García Prieto points out that the proposal to freeze BTC seeks to prevent the price from falling.
The specialist says that a consensus is necessary to know what to do with quantum computing.
“An aberration.” This is how the Spanish tax lawyer Clara García Prieto classifies the current debate on the freezing of bitcoins (BTC) that belong to Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, in case quantum computing manages to break the cryptography that protects them.
The jurist, who participated in episode 32 of the CriptoNoticias podcast Separating Money from the State, argued that this type of approach only seeks to contain financial distortions and avoid a massive impact on the market.
As you see it, the objective of this blockage would be to contain the price of the currency in the hypothetical case where the private keys of these old wallets were broken due to the action of quantum computing, HE release a massive flow of coins to the market and the price is pressured downwards due to the sudden increase in available supply.
“To me that seems like an aberration,” said the lawyer.
AI is a “danger” for banks and governments
According to the specialist, quantum computing represents a direct danger to technology based on symmetric cryptography, which will affect banks and government institutions long before impacting the Bitcoin ecosystem.
García Prieto stated that the risk has been misinterpreted by focusing it exclusively on the digital asset environment. In his opinion, there is a recurring concern every time companies like Google present new quantum chips, but analyzes often omit the overall global infrastructure.
“Quantum computing, if it comes, would not only affect Bitcoin but the technology that relies on symmetric cryptography, which involves banks, governments and other issues,” said the specialist.
This perspective aligns with recent statements by American investor Tim Draper. The Silicon Valley venture capitalist argued that traditional financial systems will be compromised long before quantum technology affects the Bitcoin network.
The above responds to the fact that banks operate under a strictly centralized structure and use configurations of Older encryption, such as RSA or AES. These mechanisms function as safes, but lack a distributed protocol to reverse a massive attack, which generates a silent fragility against the computers of the future.
Bitcoin consensus makes a difference
The differentiating factor between both systems lies in the governance and methods of adopting security updates. García Prieto emphasized that decentralized networks necessarily require the approval of their participants to apply structural modifications.
“To make a decision about a change there has to be consensus in the network, and that does not happen in other places,” explained the lawyer, while contrasting this model with the institutional rigidity of the traditional corporate sector, where “the CEO tells you ‘tomorrow we will migrate to such and such’ and it happens. Not here.”
Regarding the technical preparation of the Bitcoin network for the advanced computing scenario, García Prieto highlighted that developers already consider the necessary preventive measures through specific research branches.
“If there is already someone thinking about quantum computing, they are going to post-quantum things. And, in fact, there are already different issues that are already planned for how post-quantum is followed,” he asserted. And he recalled that, on a technical level, the network has the capacity to implement advanced quantum resistance cryptographic schemes by executing soft or hard forks if the situation warrants it.
García Prieto suggested that the transition to the quantum era is not limited by mathematical calculation factors, but by the capacity for human organization. The positive thing, he points out, is that, while the centralized financial system has deficiencies due to its hierarchical inflexibility, the Bitcoin network It has the architecture that will allow it to mutate towards post-quantum security standards.
As the lawyer concluded, the real challenge does not lie in the advancement of machines, but in the internal governance of information systems, since “the problem is not so much about quantum computing, but about consensus on what is going to be in front of it.”