Gold and bitcoin both trade below year-ago prices as Google quantum advance raises the risk to early bitcoin wallets

Gold traded at $4,168 an ounce on Friday morning, $21 higher than a day earlier and $86 lower than a year ago. Silver traded at $57.84, up $1.13 on the day and more than $3 above its level a year earlier. Bitcoin traded at $82,644.65 early on Friday, up $1,729 from the previous morning but about $25,613 below its price a year ago. Later that day the Nasdaq fell more than 2%.

The year-on-year figures matter more than the daily moves. Over 12 months, US consumer prices rose 3.7% and Brent crude approached $110. Gold roughly held its value, silver rose, and bitcoin lost about a quarter of its dollar price. In a year of war and energy-driven inflation, the monetary metals preserved purchasing power better than bitcoin. Real interest rates explain part of the difference. With the 10-year Treasury yield above 5%, holding any asset with no yield has a cost, and bitcoin has traded more like a high-beta technology stock than like a reserve asset.

A separate technical risk appeared this week. CoinDesk reported that Google says its Willow quantum chip can now prepare the special quantum states needed for advanced calculations (magic states) with about 40 times fewer errors. That removes one of the hardware bottlenecks to any future attempt to break bitcoin's signature cryptography. The coins most exposed are early, Satoshi-era holdings whose public keys are already visible on the blockchain. Google has not claimed that such an attack is possible now. The advance shortens the time developers have to agree on a migration to quantum-resistant signatures.

Custody risk today comes from more ordinary sources. Bitcoin Magazine reported that Chainalysis traced one victim of last week's theft targeting Ledger users and found that the victim, who lost about $5 million in bitcoin, was a scammer.