Bitcoin developers propose BIP-361 to mitigate future potential quantum attack risks

BlockBeats News, April 15th, one of the Bitcoin contributors, Jameson Lopp, and other cryptographers proposed a measure that could potentially force Bitcoin holders to move their tokens to a new post-quantum address; otherwise, their tokens would be irreversibly frozen by the network itself. In this scenario, holders would technically still "own" these coins but would lose the ability to transfer them.

This is known as Bitcoin Improvement Proposal BIP-361 and was updated in Bitcoin's official proposal repository on Tuesday under the title "Post-Quantum Migration and Legacy Signature Deprecation."

BIP-361 builds upon the BIP-360 proposal introduced in February. BIP-360 brought in a soft fork (a type of network upgrade) aimed at enabling a new transaction type called "Pay to Merkelized Abstract Syntax Tree" (P2MR). This approach draws from Bitcoin's Taproot (P2TR) framework but removes the key path spending, eliminating an element widely seen as vulnerable in the quantum era.

The BIP-361 proposal outlines the migration in three stages. Stage A, activated for three years, prohibits anyone from sending new Bitcoin to older, quantum-vulnerable addresses. You can still spend from these addresses but cannot receive any coins.

Stage B, activated for five years, will render old signature schemes (ECDSA and Schnorr) entirely obsolete, with the network rejecting any attempt to spend coins from wallets vulnerable to quantum attacks. Essentially, your coins will be frozen.

Finally, there is Stage C, which is a rescue plan still under research: holders of frozen wallets may have the option to prove ownership through zero-knowledge proofs (a method of proving knowledge of a secret without revealing the secret itself). If successful, the coins frozen in Stage B can be recovered.