Analytics Company CEO: “Freezing All of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Assets May Be Necessary to Save Bitcoin”

CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju has brought up one of the most controversial topics regarding the future of Bitcoin.

Satoshi Nakamoto’s Assets and Early Bitcoin Wallets May Be Frozen

According to Ju, a radical decision may be needed to protect the security of the Bitcoin network in the face of a potential quantum computing breakthrough: freezing approximately 1 million $BTC belonging to Satoshi Nakamoto and millions of coins held in old address types.

Ju points out that Bitcoin is based on cryptography that is currently considered “practically impossible to break” against classical computers, but quantum computers could change this assumption.

Ju states that a sufficiently powerful quantum machine could, under certain conditions, derive a private key from a public key, which could mean that coins that seem secure today could become spendable by attackers tomorrow.

According to Ju, approximately 6.89 million $BTC held in publicly disclosed addresses on the chain are potentially vulnerable to quantum attacks. In particular, approximately 3.4 million $BTC that have been inactive for over 10 years (of which about 1 million is associated with Satoshi) create an incentive worth hundreds of billions of dollars at current prices.

Bitcoin’s security model is based on the assumption that attacks would be economically impractical. However, the fact that quantum attacks are becoming cheap and feasible could fundamentally undermine this assumption.

Ju believes that the harsh reality of a potential quantum update might be that coins in old addresses would be frozen by design. This could apply not only to Satoshi’s coins but to all users who used the old address types.

Two possibilities stand out in this scenario:

• The protocol upgrade removes spending authority from risky addresses (effectively freezing the coins),
• Or quantum attackers could seize these coins.

Ju argues that even securely stored private keys can become useless if their owners don’t participate in a protocol update in time.

Ju, recalling how difficult it is to achieve social consensus within the Bitcoin community, noted that the block size debate lasted more than three years and led to hardforks. He also pointed out that the SegWit2x initiative failed to garner sufficient community support.

Freezing Satoshi’s coins and those of other inactive addresses could contradict Bitcoin’s fundamental philosophical principles of “immutability” and “inviolability of ownership.” This could pave the way for new divisions and the emergence of competing Bitcoin forks.

According to Ju, the issue isn’t whether quantum day (Q-day) is five or ten years away. The real problem is that technology always advances faster than social consensus. “Developers aren’t the bottleneck, social consensus is,” says Ju, arguing that quantum discussions should begin today.

*This is not investment advice.