Opinion: The bitcoin community is reaching an initial consensus on the quantum threat, driving the development of an anti-quantum upgrade roadmap

BlockBeats news, on May 4, Galaxy Digital research director Alex Thorn stated that as quantum computing hardware advances rapidly, the Bitcoin community is shifting from fragmented debates toward forming a preliminary consensus on the quantum threat. The main approach is to gradually introduce post-quantum cryptography (PQC) via soft forks, enabling address system upgrades and long-term security assurance.

The report points out that Bitcoin's current signature mechanism, which uses the elliptic curve digital signature algorithm, can theoretically be broken by the Shor algorithm. About 2 million BTC in early p2pkh addresses face potential "collect now, decrypt later" risks because their public keys have been exposed. The community favors promoting a "migration window" mechanism, guiding users to move assets to new quantum-resistant addresses, and freezing or destroying un-migrated assets after a multi-year grace period to prevent extreme scenarios of mass selling impacting the market.

In addition, consensus also includes enhancing "cryptographic agility," meaning allowing the protocol to switch signature algorithms without interrupting the network. The current plan leans toward adopting a dual-signature mechanism with ECDSA and PQC (such as Dilithium) running in parallel, ensuring security redundancy and a smooth transition. Analysts believe this path turns the quantum threat from a "black swan" event into a manageable technology upgrade, helping to strengthen Bitcoin's security foundation as a long-term store of value asset.