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BIP-361 proposes freezing every bitcoin that doesn't migrate to a quantum-safe address within five years of activation. If you're incapacitated, in prison, or simply unaware of the deadline, your coins aren't stolen. They're frozen by consensus. The justification: 34% of all bitcoin have exposed public keys on-chain. If a quantum computer existed, those coins could be stolen and dumped. The proposal wants to invalidate legacy address types before that happens. The problem: Bitcoin has survived 80%+ drawdowns. The network would recover from a quantum-enabled theft. What it might not recover from is the precedent that consensus rules can freeze coins based on address type. If you can invalidate addresses for quantum protection, governments will point to that precedent to freeze "sanctioned" coins next. Two-thirds of the vulnerable supply comes from address reuse by a small number of large custodians. That's fixable today. No protocol change needed. Exchanges just stop reusing addresses. The Presidio Bitcoin report found that with 25% of block space dedicated to migration, 90% of bitcoin's value could move to quantum-safe addresses in four days. Post-quantum signature schemes already exist. Developer discussion on quantum has gone from 5% to 50% of the mailing list in two years. The work is happening. The right approach is voluntary migration, not protocol-level coercion with a deadline. Bitcoin's core value proposition is that no one can freeze your money. BIP-361 proposes doing exactly that.

I find it really funny that people are raging against the proposal to freeze quantum vulnerable addresses. You’re tilting at windmills, friend. If a QC materializes then It’s going to happen. You can’t stop it. Basic game theory. The fork without the giant quantum bonanza is the more valuable fork, and it is the one that will be chosen by capital, and therefore miners. Your little node and your 2 $BTC on a Seedsigner are very much irrelevant. $MSTR, $IBIT, $MSBT et al. will signal before any hardfork is activated and all intelligent capital will follow them. 10M+ quantum-vulnerable $BTC will hit the market in a day. And it will be ever so over for you. I’m sorry. You may not like this. But it’s inevitable. Cry about it.

BREAKING: Bitcoin developers have proposed BIP-361 to freeze early Bitcoin addresses that have quantum vulnerabilities. This includes Satoshi wallets and other OG dormant wallets from the 2010-11 era. It's a big step, as these wallets hold over 4M BTC and are at high risk from future quantum computing attacks.

BIP-361 wants to freeze Satoshi's coins to protect against quantum computers. This might be the most dangerous idea in Bitcoin's history. And the threat it's solving isn't even real. Shor's algorithm theoretically breaks elliptic curve cryptography. Theoretically. The machines that could actually do this don't exist. We need millions of stable, error-corrected qubits. Today's best hardware has thousands and isn't close. We're decades away. Maybe more. But even if quantum computers eventually cracked old P2PK addresses, so what? Coins re-entering circulation isn't a crisis. It's a Gold Rush. People race to recover forgotten wallets. Supply hits the market. Prices adjust. Holders who care migrate to quantum-resistant addresses. The market absorbs it. That's not a bug. That's Bitcoin working exactly as designed. "But Satoshi's coins..." What about them? Satoshi never gave anyone authority over those coins. Not Jameson Lopp. Not the developers. Not the community. The whole point of Bitcoin is that nobody freezes your coins. Nobody. Not even with good intentions. Here's the precedent that should terrify you: once you establish that coins can be frozen for their own protection, you've introduced permissioned holding into a permissionless system. The Bitcoin that can freeze lost coins to protect us from hypothetical quantum threats is the same Bitcoin that can freeze your coins to protect us from hypothetical criminals. The logic is identical. The door, once opened, doesn't close. Solve quantum resistance the Bitcoin way. Better address standards, user education, voluntary migration. That's how every legitimate upgrade happens. Bitcoin's immutability isn't a bug to patch when it gets inconvenient. It's the whole product.