Freezing Satoshi's Bitcoin 🥶

A new Bitcoin Improvement Proposal would implement a soft fork to freeze quantum-vulnerable coins—including Satoshi Nakamoto's billions.

Author

Stephen Graves
April 15, 2026

đź“ť What you need to know

A new Bitcoin Improvement Proposal aims to address the looming threat of “Q-Day,” the moment when a sufficiently powerful quantum computer is able to break the elliptic-curve cryptography underpinning Bitcoin private keys.

BIP-361 would disable Bitcoin's existing signature verification over a five-year window, and freeze coins that fail to migrate to quantum-resistant addresses. Those coins amount to billions of dollars in BTC, including the stash owned by Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

The proposal has proved contentious, with critics arguing that freezing coins is “confiscation, full stop,” undermining the founding principle of “not your keys, not your coins.” Even one of its own authors, Jameson Lopp, has conceded that, “I don't like it myself. I wrote it because I like the alternative even less.”

New Bitcoin Proposal Would Freeze Coins to Counter Quantum Threat - Decrypt

The proposal would phase out Bitcoin's original security methods and freeze coins that don't move in time.

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