Summary
- A Coinbase advisory council of leading cryptographers says quantum computers are not yet a threat to Bitcoin but urges the community to begin technical planning for post-quantum signatures now.
- Roughly 6.7 million bitcoin are considered vulnerable to a future quantum attack, including about 1.7 million in early addresses likely tied to Satoshi Nakamoto and lost keys, fueling debate over whether to let those coins remain spendable.
- The council declines to choose between proposals that could freeze or constrain vulnerable coins, instead stressing that compatible solutions can be combined and that users need clear communication and timely action from the Bitcoin community.
A Coinbase-convened advisory board of some of the most prominent cryptographers in the world has laid out what Bitcoin should do about the millions of coins a future quantum computer could steal, and on the hardest question, it refuses to answer.
The board, which shared the report with CoinDesk earlier this week, includes Scott Aaronson of the University of Texas at Austin, Dan Boneh of Stanford and Justin Drake of the Ethereum Foundation. Its starting point is that quantum computers are not a threat to blockchains today and that nobody knows when they will be, so the debate should not wait on a timeline.
The exposure is concentrated in Bitcoin, nevertheless. About 1.7 million bitcoin sit in roughly 20,000 early pay-to-public-key addresses, a format that publishes the owner’s public key directly on the blockchain and leaves it open to a quantum attacker.
