On December 20, Nic Carter — founder of smart contracts and co-founder of Castle Island Ventures — published a lengthy article. In it, he noted that leading quantum theorist Scott Aaronson’s research indicates breaking Bitcoin with quantum computing is merely an “extremely difficult” engineering challenge, not a requirement for new basic physics discoveries. Carter pointed out Bitcoin could theoretically implement a soft fork to adopt a post-quantum (PQ) signature scheme; some PQ encryption/signature schemes already exist. The main hurdles, however, are selecting the specific PQ scheme, organizing the soft fork, and migrating all addresses holding tens of millions in combined balances. As a result, mitigating Bitcoin’s quantum decryption risk could take nearly a decade. Further, a large portion of vulnerable Bitcoin sits in abandoned addresses, and their owners can’t be forced to move the funds. Even if Bitcoin upgrades to PQ signatures, it would still face the risk of 1.7 million BTC being stolen at once by quantum attackers. Not only does Bitcoin need an organized, timely upgrade — but the community must also reach a collective agreement to lock those 1.7 million BTC, a first in Bitcoin’s history. Carter is urging the Bitcoin community and developers to act now on quantum threats, rather than dismissing the risk or being overly optimistic.
