BIP-360 co-author: Bitcoin may need 7 years to upgrade to the post-quantum era

PANews, February 18th – According to Cointelegraph, Ethan Heilman, co-author of Bitcoin Improvement Proposal BIP-360, stated that if migration were to begin tomorrow, it would take approximately seven years for the Bitcoin network to achieve full quantum-resistant security, and this estimate is based on an optimistic scenario where all parties reach consensus on the roadmap. Heilman estimates that the proposal itself would require two and a half years for code review and testing, followed by half a year for activation, after which wallets, custodians, Lightning Network nodes, and fund management software would need several more years to complete upgrades. “In an optimistic scenario, 90% of participants would complete the update five years after activation. The stronger the threat perception, the faster the process.” He emphasized that if a breakthrough in quantum computing occurs, the timeline would be significantly accelerated, but overall, it remains a daunting task.

BIP-360 was merged into GitHub for review last week. It proposes a new output type called “Pay-to-Merkle-Root,” which hides the public key while retaining Taproot’s upgradability and functionality, thereby eliminating quantum-vulnerable paths. This proposal is a backward-compatible soft fork, and non-upgraded nodes will ignore the new output type. However, Heilman pointed out that BIP-360 can only defend against long-term attacks (such as those targeting Satoshi Nakamoto’s addresses) and cannot defend against short-term attacks during transaction broadcasting. The latter would require a soft fork to add post-quantum signature algorithms in tapscript. Post-quantum signatures are 10 to 100 times larger than current ones; direct adoption would significantly reduce on-chain processing speed, possibly necessitating solutions such as introducing witness discounts, increasing block size, or compressing signatures through zero-knowledge proofs.