Co-author of BIP-360: Bitcoin may take 7 years to upgrade to the post-quantum era

PANews, February 18 — According to Cointelegraph, Ethan Heilman, co-author of Bitcoin Improvement Proposal BIP-360, stated that if the migration begins tomorrow, it will take approximately seven years for the Bitcoin network to fully achieve quantum resistance. This estimate is based on an optimistic scenario where all parties reach consensus on the roadmap. Heilman estimates that the proposal itself will require two and a half years for code review and testing, followed by six months for activation. After that, wallets, custodians, Lightning Network nodes, and fund management software will need several years to upgrade. “In an optimistic scenario, 90% of participants will have completed the update five years after activation. The greater the perceived threat, the faster the process,” he emphasized. He also noted that if breakthroughs in quantum computing occur, the timeline could be significantly accelerated, but overall, it remains a challenging task.

BIP-360 was merged into GitHub for review last week, proposing a new output type called “Pay-to-Merkle-Root” that retains Taproot’s upgradeability and functionality while hiding the public key to eliminate quantum-vulnerable paths. This proposal is a backward-compatible soft fork; nodes that do not upgrade will ignore the new output type. However, Heilman pointed out that BIP-360 can only defend against long-term attacks (such as against Satoshi addresses) and cannot defend against short-term attacks during transaction broadcasting. The latter requires adding post-quantum signature algorithms within Tapscript via a soft fork. Post-quantum signatures are 10 to 100 times larger than current ones; directly adopting them would significantly reduce on-chain processing speed. Possible solutions include introducing witness discounts, expanding block size, or compressing signatures using zero-knowledge proofs.