CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju on Wednesday said Bitcoin (BTC) may ultimately need to freeze dormant wallets, including the roughly 1 million BTC attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto, as part of a future protocol response to the threat posed by quantum computing.
Proposal To Freeze Satoshi’s Bitcoin Highlights Quantum Risk
In an X post, Ki argued that a quantum-resistant upgrade could require restricting access to coins held in older address formats whose public keys are already exposed onchain.
That group includes some of the earliest mined Bitcoin, much of which has remained inactive for more than a decade.
He estimated that about 6.89 million BTC could be vulnerable under a scenario in which sufficiently powerful quantum machines are able to derive private keys from exposed public keys.
Of that total, roughly 1.91 million BTC are held in pay-to-public-key (P2PK) addresses, while as much as 4.98 million BTC may have revealed public keys through prior transactions.
Dormant Supply Seen As High-Value Target
Ki said long-inactive holdings, approximately 3.4 million BTC, could become a primary incentive for attackers if quantum capabilities reach a level where such operations are economically viable.
At current market prices, those coins represent hundreds of billions of dollars in potential value.
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Because the exposure of a public key is permanent once it appears onchain, he warned that coins considered secure today could become spendable by an attacker in the future if the network does not migrate to quantum-resistant cryptography.
Social Consensus Identified As Main Constraint
Ki said implementing defensive measures would require broad agreement across the Bitcoin ecosystem, a process he described as historically slow and contentious.
He compared the potential debate to past governance disputes such as the multi-year block size conflict and the failed SegWit2x proposal.
Freezing dormant wallets, he noted, would challenge Bitcoin’s core principle that control over coins is determined solely by private keys.
The lack of consensus could lead to competing protocol versions if different groups adopt incompatible approaches to quantum security.
Ki framed the issue as a timing problem rather than a purely technical one, arguing that development of quantum-resistant solutions is progressing faster than the social coordination needed to deploy them.
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