Top cryptographers have not reached a consensus on Bitcoin's greatest quantum risk issue, but they recommend immediately initiating post-quantum signature planning.

BlockBeats News, June 13 — The Cryptography Advisory Committee convened by Coinbase stated that quantum computers currently do not pose a threat to blockchain, but the Bitcoin community should immediately begin technical planning for post-quantum signatures. The committee members include cryptography experts such as Scott Aaronson from the University of Texas at Austin, Dan Boneh from Stanford University, and Justin Drake from the Ethereum Foundation. The report pointed out that Bitcoin's risks are concentrated on early addresses. About 1.7 million BTC are stored in approximately 20,000 early public key addresses, which publicly reveal the owner’s public key on the chain, potentially facing quantum attack risks in the future. Many of these are believed to belong to Bitcoin’s anonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto and other holders with lost private keys, making proactive migration to more secure addresses impossible. Data from the research organization Project11 shows that another approximately 5 million BTC are exposed to potential risks due to address reuse, but most of these are considered active holdings in exchange wallets.

The controversy is not about whether to switch to quantum-resistant signatures, but how to handle unmigrated tokens. One side advocates setting a hard deadline after which the current Bitcoin signatures, ECDSA and Schnorr, will no longer be accepted, and unmigrated tokens will become unspendable to prevent future attackers from acquiring large amounts of BTC and impacting prices and network legitimacy. The other side argues that this is equivalent to confiscating assets, violating Bitcoin’s principle of absolute property rights, and could set a precedent for future government pressure to freeze tokens.

However, the committee refused to take sides on the issue of "abandoned tokens." The report states that there is no single correct answer to this problem and it should be decided by the Bitcoin community. But the committee clearly indicated that technical migration planning should begin immediately because supporting post-quantum signatures is an engineering effort independent of governance disputes and should not wait for their resolution; at the same time, clear communication is necessary to let users know that this issue is being taken seriously, because uncertainty itself is a risk.