According to BroadChain, on April 17, Bitcoinist reported that Nic Carter, founding partner of Castle Island Ventures, pointed out that as the industry transitions to post-quantum cryptography, Bitcoin faces three possible paths: freezing vulnerable early tokens, maintaining the status quo and accepting the consequences, or avoiding protocol-level confiscation through a legal "salvage" process.
Carter believes that if Bitcoin eventually deprecates elliptic curve signatures and relevant quantum computers emerge, approximately 1.7 million BTC from early pay-to-public-key outputs could be at risk of exposure. He posted on platform X, stating that discussions on quantum risk have shifted from a fringe concern to an engineering and governance issue for Bitcoin itself.
Carter anticipates that the upgrade path will go through a soft fork transition phase, ultimately completely disabling traditional signatures like ECDSA. However, the core challenge lies in how to handle unmigrated tokens. He believes the market has formed two major camps: institutional parties advocate freezing non-migrated tokens to mitigate risks, while Bitcoin purists view any freezing as a fundamental violation of the system's principles.
Carter noted that due to changes in market structure (increased proportion of corporate entities, ETF issuers, and custodial institutions), the likelihood of the freezing camp prevailing is higher than many expect. However, he personally favors a third option: authorized by U.S. courts, leading quantum companies (such as Google or IBM) could legally recover vulnerable tokens as neutral custodians.
Carter ranks the options, considering legal salvage as the best outcome, freezing as the second best, and the non-freezing option far behind. As of the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading at $74,795.