The counter is a marketing sum, not a custody guarantee

Quantum runway counter ticks past nine billion dollars

Updated 6 October 2026

That is a counter. It is not a clock.

Where the figure comes from

Project Eleven, the research outfit that has been reposting its quantum runway tracker through 2026, refreshed the headline number on 4 October to read about 9.18 billion dollars worth of bitcoin. The math is the same recipe the page has run since early 2025. Take the visible UTXO set. Filter for script types that reveal a public key on chain. Discount coins that are provably unspendable, including the obvious burns and the OP_RETURN dust. Discount coins that have moved since the script was first published, on the working assumption that a holder who has spent is a holder who has custody. Sum what is left, multiply by the spot price, and round to two figures that fit on a slide.

The counter is honest in the way a banner is honest. It tells you what the author chose to count. The author has chosen to count only the script types that a Shor-capable adversary could in principle derive a private key from. The author has chosen not to count coins that live behind a hash and that have never moved. The author has chosen to multiply by the spot price, not by some discounted price that the market would print on the day a quantum machine demonstrably runs Grover on a real signature. None of those choices is wrong. They are choices.

The number is also a moving target, and the motion is mostly sideways. Old addresses that look dead will sometimes wake up. A holder who migrated to SegWit in 2024 will, in October 2026, drop the legacy UTXO out of the count. A holder who swept a P2PKH pile into a single Taproot output this summer will pull that pile out of the count. The counter ticks down by the size of those sweeps and ticks up only when somebody, somewhere, broadcasts a fresh legacy send to a fresh legacy address. Net effect, across 2026, the number has been drifting gently lower in bitcoin terms and gently higher in dollar terms, because spot has done more of the work than the migration has.

What the figure actually counts

Read the methodology note at the bottom of the tracker page and three categories survive. P2PK outputs, the very old pay-to-public-key style that Satoshi and a handful of early miners used, sit at the top because the public key is the address. P2PKH outputs whose first spend is still in the future, where the public key has been revealed at funding and never rehidden, sit second. P2TR outputs that have already been spent along the key path, where the tweaked internal key is now part of the spent witness, sit third. Everything else, including every P2WPKH and every unspent P2PKH that has never broadcast a key, sits in the bin the counter refuses to count.

That last bin is the part the marketing sum has to wave at without picking up. A P2PKH address that has funded but never spent keeps its public key behind a HASH160. To derive the private key, a quantum adversary would have to invert RIPEMD-160, which is a 160 bit preimage problem that even Grover only halves, leaving roughly 80 bits of work. The counter does not claim a quantum machine can do that work at economic cost. The counter only claims the box is open when the public key is already on the page. Bitcoin Optech has been making the same point in its briefings since the BIP-360 draft was first circulated.

So the figure, read honestly, is a count of public keys that have been printed on the blockchain ledger in a script that a sufficiently large Shor machine could turn into a private key. It is not a count of coins that would be lost. It is not a count of boxes that a quantum thief could open tomorrow. It is a count of boxes whose lock is, by the rules of public key cryptography, already partly disassembled on the front step. The thief still has to lift the parts. The counter does not promise the parts are light.

What the figure does not count

Three things the counter does not touch, and the silence is doing work. First, the counter does not count coins held by custodians, exchanges, treasuries, or ETF issuers whose public addresses are known but whose scripts are all P2WPKH or P2TR key path. The author has chosen to treat custody as out of scope, on the argument that a custodian has its own key ceremony, its own HSM fleet, and its own duty to migrate. That is a fair argument. It is also an argument that leaves the dollar total looking larger than the addressable total, because a meaningful share of legacy UTXOs in the 2026 set are exchange cold wallets whose ops team will sweep them the moment a credible migration plan exists.

Second, the counter does not count coins that have moved, even by a single satoshi, since their address was first used. The discount here is the largest in the methodology, and the largest by design. A legacy address that sent a single satoshi in 2017 to consolidate dust, and that then sat dormant, is not in the figure. The author's reasoning is that a holder who has demonstrated custody is a holder who has moved, and a holder who has moved is a holder who is plausibly still alive. The reasoning is fair. The reasoning also assumes that holders who have moved will not be the holders who lose coins, and that assumption has no empirical content.

Third, the counter does not count the coins that quantum would, in the worst case, also threaten, but through a different door. The figure is a Shor-only figure. Grover-friendly signature schemes, hash-only signature schemes, anything that lives in the NIST PQC pipeline that is not Dilithium or any of its surviving variants, none of that is in the runway number. The runway number is a one-adversary number. The honest runway is a two-adversary number, and the second adversary is the one that is harder to price because nobody has yet built a credible quantum threat model for the SHA-256 part of the script.

Why the counter sits at nine billion and not at seven

Spot price is the dominant driver. The bitcoin price has spent most of 2026 above ninety thousand dollars, briefly tagging one hundred and ten thousand on a thin book in late September before settling back into the high five figures. Multiplying the visible legacy UTXO set, roughly one hundred and five thousand bitcoin in script types the counter counts, by a price in the ninety thousands gives you a number north of nine billion dollars. The same count at the average 2025 price would have given you a number in the seven billions. The counter is, in this sense, a price thermometer wearing a runway costume.

The bitcoin count itself has been creeping up, not down, through 2026, and the creep is mostly coming from a place nobody wants to talk about. P2PKH addresses that funded in 2010 and 2011, dormant through three cycles, are now occasionally being used as change targets for small consolidation sweeps by miners and by early adopters who would rather not leak their modern wallets. Every time one of those legacy outputs receives a coin, even as change, the receiving output is added to the visible set and the counter ticks up. The mempool.space cluster map has been showing this kind of dusting traffic all year, and the runway tracker has been crediting it in real time.

There is also a small, slower source of upward pressure. A handful of services that took custody of coins in 2014 and 2015 and that have since collapsed or been abandoned are now being unwound by liquidators who have no reason to migrate legacy addresses cleanly. The unwinding shows up on chain as a P2PKH send from a known cold wallet, and the change output sits in the visible set. The liquidator will, presumably, sweep the change into a modern wallet the next time they consolidate. The runway counter, in the meantime, has been briefly embarrassed by the spike.

How to read the counter without panicking

Read it as a banner that tells you which boxes have their keys on the front step. Do not read it as a banner that tells you when the box will be opened. The two questions are different, and the runway figure answers only the first. The quantum clock question, the when, is the question the counter explicitly refuses to clock, and the refusal is on the methodology page in plain language. Project Eleven has been clear since the tracker launched that the figure is a stock, not a flow, and that the time to act is a function of the box, not of the price.

For a holder, the practical read is short. If your coins sit in a P2PKH address that has never spent, the public key is hidden behind a hash and the counter does not count you. If your coins sit in a P2PKH address that has spent at least once, the public key is on the page and the counter does count you, and the right next move is a sweep to a modern address, done now, with the existing hardware wallet, before any further spend makes the situation worse. If your coins sit on an exchange, the counter does not count you, and the right next move is a question to the exchange about its post-quantum migration plan, asked in writing, stored in your own archive.

For a builder, the read is shorter. The runway figure is a marketing artefact, and the artefact is useful exactly to the extent that it pulls a single number out of a methodology that would otherwise live in a footnote. The figure is also a hostage to spot. A thirty percent drawdown over a quarter would knock a billion and a half dollars off the headline without a single coin moving, and a thirty percent rally would add the same back. The honest runway question, the one that should be on slides, is how many bitcoin, not how many dollars, and the runway tracker, to its credit, prints the bitcoin count next to the dollar count for exactly this reason.