Bitcoin developer Jameson Lopp said he would rather see roughly 5.6 million BTC frozen by the network than risk those coins being recovered by future quantum attackers. At the prices cited in the report, those long-dormant holdings are worth about $420 billion.
Speaking to CoinDesk, Lopp said he does not want anyone’s bitcoin frozen, but argued that removing likely lost coins from possible circulation could be a safer outcome for the network. He also stressed that he does not believe any such move is needed right now. His comments were framed as preparation for a possible future threat, not a response to an immediate one.
BIP-361 sketches out a quantum contingency plan
The remarks came after the release of BIP-361, a proposal from Lopp and others that explores phasing out Bitcoin’s current cryptographic signatures and, over time, invalidating transactions from wallets vulnerable to quantum attacks. If affected holders failed to migrate, their assets could end up frozen. In a later post on X, Lopp said he does not like the proposal and hopes it never has to be adopted, calling it a rough contingency idea rather than a finished specification.
He wrote that he proposed it because he liked the alternative even less. In his view, if Bitcoin ever faces an existential security threat, economic incentives would outweigh philosophical commitments. Lopp has made similar arguments before, saying so-called quantum recovery would reward technological superiority instead of productive participation in the network. He also described quantum miners as “vampires feeding upon the system.”
About 28% of bitcoin has not moved for more than a decade
Lopp said roughly 28% of all bitcoin, or around 5.6 million coins, has not moved in more than ten years. He and other analysts consider a large share of that supply likely lost forever. If advances in quantum computing ever made those coins spendable again, the return of such a large dormant supply could create heavy volatility and damage confidence in Bitcoin itself.
The proposal remains at an early stage and has no set timeline for adoption, but it has already triggered sharp debate across the community. Lopp presented the idea partly as a way to push wallet providers and users to upgrade before any real threat appears. His point was simple: people tend to procrastinate, so the ecosystem may need clear incentives or pressure to migrate in time.
Lopp says the bigger danger is a collapse in trust
For Lopp, the central risk is not only a sudden wave of selling if millions of recovered BTC hit the market. He said the larger threat is perception. Even without a huge dump, any credible evidence that someone can use a quantum computer to recover lost or vulnerable coins could trigger immediate market panic.
In that scenario, he said rational holders would likely exit the system until there is confidence that the blockchain has been secured against the threat. That leaves Bitcoin facing a difficult split inside its own community: one side defends the long-held principle of immutable, censorship-resistant ownership, while the other is willing to consider freezing some assets to defend the network from a future shock. Any actual change would require broad consensus across the decentralized network, and while there is no formal vote, similar upgrades in the past have depended on overwhelming miner support to activate.