Freezing Satoshi's Coins to Save Them
To shield Bitcoin from the quantum computer, developers propose freezing nearly a third of the supply, Satoshi's coins included. The move that defends the chain is the very one it swore it would never make.
Bitcoin was built so that no authority could ever move a coin against its owner’s will. That promise, “your keys, your coins,” rests on a cryptographic certainty: without the private key, nothing moves. Quantum computing is starting to crack that certainty, and the defense its developers are preparing looks unsettlingly like the very thing Bitcoin swore to abolish.
The threat carries a laboratory name: harvest now, decrypt later. The moment an address sends a transaction, its public key is written into the ledger forever. A patient attacker can copy it today and wait for the machine able to derive the private key. In March 2026, Google researchers estimated that roughly 1,200 logical qubits would suffice to break Bitcoin’s elliptic-curve signature; a Project Eleven report places this “Q-Day” between 2030 and 2033.
Defense and Betrayal Become One
To head off the blow, BIP-361, published in April 2026 by six authors including Jameson Lopp, proposes a freeze. A three-phase schedule would first bar sending funds to legacy addresses, then, two years later, invalidate their signatures. Coins left unmigrated would go inert. This touches close to 6.5 million bitcoin, about a third of the supply, including the million-plus attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto.
From the protocol’s vantage point, freezing a coin to protect it and having it stolen by a quantum machine yield the same outcome: the holder no longer controls it. The only difference lies in intent and in an exit, a third phase still under study that would let owners prove their claim through a zero-knowledge proof. Saving the coins, then, begins with seizing them.
Who Decides Satoshi’s Fate?
Here is the paradox quantum computing forces open. Immutability, praised as a release from human judgment, becomes the trap: an exposed public key can no longer be hidden, and a ledger that forgets nothing cannot correct itself. To defend itself, Bitcoin must do what it forbade: decide which coins still have the right to move.
Ethereum, which stood up a dedicated team back in January 2026, bets on another route: letting each account swap its key without touching the ledger. Bitcoin has no such flexibility, and that is where its purity turns against it. The tacit expiry date now hanging over “your keys, your coins” is not one more betrayal: it is proof that no chain stays neutral when the unplanned-for arrives.