Many are believed to belong to Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto and other owners who have lost their keys, meaning they can never be moved to a secure location. Another 5 million or so are exposed through address reuse, though most of them are believed to be active holdings in exchange wallets, according to Project11, a research group tracking the issue.
Swapping in quantum-resistant signatures is the easy part, but the fight is over the coins no one moves. One camp argues for a hard deadline, after which the signature schemes used by Bitcoin today, ECDSA and Schnorr, cease to be accepted and any native coins are no longer spendable. The side says that leaving them alive would leave a future attacker, potentially a sanctioned state like North Korea, in the hands of a stockpile of Bitcoins large enough to crash the price and tarnish the validity of the network.
The other camp calls that seizure a violation of Bitcoin’s absolute property rights, and warns that it would set a precedent for later freezing of coins under government pressure.
Between them sit several offers tracked by CoinDesk over the past two months.
The hourglass will determine how many weak coins can be spent per block to prevent supply flooding. BIP-361, from developer Jameson Lopp and others, will let migrated holders prove ownership after the cutoff with a quantum-resistant proof that exposes no keys. PACTs, from Paradigm’s Dan Robinson, will let owners timestamp a private claim now and transfer funds later without having to commit anything today.