Short version for Bitcoin: this doesn't touch it. The post is about NIST's P-192 through P-521 curves. Bitcoin signs with ECDSA on secp256k1, a different curve with different parameters. Secp256k1 is defined by the simple equation y² = x³ + 7 over a prime field, and its constants were not generated from a seeded random generator, so the lrand48 finding has no direct path into it.
What Anthropic reported (published October 16, 2026, and covered the same day by several outlets): an internal research model traced the seeds for five NIST prime curves to lrand48, a 1990s C-library generator seeded with Unix timestamps from roughly May 1997 to April 1998. Reported figures: P-256's seed was the 1842nd candidate in that run, and the work took under 30 minutes. Anthropic says it is not a cryptographic break and that users need to change nothing.
What remains open, per the same coverage: the B-163 seed, the base points for P-224, P-256, P-384 and P-521, and why some candidates were skipped. The $36,864 bounty is being donated to the Internet Security Research Group.
The real Bitcoin-adjacent question is the long-term one: quantum computers would threaten ECDSA on any curve, secp256k1 included. That is a separate debate, and it's covered in the thread on quantum computers and Bitcoin. Has anyone here read Anthropic's full write-up and checked the published code?
Also discussed here:
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- Is Bitcoin "Tokenized Compute"? Jason Lowery's AI Argument, Checked
🕒 As of October 2026
