Emin Gün Sirer, founder and CEO of Ava Labs, has proposed freezing 1 million BTC belonging to Satoshi Nakamoto due to risks associated with the advancement of quantum computing.
There is the issue of Satoshi’s 1m Bitcoin. @hosseeb just reminded me that Satoshi’s early minded coins used the very old Pay-To-Public-Key (P2PK) format, which reveals the public key and gives the attacker time to grind, for the mother of all cryptography bounties. P2PK isn’t…
— egs9000?⚔️ (@el33th4xor) December 9, 2024
The expert noted that wallets presumably linked to the creator of the first cryptocurrency used the early P2PK format. This format fully reveals the public key, allowing attackers time to attempt brute-force attacks.
Modern addresses like P2PKH offer better protection as they only publish the hash of the key.
“As quantum computers become a threat, the Bitcoin community might consider freezing Satoshi’s coins or, more generally, setting a sunset date for the format and freezing all assets on P2PK,” concluded the head of Ava Labs.
Not everyone agreed with this idea in the comments. Some called it at least controversial, reminding of property rights.
Others doubted the immediate threat posed by quantum computers.
why freeze Satoshi’s coins? The possibility to access an old-format wallet is a feature, not a bug. In a hundred years, it might be like discovering a long-lost galleon filled with gold.
— fed | flow ai (@feulf) December 10, 2024
“The possibility to access an old-format wallet is a feature, not a bug. In a hundred years, it might be like discovering a long-lost galleon filled with gold,” wrote the founder of the Flow AI platform, known as fed.
According to a theory put forward on the BTCparser project website, Satoshi Nakamoto is alive and has become a “mega whale.” He has not touched the original 2009 coins to avoid unwanted attention but has accumulated a large number of bitcoins since 2010, distributed across numerous wallets. The author of the hypothesis believes Satoshi is gradually spending these funds.
In a documentary released in October, Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery, aired by HBO, Canadian programmer Peter Todd was named as the creator of Bitcoin. Despite his denial, the film’s director, Cullen Hoback, insists on this version.
Earlier in December, American spot Bitcoin ETF providers accumulated more coins than are attributed to the creator of the first cryptocurrency.