Anchorage Digital researchers have published a formal protocol to migrate roughly 13.5 million Bitcoin (BTC) to post-quantum security without ever exposing a user's private key.

Anchorage Bitcoin Proposal

The paper, released by Anchorage authors Dustin Ray, Prasanna Gautam and Sean Ryan, describes a one-way mechanism called a "turnstile."

It targets a specific problem. If Bitcoin ever disables classical signatures to block quantum theft, accounts whose public keys were never revealed would also become frozen.

The turnstile uses a STARK zero-knowledge proof to let the owner prove they hold the private key. Inside the same proof, a new post-quantum key is derived deterministically from the old one via HKDF.

The authors estimate the mechanism covers about two-thirds of circulating Bitcoin, leaving roughly 6.51 million BTC with exposed public keys outside its protection. Proof generation runs 5 to 30 seconds on consumer hardware, while proof size ranges from 2 to 10 MB.

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Back Quantum Debate

The paper lands in the middle of an active split among Bitcoin developers over how aggressively to prepare for quantum attacks.

Blockstream chief executive Adam Back, recently named by The New York Times as a leading candidate for Satoshi Nakamoto based on stylometric analysis, has stayed active in the quantum debate. He claims that current quantum systems remain "essentially lab experiments", and argued for optional upgrades rather than forced freezes.

His position contrasts with BIP-361, a proposal from Jameson Lopp and five co-authors that would phase out vulnerable addresses over five years and freeze coins that fail to migrate.

The Anchorage paper fits alongside that track, proposing a recovery route for frozen outputs.

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