Crypto is not actually crypto. Why? Because everything leaks and computers are solving hard math problems faster than people realize.
Nan, who writes Offrampt
Everything leaks. Chainalysis counted $3.7 billion stolen from crypto businesses in 2022, $1.7 billion in 2023, $2.2 billion in 2024 and over $3.4 billion in 2025. CertiK counts $2.68 billion from January to September 2026, before Binance's $6.3 billion in October. In August 2026, attackers drained over $130 million from Coldcard hardware wallets, offline ones among them, through a 2021 flaw that made seed phrases predictable.
On paper, the math gets cheaper to break. For RSA-2048, a common lock on the web, estimates of the quantum computer needed fell from 20 million noisy qubits (2019) to under 1 million (Google, May 2025) to under 100,000 (an Iceberg Quantum preprint, February 2026). For the 256-bit elliptic curve under bitcoin's keys, Google estimated in March 2026 under half a million physical qubits running for minutes, about a 20-fold cut from earlier estimates. Google's Willow chip, shown in December 2024, has 105 qubits.
Google's paper counts about 6.9 million BTC in addresses whose public keys are already exposed or reused. NIST's final guidance of 27 October 2026 deprecates RSA, ECDSA and EdDSA after 2030 and disallows them after 2035. Bitcoin's BIP-360, a draft that hides keys from long-exposure attacks, entered the proposals list in February 2026 and is not active.
Used as a tool, crypto moves value where a Thai bank account is out of reach, and the move takes minutes. Held for decades, it rests on locks with a date on them.
Speed: years
Slow, then sudden. A math lock does not wear out; it holds until a machine opens it, and then every lock of that kind is open at once. The estimates fall every year and the hardware grows more slowly. Nobody can date the first broken bitcoin key; the people who write the standards have dated the end of these locks: 2035.