Quantum Computers Haven't Arrived Yet, Satoshi Nakamoto's 1.1 Million Bitcoins Have Already Become a Problem
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Quantum Computers Haven't Arrived Yet, Satoshi Nakamoto's 1.1 Million Bitcoins Have Already Become a Problem
The answer to this question lies not in cryptography, but in politics.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsWritten by: Clow
A zero-knowledge proof tool can help your Bitcoin evade quantum attacks in just 243 milliseconds. But Satoshi's 1.1 million coins? No hope.
It's not that quantum computers aren't powerful enough; it's that before they even arrive, the Bitcoin community is already fighting.
Project Eleven just released a zero-knowledge proof recovery tool that enables modern wallet holders to securely migrate assets before quantum attacks arrive. A benchmark run on a MacBook Air with an M5 chip showed proof generation in 243 milliseconds, verification in 40 milliseconds, and peak memory usage of 2.1 GB. Fast, light, and elegant.
But this solution has a critical flaw: it only works for HD wallets created after 2012.
Old coins from before 2012, including the approximately 1.1 million Bitcoin mined by Satoshi, are scattered across about 22,000 P2PK addresses, with about 50 BTC per address. These addresses have no parent key, no mnemonic phrase, and no derivation path that can be used to construct a zero-knowledge proof. Cryptographically, they are dead ends.
So the real question has never been 'when will quantum computers arrive,' but 'what to do with these 1.1 million old coins.'
The answer to this question lies not in cryptography, but in politics.
01 Who Can Save Themselves, Who Is Sentenced to Death
To understand this crisis, first clarify one thing: not all Bitcoin is equally vulnerable.
On-chain assets are roughly divided into three tiers based on the degree of public key exposure.
The safest are hash-protected unused addresses, where public keys are hidden behind hashes; quantum computers can do nothing about them. These account for more than 65% of the total circulating supply.
The middle tier consists of modern addresses that have exposed public keys, due to address reuse or Taproot design, where public keys are permanently recorded on-chain. This accounts for approximately 4.5 million to 5.2 million BTC.
The most dangerous are early P2PK addresses, where public keys are written directly in transaction scripts, accounting for approximately 1.7 million to 1.9 million coins.
The middle tier can be saved. Project Eleven's tool is designed precisely for them.
The principle is called 'Signature Upgrade,' proposed by researchers Or Sattath and Shai Wyborski in 2023. While the Shor algorithm can break elliptic curve signatures, it is powerless against hash functions.
Private keys for sub-addresses in modern HD wallets are all derived from the master key via HMAC-SHA512 hashing. Even if a quantum computer deduces the private key of a sub-address, it cannot reverse upward across the hash barrier.
Wallet holders only need to prove they possess the parent key upstream of the derivation path, generate a zero-knowledge proof, bind it to a quantum-resistant address, and complete the migration. This does not expose the master private key or mnemonic phrase and is verifiable on-chain.
But old coins from before 2012 do not have this 'key tree.' During 2009 to 2010, when Satoshi was active, Bitcoin wallets generated addresses completely randomly each time, independently of one another.
There is no parent-child hierarchy, no master key, and no BIP-39 mnemonic phrase. Logically speaking from a cryptographic perspective, Project Eleven's solution is completely ineffective for them.
1.7 million Bitcoin are blocked from the self-rescue path by a technical dividing line drawn in 2012.
02 Four Solutions, Four Ways to Die
Problems that technology cannot solve must be handed over to politics. Four paths lie before the community, each leading to some form of disaster.
First: Inaction, allowing liquidation. Strictly adhere to 'Private Keys are Justice,' whoever has the quantum computer first takes them. It sounds the purest, but the cost is the highest.
1.7 million Bitcoin regarded by the market as 'permanently lost' would suddenly flood the secondary market, equivalent to an additional 8% to 9% of circulating supply appearing out of thin air. The 'Digital Gold' narrative would be shaken by the actual change of hands of underlying property rights.
