Bitcoin just took two important steps toward a quantum and AI future

Bitcoin (BTC) developers have made two recent announcements, as the largest cryptocurrency network progresses toward becoming quantum-resistant and better prepared for fierce competition in the agentic economy.

Step 1: bitcoin moves toward quantum resistance with BIP 360. In short, the most popular proposal to make BTC holdings safer from a possible quantum attack, BIP 360, has been merged into the official bitcoin BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal) GitHub repository. This means that the updated version of this BIP is now an official, numbered, and publicly archived Bitcoin Improvement Proposal that anyone can reference and build upon. However, it will still take time until these changes are implemented in bitcoin, if at all.

Authored by Hunter Beast, Ethan Heilman, and Isabel Foxen Duke, BIP 360 outlines how BTC holdings can be protected against so-called long-exposure attacks by Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computers (CRQCs) and how bitcoin can become resistant to potential compromises of the elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) it uses.

A long exposure attack is especially relevant to so-called Taproot bitcoin addresses, which are one of several BTC address formats and start with "bc1p."

Taproot addresses have their so-called public keys exposed at all times (hence, "long exposure"), and a CRQC could use them to derive a private key, allowing an attacker to steal BTC. While some old BTC address formats, such as those used by bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto and early bitcoin miners, are also vulnerable to potential long exposure attacks, all other address formats can become vulnerable after they are reused, meaning a person uses the same address to receive BTC more than once.

Many BTC wallets automatically generate a new address when receiving BTC, as this is considered one of the key bitcoin security and privacy practices.

Meanwhile, according to the authors of BIP 360, while long-exposure attacks are likely to be the earliest quantum attacks possible against bitcoin, the blockchain should also be prepared for short-exposure attacks. Theoretically, this attack could be performed during the relatively short time a BTC transaction is waiting to be confirmed.

However, this would require faster quantum computers, and bitcoin would need to implement post-quantum signature schemes.

"In this proposal, we adopt a "prepared not scared" approach to the possible advancement of quantum computing and offer bitcoin users an option for increased protection if they so choose," the BIP's authors said, noting that, while there's no any specific quantum computing timeline, they just propose "a flexible and unobtrusive option for users that wish to mitigate this risk according to their own estimate of the timeline."

Step 2: Preparing bitcoin for AI agents

Separately, as quantum computing is only one of the key challenges bitcoin faces, developers have announced an important step in making bitcoin more AI agent-friendly, as the cryptoasset industry is racing in an attempt to capture the largest share of the so-called agentic economy.

Lightning Labs (LL), the developers of one of the Lightning Network (LN) implementations, a bitcoin payment scaling solution, have released a set of tools that provide AI agents with native access to LN, eliminating the need for identity, API keys, or signup flows.

According to Michael Levin, Head of Product Growth at LL, agents need to transact instantly, programmatically, and at massive scale, often for tiny amounts that would be consumed by traditional transaction fees.

"Right now, thousands of agents are posting on social networks, sending emails, and more. Imagine what happens when those agents can also pay for premium data feeds, purchase compute resources, and sell their own services for sats," Levin said, adding that the missing piece has been a permissionless financial layer native to how agents operate.

However, bitcoin is not the only crypto network competing for a piece of this pie.

For example, yesterday, a major crypto exchange, Coinbase, also introduced agentic wallets that give AI "the power to spend, earn, and trade autonomously while maintaining enterprise-grade security and programmable guardrails."

However, this solution is currently optimized for stablecoins, which are still heavily regulated and lack censorship resistance.

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