Back estimates that Satoshi has between 500,000 and 1 million quantum-vulnerable BTC.
Back spoke out in favor of voluntary migration, in contrast to the BIP-361 proposal.
Adam Back, co-founder of Blockstream and one of the most recognized cryptographers in the Bitcoin ecosystem, commented this April 16 at the Paris Blockchain Week that the future post-quantum migration of Bitcoin could inadvertently solve one of the most debated mysteries of the ecosystem: how many coins attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto are still accessible.
“This migration to the post-quantum address format can tell us how many of those coins Satoshi still has,” he said, noting that the Bitcoin creator would have between 500,000 and 1 million estimated BTC. The Arkham platform estimates that the wallets linked to Nakamoto contain 1.09 million BTCequivalent to almost USD 82,000 million.
Back’s logic is that if the migration is voluntary and any owner who wants to protect their funds must move them to a new address format, the coins that remain immobile after that process could reasonably be considered lost. If Satoshi coins are not moving, that would suggest that their private keys no longer exist or that their owner decided to abandon them.
Back’s statements came two days after Jameson Lopp and five other authors published BIP-361, the proposal that proposes restricting the future movement of currencies in formats vulnerable to quantum, including those of Satoshi. As CriptoNoticias reported, this proposal generated rejection in part of the ecosystem due to the precedent that it would imply freezing user currencies.
Back, during Paris Blockchain Week, positioned at the opposite end. He acknowledged being in favor of making the migration optional, letting each user voluntarily decide to move their funds to post-quantum addresses.
On the other hand, at the same event, Back noted that the institutional wave in Bitcoin has not yet arrived and that it will take years to complete:
Most of the world’s money is managed by professional managers who handle pension funds and life insurance products. The only way most people will get exposure to Bitcoin is through those institutions. That wave will activate in the coming years.
Adam Back, co-founder of Blockstream.
Adam Back and quantum FUD in Bitcoin
As reported by CriptoNoticias, Back had already ruled out that the quantum threat to Bitcoin is imminent. He noted that current quantum hardware is “too basic” to represent a real risk and estimates that the ecosystem has approximately between “1 and 2 decades” to prepare for migration.
Their statements on April 16 in Paris are consistent with an orderly, voluntary migration without extreme urgency, in contrast to what was stated by companies such as Google, Grayscale and Cloudflare who set 2029 as a deadline to migrate their own infrastructures to post-quantum cryptography.
The post-quantum debate in Bitcoin remains divided between those who argue that deadlines are shortening and that the protocol’s governance is not prepared to respond, and those, like Back, who maintain that technical work is progressing reasonably and that urgency is disconnected from the actual state of the hardware.