📢Bitcoin Takes Step Towards Quantum Fix as Experts Diverge on Urgency of Threat

🪙Bitcoin developers lay the groundwork for post-quantum upgrades, but experts vary on whether the threat is years or decades away.

🪙Bitcoin developers have taken another step towards addressing the risk posed by future quantum computers, merging BIP 360 into the Bitcoin Improvement Proposals GitHub repository as the long-running debate over the timeline intensifies.

🪙BIP 360 introduces a new output type called Pay-to-Merkle-Root, or P2MR. The design disables a technical feature called key-path spending, which exposes public keys when coins are spent, and lays the groundwork for adding post-quantum signature schemes in future soft forks. The merge does not activate the change, but rather moves the proposal into formal review.

🪙Ethan Heilman, a cryptographic researcher and BIP 360 co-author, told Decrypt that the proposal addresses a specific weakness in Taproot, an upgrade added to the Bitcoin network in 2021.

🪙“The key spend is not quantum-safe because it exposes the public key," he said, "which means that a quantum attacker could attack the key spend and steal your funds, even if the script spend was totally safe.”

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