Distribution method you mentioned definitely less controversial than other method i've seen. But aside from hard fork, it also add some technical complexity about changed mining reward & which Bitcoin from which vulnerable address/UTXO should be taken.

Would that be how the actual redistribution takes place? Or is it actually just a free-for-all treasure-hunting of vulnerable funds?

Moreover, what will probably happen is an exclusive and elite race, one which even Bitcoin developers and contributors couldn't join. The participants would only be those who have the resources. Who knows, it might even be the Lazarus Group who'd first acquire quantum computing capabilities to break open people's wallets? After all, they're trained, financed, ran by a government.

Perhaps we can only think of a proper redistribution after being certain that those vulnerable funds are recovered by saintly actors, which we cannot. Otherwise, perhaps rendering those QC-vulnerable funds unspendable is the most practical thing to do. And perhaps ethical, too.

No. Read Lopp's blogpost again. The burning would take place at least a year after the addition of "quantum proof" cryptography, as the idea is exactly that the users should migrate. I continue to not like the proposal though as a mandatory option -- only as a nuclear option to threaten attackers preventively, which ideally never should be used.

That's what Lopp fears when nothing is done via QCs, it's not a "redistribution proposal". A redistribution based on some arbitrary parameter ("treasure hunting") would indeed not make sense, and an "equal amount distributed to all currently active UTXOs" would have probably no effect because sell pressure would decrease the Bitcoin price or market cap, perhaps more than by the (pre-restribution) value of the redistributed coins, due to anticipation/panic/liquidation effects.

Best case is that even Satoshi moves (to an unused P2PKH or similar address) or migrates his coins voluntarily, and thus the burning isn't even necessary, but nobody knows if he's still able to do so. And a return of Satoshi to activity could also make Bitcoin crash, even if it would be bullish because we can probably expect Satoshi to be less prone to sell his coins instantly than an attacker. In the case of the more recent wallets with re-used addresses Lopp mentions, I guess however that more than 95-99% would be migrated or moved.

Perhaps the Bitcoin community could launch a campaign to move coins from re-used addresses, particularly older ones, now that the fees are relatively low? Otherwise when a quantum threat is visible on the horizon, this could make fees explode if everybody's moving/migrating ...

Of course. However most other proposals also add complexity. Regarding vulnerable addresses however, as I already wrote I would limit them to scripts which expose the private key from the beginning, like P2PK. This would cover probably most old coins affected by this problem.

You are right, there have been no such time when any government gave the seized funds back, but what if they tag these BTC as recovered BTC not seized so maybe they pass some bill where whoever recovered those BTC are responsible for giving them back to the rightful owner? Well, if that happens, then we might see thousands of people declaring themselves the Satoshi.

Or maybe if Satoshi also upgrades its wallet security by moving funds to QCs resistance wallet.

There is essentially no way to stop someone, somewhere from building a QC.  Whether it is in the US, China, the EU, UK, Japan etc, someone, somewhere will do it.  There is a ton of research on it going on and no way will it stop unless we move to some type of totalitarian system worldwide.  Whether a QC will eventually be able to cause an issue for bitcoin is somewhat open to debate but the length of time to respond with upgrades etc is quite long which is why people are discussing it now.  

Either with a QC or freezing coins the owner will no longer have access to them so it is just a question of whether they should be frozen or not.  It seems to be a no-brainer that freezing is preferable to what would probably amount to a destruction of bitcoin if they are not.  :-)  There would be a period of many years (5-10?) where people would know to move the coins or they'd be lost vs suddenly, one day, everyones coins are moved by a QC and (potentially) dumped.

It is obvious that Jameson Lopp is trying to push for the protection of Bitcoin from those who could use the early power of quantum computers to deopardize and steal Bitcoin from vulnerability wallets. There is need for the government to control the development of quantum computers so it wouldn't be used to steal from old or reused wallets that are vulnerable to attack and exploit.


Quantum computing is quite an expensive technology and I've heard that countries like USA, China including private companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon etc are spending billions of dollars on Quantum technologies research. Maybe soon we could start seeing the use of this computer that has higher performances than the super computers.

This has been one of the things Jameson Lopp was emphasizing on because he knows that by the time the quantum computer has reached the final stage where it could be used to break codes and sophisticated computations, it could have a vast implication on the Bitcoin Elliptic Curve Cryptography(ECC) which is responsible for the security of every transaction. We all need to stand in support of Bitcoin and the government ought to create implementations that will not compromise the Bitcoin cryptographic security that could be breached by the time the quantum computer is in full operational stage.

Indeed I do share in this mixed feeling as, most of us Bitcoiners and investors in this field like to view and believe that the vulnerabilities that might exists within the system is one that haven’t got nothing to do with the security of whatever wallets there might be, used in securing and storing of our Bitcoin hodlings.
The singular idea that this could be exploited by quantum computation simply means, nothing is ever safe as, it doesn’t stop with Satoshi’s starch but, every other exposed public key like you’ve said is a target.

We hope not to get to that point though but like he said, hope isn’t a strategy however, we can only hold on to what we’ve got.

Also, we can’t truly decide what to do with those starch because, we don’t own it and don’t know if the owner be it Satoshi and the long list of lost private key owners to some wallets out there might be, you never know what’s the deal with them for sure. Any compromise would be undermining the integrity of the innovation.

A big part of the quantum upgrade at the protocol level will be just moving the coins to safe addresses.
I cannot think of a similar congestion on the network.
Better to prepare earlier than later. Now the fees are very low from a historical perspective. Better act timely.