If someone had a faster method for breaking elliptic curve keys, fast enough to have a realistic chance on GPUs, the repercussions for that would be waaaaaay larger than merely stealing some bitcoin. This is the same math upon which nearly all digital security in common use today is based. It’d be full-on cryptopocalypse.
It's US$2 billion. I can't imagine a better way of monetizing such an exploit than to convert it into cash by using Bitcoin.
The US govt can't pay you US$2 billion without it showing up as a line item in the federal budget. That's like 20% of the NSA's funding. You'd have to get authorization from the President and hold some emergency session of Congress. Other governments would pay less.
Hacking the normal banking system is also challenging. If you steal US$2 billion someone is going to notice and simply undo the transaction because banking doesn't believe in "code as law".
Everyone will switch to one-time pads if you released it publicly. And you'd have to be very patriotic to give it secretly to the government.
Switching to one-time-pads is easier said than done. Upgrading to PQC will be complicated and difficult, and there is a lot of recorded historical messages.
Just this specific implementation with these specific wallets maybe using a version of the btc code with a small recently discovered bug that existed say for 3 months in 2011
You can have something extremely localized and get this result. And this is exactly the behavior people have long game theoried would happen under such a scenario.
You're implicitly making the claim that just because you can't find something widely discussed in literature than any optimization of any kind is impossible and nobody would ever dare to keep an advantage in stealing bitcoin wallets secret.
Stuxnet is way less plausible than this yet that happened.
People have been trying to do this for a decade and have in aggregate thrown probably north of $100 million into it through separate efforts. The idea of someone finally succeeding is kind of expected.
Again the only claim I'm making here is that this is not only a non-zero chance, but, in my mind, an over 90%.