🎯🖥️ BITCOIN RISES TO THE ANTI-QUANTUM SHIELD: BIP 360 IS HERE 🖥️🎯
Bitcoin takes a strategic step towards post-quantum security: the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 360 (BIP-360) has officially been merged into the BIP repository, fully entering the technical roadmap of the network.
The goal is to drastically reduce the risk that future quantum computers may derive private keys from exposed public keys on-chain, thus threatening the funds stored on certain legacy and Taproot address formats.
At the heart of BIP-360 is the introduction of a new type of output called Pay-to-Merkle-Root (P2MR), designed to maintain the flexibility of Taproot scripts while removing the “key-path spend,” which is currently considered the most vulnerable point against quantum attacks.
Instead of directly revealing a public key on the blockchain, P2MR requires spending exclusively through the script path, thereby reducing the attack surface for Shor and other quantum algorithms against ECDSA/Schnorr.
The authors of BIP – including Hunter Beast, Ethan Heilman, and Isabel Foxen Duke – estimate that today about a third of the BTC supply is potentially vulnerable, including historical P2PK addresses, reused addresses, and many Taproot addresses used by Lightning, BitVM, and other scalability solutions.
The integration of BIP-360 does not mean that the upgrade is already active on the network, but it marks the first formal step towards a broader post-quantum defense strategy that, in the future, will also include genuinely post-quantum signing schemes and possible soft forks dedicated to migrating users to safer addresses.