The Bitcoin community has blown up recently. Jameson Lopp, the Chief Technology Officer of Casa, together with several researchers, put forward a proposal called BIP-361 in mid-April. The core idea sounds a bit crazy: freeze all Bitcoin wallets that rely on old signature schemes, to prevent them from being cracked by quantum computers.

Why has this caused such a sensational reaction? Because the scale involved is truly enormous. According to estimates, about 5.6 million Bitcoin have not moved in over ten years, worth $4200 billion. Among them, the most striking is Satoshi Nakamoto’s holdings—about 1.1 million BTC, worth $740 billion today, with the public key already exposed on-chain. Once quantum computers reach a critical point, attackers could use Shor’s algorithm to work backward from the public key to the private key, directly taking those funds.

BIP-361 lays out a three-stage plan: first, ban transfers to old-style addresses; then, completely do away with ECDSA and Schnorr signatures; and finally, freeze all Bitcoin that have not been migrated. In an interview, Jameson Lopp admitted he knows everyone dislikes this proposal, and that he doesn’t like it either, but he likes it even less to watch hundreds of millions of Bitcoin be taken by quantum hackers.

How did the community respond? It blew up directly. Bitcoin Magazine editors, TFTC founders, and all sorts of crypto punks are all berating the proposal as “authoritarian confiscation.” Someone said, “We have to steal people’s money to prevent them from having their money stolen,” which is basically mockery. Discussions on Reddit are even more heated—someone said, “If, for hedging risk, wallets are frozen, then BTC is no longer BTC.”

But some people also acknowledge that Jameson Lopp’s concerns aren’t unfounded. The founder of Cysic pointed out that the proposal effectively makes ownership conditional—holding the keys no longer guarantees that you can spend your money. This does shake the promise of Bitcoin as “unstoppable money.”

Interestingly, the market response has been fairly calm. On Polymarket, the odds of “whether Satoshi will move Bitcoin in 2026” rose from 4.5% at the beginning of the year to 9.3%, but the increase is not large. This suggests most people still treat it as a governance discussion, not some immediate threat. However, Jameson Lopp warned that as long as any credible evidence shows that someone can use quantum computers to recover lost or fragile coins, the market will panic immediately.

So what is the essence of this debate? In fact, it’s a clash of Bitcoin’s deepest philosophy—whether ownership should come with conditions. Is the cost of defending against quantum threats worth it? Jameson Lopp chose to take the initiative, but the community clearly hasn’t decided on an answer yet.