Bitcoin may need a radical fix against quantum threats, as CryptoQuant founder advocates freezing inactive wallets holding billions of BTC.
Ki Young Ju, founder of CryptoQuant, proposed that future Bitcoin (BTC) quantum upgrades may require freezing old addresses to prevent potential theft by quantum computers.
He also believes the risks will be difficult to address because the crypto community has historically struggled to agree on protocol changes.
Quantum risk solutions
In a social media post, Ju explained that anyone holding BTC with the old address type faces the same risks. This is because if a quantum machine were to evolve enough to break BTC’s encryption, the digital asset could be frozen or stolen by design. He added that even a securely stored private key could become useless if the owner fails to implement protocol upgrades in time.
“Simply put, a coin that seems perfectly safe today could be used by attackers tomorrow,” Ju warned.
In response to this threat, the founder of CryptoQuant proposed freezing the old address containing Satoshi’s 1 million BTC to prevent theft and breaches.
“Would you support freezing dormant coins, including Satoshi’s, to protect BTC from quantum attacks?” he asked.
Bitcoin’s security relies on encryption that is virtually unbreakable by traditional computers. However, quantum computers change this assumption. Under certain conditions, a sufficiently powerful machine of this kind might obtain the private key from the published public key.
Once the public key is exposed on the chain, the risk becomes permanent. Ju estimates that approximately 6.89 million BTC is currently exposed to such attacks. According to the data, approximately 3.4 million BTC, including Satoshi’s stash, has been dormant for more than 10 years, with a potential value of hundreds of billions of dollars. He explained that with so much value at stake, hackers could be highly motivated if the technology became cheaper and easier to use.
Social consensus challenges
Even if it is technically possible to freeze dormant BTC, gaining community consensus remains a major challenge. Because while these solutions are moving quickly, it will take time for social consensus to emerge.
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The Bitcoin ecosystem has historically had a hard time agreeing to changes to the protocol. This can be seen in the block size debate that lasted over three years and led to a hard fork. Another example is the SegWit2x upgrade failure, which shows how difficult it is to reach consensus.
Freezing coins, even to prevent quantum attacks, is likely to face similar resistance as it contradicts OG cryptocurrencies’ core philosophies of decentralization and user control.
Ju warned that as quantum technology advances, a competing BTC fork could occur if a complete consensus is not reached. The real question, he says, is not whether the threat will arrive in five or 10 years, but whether the crypto community will come together on how to deal with it by then.
Bankless co-founder David Hoffman believes that in the event of a quantum attack, even if Bitcoin were to fail, ETH would continue to function normally as it has long been prepared for such challenges.
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