Second: Mandatory freeze. The BIP-361 proposal plans to prohibit depositing new funds into vulnerable addresses in the third year after launch, and completely abolish the spending validity of traditional signatures in the fifth year. Unmigrated coins would be permanently locked.
Economically, this equals actively destroying 1.7 million Bitcoin, creating a permanent deflation. But the community's reaction was direct: To prevent assets from being stolen, you decided to confiscate users' money first?
When protocol developer Mark Erhardt shared this proposal on social media, the comment section was flooded with abuse.
Third: 'Hourglass' rate limiting. Developer Hunter Beast proposed a compromise solution, acknowledging the fact that old coins might be stolen, but setting an extremely low threshold for spending from P2PK addresses.
Each block confirms at most one P2PK transaction, with a single transaction limit of 1 BTC. Even if all of Satoshi's 1.1 million coins were controlled by quantum hackers, selling them off would have to be stretched out over hundreds of years.
Attackers wanting to cash out would have to bid fiercely in the fee market; this money would eventually flow to miners, becoming a long-term subsidy for network security.
Fourth: Mandatory redistribution. The most radical option. Through a hard fork, 'treasury-ize' ownerless old coins and distribute them proportionally to active holders who migrate to quantum-resistant addresses.
The total supply remains 21 million, but the ledger promise is directly overturned. The result is almost predictable: community split, multiple 'orthodox chains' running in parallel, and catastrophic divergence in valuation.
Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson's criticism of BIP-361 hit the nail on the head: This is not a soft fork, this is a hard fork.
Any attempt to forcibly freeze early assets by setting a deadline is a trampling of Bitcoin's property rights principles. BIP-361 co-author Jameson Lopp also admitted that this proposal is more like an 'emergency backup plan sketch,' not the final answer.
Ironically, the goal of all four solutions is to protect Bitcoin's value, but each one is destroying what it attempts to protect. Allowing theft destroys value storage, mandatory freezes destroy property rights promises, rate limiting admits the legitimacy of theft, and redistribution destroys ledger immutability.
This is not a technical problem; it is a political problem with no correct answer.
03 The Market Has Already Started Voting
Most investors still treat the quantum threat as a long-term problem of 'when hardware will meet the standard.'
But the market is already pricing it in.
In January 2026, Jefferies announced it was clearing its 10% Bitcoin holding in its pension model portfolio.
The strategist stated clearly: The reason for clearing was not that quantum computers have already been launched, but the governance uncertainty demonstrated by the Bitcoin community regarding 'how to dispose of early vulnerable coins.'
This is the real expectation gap. Physicists are still struggling with error-corrected logical qubits in the lab, while Wall Street is already discounting for governance risk.
For institutional capital seeking legal certainty, the logic is simple: If Satoshi's coins can be forcibly frozen by code, then any coins in the future can be deprived by consensus.
Also不可忽视 is the hidden risk of 'Harvest Now, Decrypt Later.' The blockchain ledger is public; attackers are already downloading and storing the entire Bitcoin ledger.
Once practical quantum computers emerge, they won't need to access the network; they can crack those old wallets with exposed public keys offline. This delayed attack makes the governance game even more urgent.
Differences in statistical methodologies among various institutions regarding vulnerable Bitcoin are also worth noting. The BIP-361 proposal states that over 34% of the supply has exposed public keys, Citibank's figure is 25% to 37%, Glassnode statistics are about 30%, and Talos's full ledger scan gives 34.5%. Regardless of which number is taken, it means at least one-quarter of Bitcoin is under long-term quantum threat.
Moreover, Project Eleven's tool is currently just an early prototype that has not undergone security auditing, supports only three types of wallets, and requires highly controversial consensus rule modifications before going on mainnet. Treating it as a ready-to-use emergency channel is premature.
Back to that fundamental question: How can Bitcoin complete a liquidation of historical technical generations without destroying its own property rights principles?
No one has the answer. The quantum computer hasn't arrived yet, but the crisis of faith has already arrived.
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