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An Italian Researcher Won $78,000 for “Breaking” Bitcoin With a Quantum Computer. A Bitcoin Dev Did the Same Thing With 20 Lines of Python.
Alex Sandro8 min read·Just now--
Last Friday’s “Q-Day” headlines were the most viral quantum-crypto story of 2026. They were also, mostly, theater. The real Q-Day story is more boring, more important, and almost nobody is telling it.
On Friday, April 24, a startup called Project Eleven handed an Italian researcher named Giancarlo Lelli a single bitcoin — about $78,000 at the time — for what it billed as the largest public quantum attack on the cryptography securing roughly $2.5 trillion in digital assets. Headlines across the crypto press dutifully repeated the framing: a 15-bit elliptic curve key broken on IBM’s cloud-accessible quantum hardware, a 512-fold jump from the previous record, set just seven months earlier. “Q-Day inches closer,” ran one. “The attack class that threatens Bitcoin,” ran another.
Within 24 hours, a former Bitcoin Core maintainer named Jonas Schnelli published a 20-line Python script that produced the exact same result. No quantum computer. No qubits. No Shor’s algorithm. Just /dev/urandom — the random number generator that ships with every Linux laptop on Earth.
