Viewpoint: The Bitcoin community is forming a preliminary consensus on quantum threats and promoting a roadmap for anti quantum upgrades

According to a report by Golden Finance on May 4th, Alex Thorn, the research director of Galaxy Digital, stated that as quantum computing hardware advances at an accelerated pace, the Bitcoin community is shifting from a dispersed debate to forming a preliminary consensus on quantum threats. The core direction is to gradually introduce quantum resistant cryptography (PQC) through soft forks to achieve address system upgrades and long-term security guarantees. The report points out that the current Bitcoin signature mechanism using elliptic curve digital signature algorithm can theoretically be cracked by the Scheuer algorithm, and the early p2pkh addresses of about 2 million BTC face the potential risk of "collecting first and decrypting later" due to the public key being exposed. The community tends to promote a "migration window period" mechanism, guiding users to transfer assets to anti quantum new addresses, and freezing or destroying non migrated assets after a grace period of many years to prevent large-scale selling pressure from impacting the market in extreme situations. In addition, consensus also includes enhancing "encryption agility," which allows protocols to switch signature algorithms without interrupting the network. The current solution tends to adopt a dual signature mechanism that combines ECDSA and PQC (such as Dilithium) in parallel, ensuring security redundancy while smoothly transitioning. Analysis suggests that this route transforms quantum threats from 'black swan events' into manageable technological upgrades, which helps to solidify Bitcoin's security foundation as a long-term value storage asset.