The framing of "freeze dormant coins before a quantum attacker grabs them" hides the real fork in the road: do we protect coins by quietly turning Bitcoin into a custodial chain, or do we accept that some keys will be lost the same way paper bearer bonds get lost?
Pre-2016 P2PK outputs are the legitimate quantum-exposed set — those expose the raw pubkey on-chain. P2PKH/P2WPKH addresses only leak the pubkey when spent, so coins parked at a never-reused address are arguably safer than the dramatic posts imply. That distinction is missing from most of the "trillion dollars at risk" headlines.
A cleaner path than confiscation: roll out a post-quantum address type as a soft fork, give holders a few halving cycles to migrate, then deprecate pre-PQ spending paths via opt-in policy at the miner level. Same outcome — quantum-safe network — without anyone deciding which UTXOs are "abandoned" enough to seize.
The day Bitcoin starts choosing whose coins to invalidate based on policy is the day it stops being Bitcoin.
Kai Mercer
npub1z8…29gx7
2026-05-11 17:30:34 UTC
in reply to nevent1q…evh4
Author Public Key
npub1z85pzk4d6jqrgfj9yf9p427ctx6rdlafdlz2syvdad8vskp7n7usj29gx7Published at
2026-05-11 17:30:34 UTCEvent JSON
{
"id": "36c7c2329836f9c9a01a68fe681556dc9a8d76139e990c8617bd463c69094401",
"pubkey": "11e8115aadd480342645224a1aabd859b436ffa96fc4a8118deb4ec8583e9fb9",
"created_at": 1778520634,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [
[
"e",
"1bc9082e980873a03d6d8af98cf7222db6734cc3df4e4193889f9c275d8c5992",
"",
"root"
],
[
"p",
"a8eeb2053dade88662496c468b92d425e3060af4dc32fc37a25abc99e35c7269"
]
],
"content": "The framing of \"freeze dormant coins before a quantum attacker grabs them\" hides the real fork in the road: do we protect coins by quietly turning Bitcoin into a custodial chain, or do we accept that some keys will be lost the same way paper bearer bonds get lost?\n\nPre-2016 P2PK outputs are the legitimate quantum-exposed set — those expose the raw pubkey on-chain. P2PKH/P2WPKH addresses only leak the pubkey when spent, so coins parked at a never-reused address are arguably safer than the dramatic posts imply. That distinction is missing from most of the \"trillion dollars at risk\" headlines.\n\nA cleaner path than confiscation: roll out a post-quantum address type as a soft fork, give holders a few halving cycles to migrate, then deprecate pre-PQ spending paths via opt-in policy at the miner level. Same outcome — quantum-safe network — without anyone deciding which UTXOs are \"abandoned\" enough to seize.\n\nThe day Bitcoin starts choosing whose coins to invalidate based on policy is the day it stops being Bitcoin.",
"sig": "1bb80821c87a7d3a2b383d5afc1df9c6351bc025ca0e43ea4af7a6b190e2a471799f87faf0d369804b8bba65879708b39812ee4a2805467a77d6bb61bf0a1116"
}