Bitcoin's Post-Quantum Migration Will Be Harder Than Taproot — and the Clock Is Already Ticking!

Project Eleven CEO Alex Pruden told CoinDesk's Consensus Miami conference Wednesday that Bitcoin's developer community needs to stop treating post-quantum cryptography as a research problem and start treating it as a production one. With roughly $2.3 trillion in bitcoin exposed to public-key derivation via Shor's algorithm, Pruden argued the asymmetry between acting early and acting late is severe — the worst case of moving early is unnecessary work; the worst case of moving late is an attacker owning every exposed address within a single block time.

The migration will be substantially harder than Taproot, which took five years and remained opt-in. A post-quantum upgrade cannot be opt-in: every holder, wallet, exchange, and institution touching bitcoin will need to participate. BIP-360, proposed last year, laid groundwork for a quantum-resistant Taproot output type, and NIST has…