PANews reported on February 16th, citing Cointelegraph, that crypto analyst Willy Woo pointed out that the market has begun pricing in the threat of quantum computing, which challenges the 4 million "lost" BTC and BTC's 12-year valuation increase relative to gold. The market has begun considering the risk of a future "Q-Day" breakthrough—the moment when a sufficiently powerful quantum computer breaks existing public-key cryptography. If a quantum computer can derive the private key from the public key, approximately 4 million BTC, thought to be permanently lost due to the loss of their private keys, could re-enter circulation, thus undermining BTC's core scarcity narrative. This portion of tokens represents approximately 25% to 30% of the total BTC supply.

Willy Woo estimates there's only a 25% chance the BTC network will agree to freeze these tokens via a hard fork. Freezing tokens involves altering long-standing norms such as fungibility, immutability, and property rights, potentially triggering deep divisions within the community. In the 75% probability scenario, these tokens will remain unfrozen, and investors should assume that the equivalent of "eight years of corporate accumulation" in BTC could become consumable again. This prospect translates into a structural discount for BTC relative to gold valuations over the next 5 to 15 years, meaning the long-term upward trend in BTC's purchasing power measured in gold ounces is no longer valid. Furthermore, Jefferies strategist Christopher Wood removed BTC from his flagship model portfolio in January and shifted to gold, again citing the possibility that quantum machines could undermine BTC's value as a store of value for pension-level investors.