Bitcoin's quantum protection proposal could freeze vulnerable BTC

Though present in public discussion for years, the threat of quantum attacks – and the overall development of quantum computing – saw a massive increase in interest in 2026 as President Donald Trump’s administration unveiled $2 billion in investments to develop the technology.

The community around the world’s premier cryptocurrency, Bitcoin ($BTC), is seemingly responding to the long-perceived danger by proposing new measures to safeguard the digital asset.

Specifically, the BIP-361 proposal aims to incentivize individual holders to take the threat seriously by slowly raising the barriers to accessing funds held in accounts that have not seen proper security upgrades.

Here’s how Bitcoin might be secured against quantum computing attacks

According to the initiative’s website, the change would happen in three stages. First, sending funds to quantum-vulnerable addresses would be disallowed. Second, ECDSA/Schnorr spends would be invalidated in a change that would be ‘triggered by a well-publicized flag-day five years after activation.’

Finally, a still-unknown method of recovering legacy unspent transaction output (UTXO) would be developed and implemented as the final stage.

Notably, the proposal could, if adopted, have consequences for Satoshi Nakamoto as his vast and dormant Bitcoin holdings would effectively be frozen unless they implement changes for better security concerning the quantum computing threat.

Are Bitcoin holders at risk due to quantum computing advancements?

Elsewhere, recent developments concerning $BTC security in the era of advancing quantum computing indicate that the BIP-361 proposal is rather timely.

Indeed, Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) published research in March indicating that a sufficiently powerful computer could successfully hijack a Bitcoin transaction within just 9 minutes in 41% of the cases.

In April, the dire warning gained new evidence of its likely accuracy when a researcher managed to crack a 15-bit elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) key on a publicly accessible quantum computer by deriving the private key from the public key.

Lastly, Glassnode estimated in May that 30.2% of Bitcoin’s issued supply – 6.04 million BTCs – were exposed to quantum computing attacks on account of having publicly-visible keys.

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