Avalanche Founder Suggests Freezing Satoshi’s BTC Holdings To Protect Against Quantum Attack

The founder of Avalanche is controversially calling for Bitcoin developers to freeze the roughly 1.1 million BTC held by Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator.

On Dec. 9, Emin Gün Sirer, the founder and CEO of Ava Labs, the development team behind Avalanche, warned that Satoshi’s Bitcoin stash may be especially vulnerable to a quantum computing attack in the future.

Sirer noted that Satoshi’s BTC were mined using the outdated Pay-To-Public-Key (P2PK) format, which “reveals the public key and gives the attacker time to grind.”

“As [quantum computing] gets threatening, the Bitcoin community might want to look into freezing Satoshi’s coins, or more generally, provide a sunset date and freeze all coins at P2PK utxos,” Sirer said.

Avalanche’s founder noted that current Bitcoin wallets and blockchain networks do not use P2PK, with the format only being used “in the early days of Bitcoin.”

The proposal has attracted pushback on social media, with many commenters opposing freezing Satoshi’s BTC on the basis of centralization concerns.

“Sunsetting Satoshi’s coins will fundamentally challenge the ownership logic of crypto,” said Gayau.eth, an X user.

R8raq questioned how developers could clearly define the coins held by Satoshi. “To provide a sunset date and freeze all coins at P2PK utxos [would] be a tremendous[ly] controversial issue!” they added.

Xspacewanderer speculated that if any attacker was able to compromise Satoshi’s wallet, the coins would be flagged on-chain, making it hard for the hacker to sell the Bitcoins.

Quantum computing threat

Sirer’s comments come as discourse surrounding what threat quantum computing could pose to blockchains is again circulating across the crypto community.

Last month, Justin Drake, an Ethereum Foundation researcher, named quantum computing-resistance as a key area of research as part of Beam Chain — an upgrade roadmap Drake proposed to overhaul Ethereum’s Beacon Chain consensus layer.

In October, Vitalik Buterin similarly called for research into quantum-resistance as part of Ethereum’s long-term technical roadmap. Buterin noted that Metaculus, a large reputation-based online prediction solicitation platform, currently estimates quantum computing may be able to break existing cryptography techniques during the 2030s, with a median estimate falling on the year 2040.

Despite Sirer warning that Bitcoin mined using the P2PK format may become vulnerable to quantum computing before other aspects of the web3 ecosystem, Sirer said “realistic attacks on cryptocurrencies are still a long ways off.”

Sirer noted that the current design of Bitcoin and other blockchains ensures that users’ public keys are not revealed to the public outside of when transactions are issued. As such quantum attackers can only launch an attack when for a brief period of time when a user’s public key can be seen in a transaction but before the transaction is incorporated as part of a blockchain.

“The faster the chain, the harder the problem,” Sirer said. “In the case of Bitcoin, the quantum attacker needs to break the key within 5 to 30 minutes. For Avalanche, the attacker only has one second, if that.”

Sirer also notes that innovations in lattice cryptography could offer further resilience to quantum cryptography.