A new draft proposal called BIP-361 is now circulating among Bitcoin developers, and it’s forcing a deep governance question front and center: Bitcoin could change its rules to freeze coins at risk from future quantum computers. The technical focus is on old pay-to-public-key, or P2PK, outputs. These were among Bitcoin’s earliest address types, and they put the public key itself on chain. That’s relevant because a sufficiently advanced quantum computer could, in theory, extract the private key from that public key and steal the coins.
BIP-360 identified those outputs, including the roughly 1.1 million bitcoin commonly attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto, as especially vulnerable. Under the BIP-361 plan, Bitcoin would create a phased sunset for legacy ECDSA and Schnorr signatures, eventually restricting those spends after a 5-year deadline. Supporters argue this preemptive move is good stewardship. They see it as defense against letting quantum actors simply take the biggest dormant pools of bitcoin.
Critics see the opposite: they say freezing coins that are still valid under the original rules undermines Bitcoin’s core promise of immutability and could set a lasting precedent for changing protocol rules. This is not just a technical puzzle. It’s a live dispute over whether defending the network ever justifies rewriting its foundational rules.