Bitcoin (BTC) Developers Weigh BIP-360 and BIP-361 Drafts to Cut Quantum Attack Risk

Bitcoin (BTC) developers are drafting a defense against quantum computing attacks, and the work now takes the form of two concrete proposals: BIP-360 and BIP-361. Both are Bitcoin Improvement Proposals, the technical documents developers use to change how the network functions, and both remain at draft stage, applied to nothing on the live network. The urgency follows warnings that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could eventually erase Bitcoin's value, including the “Bitcoin to zero” argument advanced by Social Capital founder Chamath Palihapitiya. The Bitcoin price debate over quantum risk has since moved from security circles into investment ones, which is why the proposals themselves now draw scrutiny. The threat rests on key mechanics. A wallet's private key is the secret needed to spend coins; the public key is derived from it and used to verify that a transaction signature is authorized. On classical hardware, working backwards from a public key to a private key is designed to be practically impossible. A large enough quantum computer that solves certain mathematical problems quickly could change that. The complication is exposure time: some address types leave the public key visible on the blockchain for years, and Taproot, built on Segregated Witness, is one of them. BIP-360, written by developers Hunter Beast, Ethan Heilman and Isabel Foxen Duke, attacks that long-term exposure. It introduces a new transaction output type called pay-to-merkle-root, or P2MR, which removes the Taproot features responsible for keeping public keys exposed, shrinking the material an attacker can work with over time. The draft sets its own boundary: BIP-360 alone does not stop every attack, because the public key still becomes visible briefly whenever coins are sent, a gap that may require new digital signature schemes built to withstand quantum attacks. The two proposals are companions: one builds the safer output format, the other plans the migration onto it.

BIP-361, proposed by Jameson Lopp and other developers, covers the other half of the problem: what happens to existing coins once post-quantum transaction formats exist. It would restrict new sends to legacy, cryptographically vulnerable addresses and, in a later phase, restrict use of the old digital signature method itself. That framing comes from the draft text, which treats the transition as an active steer toward safe formats rather than a passive upgrade path. The logistics are substantial. Exchanges and custodial providers would need software updates, individual wallet users likewise, and a migration at scale could concentrate a burst of transactions on the network and lift fees. The hardest cohort is coins that have not moved in years: funds whose owners lost their keys, died, or simply kept a long HODL position. Those coins cannot migrate, leaving them as potential targets for a future quantum attacker; restricting them in the name of protection would instead open a dispute over how far Bitcoin (BTC) ownership should be recognized. Nothing deploys automatically. Bitcoin runs on proof of work and has no central operator, so miners, node operators and exchanges must all accept any rule change before it takes effect. The investment angle came from Capriole Investments founder Charles Edwards, who said in a recent interview that developer agreement on a quantum roadmap could lift the price 30% to 50% in a single day. His argument is that a concrete plan for adopting post-quantum signatures, laid out within 12 to 18 months, would be enough for the market to reprice the uncertainty that has weighed on the asset. The claim places developer consensus, not ETF flows or mining economics, at the center of the near-term valuation case.

The gap between paper and deployment is where this story sits. The draft specifications themselves, the primary documents behind the debate, confirm that a technical path exists, but neither BIP is merged, tested or scheduled, and no quantum machine capable of breaking Bitcoin's signatures has been demonstrated. Edwards' 30% to 50% scenario assumes consensus alone reprices the asset; the proposals' own authors frame agreement as the hardest step, not the last. What the drafts do not establish is timing. The practical race is between quantum hardware development and the slowest consensus process in the wider Bitcoin ecosystem, and the verdict on which one arrives first is still open.