “They don’t like the feeling that their ability to transact and operate is kind of subject to the whims of a financial institution that may or may not align with their viewpoints,” Abbotoy said. Incoming businesses have been encouraged to accept bitcoin, he said. No one should expect to hear him https://bramridge-trust.com/ say God told him to launch a coin, he said.

Todd and Janet Gatewood launched their Nashville-based radio show “God, Freedom and Bitcoin” in January, blending their passion for cryptocurrency with their strong faith. CoinDesk Research maps the five privacy approaches and examines the widening gap. “I don’t want to have somebody else have crypto and have China be number one in the world in crypto,” Trump told CBS’s 60 Minutes.

For believers who share his conclusion that expanding the money supply is part of the problem, he said, bitcoin is appealing. Janet, a real estate agent in the Nashville, Tennessee, area, told her husband and a guest appearing on a Feb. 9 show that she hoped to close on more houses, so she could buy bitcoin at a lower price. As blockchain adoption scales, the metadata available to machine learning models scales with it. Obfuscation-based privacy approaches are structurally degrading as a result. This report provides a comprehensive comparison of all five major crypto privacy architectures and a framework for evaluating which models remain durable as AI capabilities improve.