The mostly likely quantum attack on Bitcoin will be a catastrophic transfer of large wallets to burn addresses along with a massive short position. No need to worry about washing stolen coins when you can just enjoy your "well timed" legal short position's windfall.

two things:

1) Short markets in Bitcoin don't have unlimited depth, and the centralized ones are KYC'd so there's some risk there 2) What if it doesn't tank the price? One thing people have suggested is just burning all the vulnerable coins[1]; it reduces supply so maybe the price will... go up? The point is there's uncertainty.

[1] https://x.com/lostbutlucky/status/2040878873731080681

Interesting, considering the extra liability / (stability) volatility that bitcoin options provide when making ROI and hashrate calculations, this can be a triple threat.

Like publicly destroying ivory /poppy stockpiles while simultaneously holding puts/futures on correlating pharmaceutical financial instruments.

Would going for the bitcoin puzzle wallets be a better demonstration of "it's broken" without needing to do anything fancy?

https://btcpuzzle.info/

If all of them went to "solved" at once or in short order I believe that would cause sufficient panic without worry of stealing or burning.

This would be the case if many people get the quantum “crack” at the same time. Since it would enable a pre-image attack, one actor could selectively mine blocks for a considerable time until others catch up. This could be going on now.

Does anyone happen to know if it is settled law in the United States that transferring bitcoins using a cracked key is a criminal act? It’s not immediately obvious to me that it would be covered by the CFAA.

Washing coins is not too difficult, you could split up values into lots of addresses and use them to buy other coins on other chains.