Bitcoin reached an unexpected milestone this week, as exactly 16 years have passed since Satoshi Nakamoto published a technical solution on the BitcoinTalk forum designed to protect Bitcoin from the computers of the future, quantum ones especially. Today, as technology giants steadily develop quantum processors, that archived post has transformed from an old theory into an active roadmap for Bitcoin Core.

The scenario now being tested by developers is built entirely on the mechanism proposed by Bitcoin's creator: the forced replacement of the network's cryptographic components through a hard deadline tied to a specific block height. Sixteen years later, this logic has formed the basis of the official BIP-360 and BIP-361 proposals.

Implementing Nakamoto's formula and its cost

Satoshi Nakamoto correctly identified the vulnerable point: quantum computers using Shor's algorithm could potentially threaten older addresses whose ECDSA public keys have already been exposed, allowing an attacker to derive a private key from a public key.

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The area at risk, which Bitcoin's creator planned to protect through a mandatory soft fork, includes about 35% of the circulating supply, or approximately 6.9 million BTC. These coins are held in wallets from the early era using P2PK outputs and in addresses affected by address reuse.

Satoshi Nakamoto outlining Bitcoin's upgrade mechanism in 2010, Source: BitcoinTalk

Modern technical committees have packaged Satoshi's two-stage instruction into strict migration rules:

• Transition to the bc1z format: the introduction of a new type of quantum-resistant address based on Merkle-tree cryptography.
• Setting a block-height deadline: the same point of no return envisioned by Satoshi, after which old wallets would be completely locked.

Implementing this 16-year-old plan would impose serious costs on the network. As Bitcoin's creator anticipated, replacing the algorithm with a stronger one would increase transaction data size by approximately 57%, raising transfer fees for ordinary users.

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However, the main drama concerns millions of lost BTC from Bitcoin's early era, whose owners would be physically unable to comply with Satoshi's requirement to update their software. To prevent these holdings from being compromised by quantum attacks, the network would have to isolate the balances permanently, with no possibility of recovery.

The historical irony is that Satoshi Nakamoto's own wallets would be among the first to fall under his deadlines for the sake of the network's survival. The price of activating his own plan could be the permanent closure of his digital legacy.

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