Migrating Bitcoin to a Quantum-Resistant World — Meet BIP 360

And, so, in 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto selected the ECDSA signature method for his/her new cryptocurrency: Bitcoin. All looked good in creating a computing machine that could run forever, and never stopping and never expose the user’s private keys. But Peter Shor came along and knocked all of that down. For this, he showed that quantum computers could solve the discrete logarithm problem (DLP) much better than classical computers. So, we possibly have 5–10 years to properly migrate our existing blockchain network, especially the ones that use ECDSA.

Ethereum, for example, is looking at a hard fork of the ledger and using a zero-knowledge proof (using STARKs) to prove the user’s BIP 32 seed (and which is used to derive the private key). With this, rather than store the user’s private key, we store the seed that creates the private key, and then use this seed to create a quantum-robust private key (such as ML-DSA, FN-DSA or SLH-DSA).

This approach is unlikely to work for Bitcoin, and, so, new methods are being rolled out to support the migration. One key area of development is to minimise the long -term exposure of the public key, as the longer the public key is exposed, the higher the chance it could be broken by a quantum computer. For this, we now see the BIP 360 protocol and which is defined as a Pay-to-Merkle Root…