Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has weighed in on Bitcoin’s evolving post-quantum strategy. In a recent X post, he criticized what he sees as an overly conservative approach that could significantly impact network performance.
The remarks followed Blockstream co-founder Adam Back’s promotion of a presentation by Director of Research Jonas Nick. In the presentation, Nick outlined potential pathways for integrating quantum-resistant cryptography into Bitcoin.
Blockstream’s Bitcoin Quantum Computing Defense Proposal
During the Bitcoin scaling conference, Nick outlined how Bitcoin could adopt post-quantum signature schemes to defend against future quantum computing threats. He specifically referenced hash-based signature schemes such as SHRINCS and SHRIMPS.
He spoke on the significant tradeoffs that would come with NIST’s standardized options, ML-DSA and SLH-DSA. Adopting that scheme would mean larger signature sizes and increased verification overhead. Thus, according to the presentation, we could see Bitcoin’s throughput reduced from roughly 6.5 transactions per second to below 0.5 TPS.
Adam Back reposted a section of the presentation where Nick explained how his proposal would not involve as many compromises. Instead, it introduces a new design dimension he calls statefulness, without largely impacting efficiency and complexity. Additionally, the solution steers away from new cryptographic assumptions, opting instead to stick to well-known and understood hash functions.
Cardano Founder Pushes Back on Simplistic Solution
Reacting, Cardano founder focused less on the technical details and more on the philosophy behind the proposal. He mocked the approach, suggesting that it favors using the less interesting and expressive strategy to solve the quantum issue facing Bitcoin.
His commentary offers a sharp critique of Bitcoin’s tendency to favor minimal change, which often leads to suboptimal design choices. This trend aligns with the expectations of many industry stakeholders, a sentiment Hoskinson underscored when he remarked, “Never Change Bitcoin.”
Hoskinson’s comments also indicate that Bitcoin developers could have explored more flexible or advanced cryptographic approaches to address the quantum issue. Consequently, Bitcoin’s exploration of minimal-change solutions come across as a baffling choice.
The exchange highlights a broader critique that Bitcoin prioritizes conservatism over efficiency, even when addressing long-term challenges like quantum resistance. Other ecosystems have more radical cryptographic solutions, such as XRP’s signing key rotation feature. However, Bitcoin opts for stability and backward compatibility, favoring slower and more deliberate changes.
Why Quantum Resistance Matters
Quantum computing poses a theoretical risk to current cryptographic systems, including those used by Bitcoin. If sufficiently advanced, quantum machines could potentially break widely used signature schemes such as ECDSA.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s legacy design leaves it very susceptible to quantum threats. For instance, Bitcoin’s pay-to-public-keys (P2PK) structure and lack of rotating keys feature means users must move their funds if their signing keys ever get compromised. This exposes funds to a host of threats. Thus, about 35% of the Bitcoin supply, about 6.9 million BTC, is currently susceptible to quantum risk, with recentb research trimming the figure to around 1.7 million BTC.
Granted, the timeline for the breakthroughs that would allow quantum computers to break cryptographic encryption remains uncertain. Nevertheless, the possibility has prompted ongoing research into post-quantum cryptography across the industry.
Meanwhile, these defensive efforts have seen good progress. Recently, Lightning Labs CTO, Olaoluwa Osuntokun, built a prototype quantum defense mechanism to future-proof Bitcoin wallets. The next few months will certainly see more proposals for solutions to future-proof Bitcoin as the community becomes increasingly wary of the threat.
Temitope Olajide
