According to on-chain analyst Willy Woo, there is a long-term rise in Bitcoin value versus gold has come to a standstill. He points to A a trend break which lasted more than ten years.
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The timing, he argues, corresponds to when quantum computing appeared on the radar Bitcoin developers and when the Quantum Bitcoin Summit took place. That change, he says, has changed the way the market thinks about Bitcoin’s future.
Quantum fear and lost coins
Reports have indicated that approximately 4 million BTC are actually out of circulation because their keys have been lost. That number is important. Since 2020, corporate buyers and spot ETFs have removed nearly 3 million BTC from the market.
If some of those lost coins would eventually be recovered with the help of powerful quantum machinessupply would expand in ways that markets could not ignore. Woo gives the chance of a network hard fork that freezes all recovered coins at 25%.
12 YEARS OF TREND BROKEN.
BTC should be valued MUCH HIGHER relative to gold.
Should be. IT IS NOT.
The valuation trend was halted when QUANTUM became known.
Don’t read this post if you want to stay high on hopium instead of seeing things as they are. pic.twitter.com/Qa2YKDlRMp
— Willy Woo (@willywoo) February 16, 2026
He also estimates that a so-called Q-Day – the point at which quantum machines could threaten modern-day cryptography – will take between five and 15 years. However, markets do not always wait for an event to actually occur before pricing it.
Macro money currently favors gold
Reports note that broader financial cycles are pushing large pools of capital into traditional hard assets. Long-term debt cycles are often followed by moves into things considered safe havens.
Sovereign funds and major investors are piling into gold while Bitcoin stands still. The result: gold is rising while Bitcoin is lagging, and that gap is what analysts like Woo are trying to explain.
Who says it isn’t quantum panic?
Quantum fears surrounding Bitcoin are not universally accepted. Blockstream CEO Adam Back has said the threat is remote and often overstated, arguing that if quantum computing advances far enough to challenge current encryption, Bitcoin could upgrade its cryptography through network consensus. According to him, the system has time to adapt before real damage occurs.
Prominent Bitcoin lecturer and author Andreas Antonopoulos has also weighed in, noting that quantum computers would impact banks, governments, and the entire internet – not just Bitcoin. He argues that global security standards would be tightened long before Bitcoin faced a unique crisis, making current concerns premature.
Still, Woo points to unusual flows, including activity by early-era holders. Reports say some Satoshi-era portfolios have undergone transfers in the past twelve months, and that behavior can quickly change market sentiment. Sometimes a few big moves are enough to tip prices for weeks.
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Bitcoin and Gold: Diverging Paths Amid Market Volatility
At the time of writing, Bitcoin (BTC) is trading at $68,700, indicating market volatility due to its inability to hold last year’s peak around $126,000.
Goldin turn, is trading at around $4,950 per ounce due to safe haven pressures caused by market uncertainty. Bitcoin is still a speculative asset, while gold is a traditional store of value, some analysts say.
The correlation The coefficient between Bitcoin and gold is relatively weak, almost to zero, indicating that these two assets are uncorrelated and tend to move independently.
Featured image from Unsplash, chart from TradingView