Quantum threat to bitcoin grows: plans emerge for first response to protect billions

Bitcoin (BTC) researchers and developers have increasingly started to articulate another option to protect bitcoin creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, and other early bitcoin users' funds from quantum computers.

The core idea is to allow these BTC holders to prove they own their bitcoin and can spend it, even after these funds become inaccessible to quantum computers.

The most recent and detailed proposal came from Dan Robinson, a researcher at investment firm Paradigm. It's about Public Address-Control Timestamps (PACTs), or a way for a BTC holder to create a tamper-proof digital timestamp proving that they control the private keys to their funds.

The key feature here is that it can be done in private, and neither Satoshi nor any other early bitcoiners would need to hurt their privacy by moving their coins. As is known, BTC transactions are pseudonymous, as they are public on the bitcoin blockchain and can often be traced to the original owner if other privacy-preserving measures are not used.

Therefore, after timestamping these proofs, bitcoiners would be able to recover their funds even if the bitcoin community decides to make quantum-vulnerable BTC addresses unspendable. The suggestion to freeze these coins is already being discussed in the bitcoin community.

While this would protect billions of BTC from being stolen by a quantum computer (if that threat materializes at all), it would also undermine bitcoin's ethos as uncensorable, decentralized money. Thus, if implemented, ideas such as PACT would solve this problem as BTC would be protected while their owners would still be able to access their funds without giving up their privacy, provided they use PACT.

"This does not require bitcoin to decide today whether a sunset [of the vulnerable BTC addresses] is necessary. It only gives holders a silent, no-onchain-cost way to preserve evidence that may become useful if such a sunset is ever adopted," Robinson said, adding that "If there is a way to plant a seed now that will give us an advantage over cryptographic attackers in a possible future, then long-term holders should take it."

Among other bitcoiners who voiced similar ideas are developer Jeremy Rubin and others. In either case, the discussion about this rescue hatch is likely to intensify amid all the recent breakthroughs in quantum computing (that still don't prove that bitcoin is facing danger), and many technical and standardization details still need to be agreed upon.

Meanwhile, Adam Back, CEO of major bitcoin firm Blockstream, who is repeatedly named as Satoshi Nakamoto and repeatedly denies it, reacted to Robinson's proposal by saying: "Correct, that could be done, with privacy even."

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