Bitcoin bulls debate Saylor’s hard fork fix for quantum threat

Saylor claims quantum won’t break Bitcoin but urges a hard fork to freeze vulnerable P2PK coins, cutting supply and igniting ethics, security and governance backlash.

MicroStrategy founder Michael Saylor stated that quantum computing will not break the Bitcoin network, proposing instead that the blockchain implement a hard fork upgrade to address potential vulnerabilities.

The backwards-incompatible upgrade would freeze quantum-vulnerable pay-to-public-key (P2PK) outputs, according to a post Saylor made on X, formerly known as Twitter. The proposal outlined that such a change would reduce the supply of bitcoin, increase security, and strengthen the network.

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The proposed hard fork would prevent Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, from spending coins associated with early P2PK addresses. The upgrade would also require nodes and miners to migrate to backwards-incompatible software.

“The Bitcoin quantum leap: Quantum computing won’t break Bitcoin (BTC) —it will harden it. The network upgrades, active coins migrate, lost coins stay frozen. Security goes up. Supply comes down. Bitcoin grows stronger,” Saylor wrote in the post.

The proposal drew criticism from members of the cryptocurrency community. One developer commented that the measures described were “extremely complex with colossal risk and externalities,” according to responses to the post. Other users questioned the ethics of freezing assets belonging to other parties.

Quantum computers pose a theoretical threat to Bitcoin’s cryptographic security, though experts suggest such capabilities remain years or decades away. Large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computers running Shor’s algorithm could potentially break the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) used by Bitcoin, allowing attackers to derive private keys from certain P2PK public keys.

The vulnerable outputs include unspent transaction outputs from the earliest days of the Bitcoin ledger, including those belonging to Satoshi Nakamoto and early Bitcoin developer Hal Finney. If a private key were compromised, an attacker could sign transactions and spend all bitcoin in the associated wallet.

Saylor serves as executive chairman of Strategy, a business intelligence firm that has accumulated significant bitcoin holdings as part of its corporate treasury strategy.