Bitcoin Faces Quantum Risk — New Proposal Could Lock Vulnerable Coins

Buried inside a new Bitcoin security proposal is a provision that could save stragglers from losing everything.

Anyone who misses the upgrade deadline but still holds their seed phrase would have a path to recovery through zero-knowledge proof technology — a last-resort mechanism built into the final phase of BIP-361, a draft posted to GitHub on Tuesday by cypherpunk Jameson Lopp and five co-authors.

The full proposal is a three-phase plan designed to protect Bitcoin from a threat that has quietly grown more serious: the eventual ability of quantum computers to crack the cryptographic keys protecting early Bitcoin addresses.

Satoshi’s Fortune At The Center Of It All

About 1.7 million BTC sits in old-style addresses known as P2PK — the kind used in Bitcoin’s earliest days. Those addresses expose public keys directly, making them vulnerable once quantum computing reaches sufficient power.

Satoshi Nakamoto’s stash alone is valued at roughly $74 billion at current prices. According to the proposal’s authors, if a bad actor gained quantum access to those coins, the damage to Bitcoin’s value and credibility could be severe.

BIP-361 builds on BIP-360, released in February, which introduced a new quantum-resistant address format called pay-to-Merkle-root, or P2MR. That earlier proposal protects new coins. BIP-361 tackles what BIP-360 left unresolved — the roughly 34% of Bitcoin’s total supply still sitting in vulnerable addresses.

The plan unfolds in stages. Three years after activation, sending BTC to old-style addresses would no longer be allowed. Two years after that, old-format signatures would be invalidated entirely.

Any coins that haven’t been moved by then would be frozen. The third phase — the rescue window — gives late movers a technical route to reclaim funds using proof of seed ownership.

The Community Response Has Been Blunt

The proposal landed hard among Bitcoin’s most vocal voices. Bitcoin Magazine’s editor rejected it outright. TFTC founder Marty Bent called it “laughable.” Metaplanet’s head of business development put the contradiction plainly: “We have to steal people’s money to prevent their money from being stolen.”

The authors anticipated the backlash. Based on their own framing, the freeze isn’t meant as punishment — it’s described as a defense against a worse outcome. Frozen coins, they argue, slightly increase the value of everyone else’s holdings. Quantum-stolen coins do the opposite.

Protocol developer Mark Erhardt shared the proposal on X, where pushback came quickly. Critics called it “highly authoritarian and confiscatory” and questioned whether any deadline could justify making existing Bitcoin unspendable by its rightful owners. Lopp had not responded to requests for comment at the time of publication.

Whether BIP-361 moves forward depends on a consensus process that has historically resisted changes this significant. For now, it remains a draft — and a flashpoint.

Featured image from PostQuantum, chart from TradingView