The paper mentions using an Elements based sidechain like Liquid to possibly safeguard vulnerable bitcoin by enabling adjudication and recovery mechanisms through a community-ran federation.
This highlights Liquid's federated governance model, which can enable faster quantum readiness.
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Bitcoin mainchain changes require global consensus. Conservative governance is a feature for base layer security.
Liquid's consensus model (11-of-15 functionary operators) with a federated governance enables faster protocol upgrades for testing post-quantum cryptography without any upstream risk to Bitcoin.
The Blockstream (nprofile…g8xl) Research team recently demonstrated SHRINCS post-quantum signatures on mainnet, without a soft fork, using Liquid's native smart contract language, Simplicity.
Users can now protect their Liquid Bitcoin and issued assets against future quantum computer attacks.
Blockstream Research has deployed post-quantum signature verification on the LiquidNetwork (nprofile…0cnd) using Simplicity - a first on a production Bitcoin sidechain.
Opt-in quantum protection, available today. No consensus changes required.
How it works: Simplicity smart contracts enable custom spending conditions on Liquid. Lock your coins to a contract that requires post-quantum signatures to spend.
There are now real transactions on Liquid mainnet using SHRINCS, our optimized hash-based signature scheme.
The verifier library is open source and available now for wallet developers to integrate:
https://blog.blockstream.com/blockstream-research-demonstrates-quantum-resistant-transaction-signing-on-liquid-using-simplicity-smart-contracts/
Liquid is one instance of the open-source Elements platform that Blockstream maintains. As a fork of the Bitcoin Core codebase, it has long served as a proving grounds for upgrades to Bitcoin.
Schnorr signatures, SegWit, and OP_CSV were proven on Liquid before Bitcoin adoption. To this day, Elements maintains parity with Bitcoin Core, enabling bidirectional feature upgrades.
https://blog.liquid.net/bitcoin-core-and-elements/
Bitcoin maximizes decentralization with slow governance. As a sidechain, Liquid complements this, with distributed trust and faster iteration.
As quantum computing advances, Bitcoin will eventually need post-quantum cryptography.
Liquid, or another Elements-based network, can serve as a strong production environment for researchers to validate the robustness and usefulness of these upgrades before any mainchain deployment.