BlockBeats News, June 13th. The Cryptography Advisory Council convened by Coinbase stated that quantum computers currently do not pose a threat to blockchain. However, the Bitcoin community should immediately begin planning for post-quantum signatures. Council members include cryptography experts such as Scott Aaronson from the University of Texas at Austin, Dan Boneh from Stanford University, and Justin Drake from the Ethereum Foundation. The report indicates that the risk to Bitcoin is concentrated in early addresses. Around 1.7 million BTC are held in about 20,000 early public key addresses, which directly reveal the owner's public key on the chain and may face quantum attack risks in the future. Many of these addresses are believed to belong to Bitcoin's anonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto and other holders who have lost their private keys, making it impossible to proactively move the funds to a more secure address. Research from Project11 shows that another approximately 5 million BTC are at potential risk due to address reuse, but most of these are considered to be active holdings in exchange wallets.

The controversy is not about transitioning to post-quantum signatures but about how to handle unmigrated tokens. One side advocates for a hard deadline, after which the ECDSA and Schnorr signatures currently used by Bitcoin will no longer be accepted, rendering unmigrated tokens unspendable to prevent potential attackers from acquiring a large amount of BTC in the future, impacting the price and network legitimacy. The other side argues that this is akin to asset forfeiture, violating Bitcoin's principle of absolute property rights and potentially setting a precedent for freezing tokens under government pressure.

However, the council refuses to take sides on the "abandoned tokens" issue. The report states that there is no single correct answer to this problem and it should be decided by the Bitcoin community. The council emphasizes that technical migration planning should start immediately because engineering work to support post-quantum signatures is independent of governance disputes and should not wait for their resolution. Clear communication is essential to let users know that the issue is being taken seriously, as uncertainty itself is a risk.