From: Anthony Derbidge <aderb001@gmail.com>
To: Matt Corallo <lf-lists@mattcorallo.com>
Cc: bitcoindev@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [bitcoindev] PQC - What is our Goal, Even?
Date: Wed, 15 Apr 2026 11:24:57 -0600 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CACja=NxfNT4dkS9F3L=9HKwxqLPJOJ6MJxfhWZrbkX-K-fuHhw@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CF7A554D-EE6F-4E6B-A670-1D6F72170539@mattcorallo.com>
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Matt, agree the binding constraint is the wallets least likely to migrate,
and that scope discipline matters here.
One minor distinction worth keeping in mind: if the community eventually
faces the fork-and-burn decision you reference in [1], a PQ-signed record
tied to pre-attack UTXO state could still matter for distinguishing prior
owners from post-attack claimants, even if it doesn’t solve the spend-path
problem itself. For the “won’t-migrate” bucket, that may be one of the only
ecosystem-side ways to preserve any independent evidence of prior control
without depending on wallet vendors to ship anything.
- Anthony Derbidge
On Wed, Apr 15, 2026 at 10:51 AM Matt Corallo <lf-lists@mattcorallo.com>
wrote:
> Its become obvious in recent discussions that a large part of the PQC
> discussion has people coming at it from very different fundamental goals,
> and as a result the conversations often talk past each other without making
> real progress. So instead of doing that more I'd like to write down what I
> think the actual, short-term goal *is*, what it it is not.
>
> Fundamentally, it seems to me the most reasonable goal is that we should
> be seeking to increase the number of coins which are reasonably likely to
> be secured by the time a CRQC exists. Put another way, we should be seeking
> to minimize the chance that the Bitcoin community feels the need to fork to
> burn coins by reducing the number of coins which can be stolen to the
> minimum number [1].
>
> This naturally means focusing on the wallets which are the *least likely*
> to migrate or otherwise get themselves in a safe spot. Focusing on those
> who are the most likely to migrate does almost nothing to move the needle
> on the total number of coins protected, nor, thus, on the probability of a
> future Bitcoin community feeling the need to burn coins. Sadly, this
> probably means the "top wallets" that are generally terrible at adopting
> Bitcoin standards. Wallets which are the top listing on app stores like
> (currently in the top few in my app store): Bitcoin.com, Trust Wallet,
> Coinbase Wallet, Blockchain.com, etc. These wallets generally use a single
> static address (because anything else confuses their users and they get
> additional support tickets for it!) and put very little time into Bitcoin,
> focusing instead on other tokens and integrations.
>
> A few non-goals:
>
> * To ensure that advanced setups have the absolute best in post-quantum
> security. I don't see how this moves the needle on the above goal, and in
> fact in many cases detracts from the above goal. Of course if we can
> accomplish this without detracting from the top-line goal above, great.
>
> * To ensure we have the best possible design for the signature scheme
> bitcoin will be using in a world where a CRQC exists and we've gotten past
> the mess. We'll almost certainly know a lot more about the security of
> various schemes and have more options for how to approach the problem by
> the point we're dealing with the mess of a CRQC being imminent, so it seems
> like a fools errand to try to predict what we should build for this. But
> even if we know no more then than we do today, likely ending up with
> hash-based signatures as the scheme everyone uses, we'll almost certainly
> be having conversations about additional witness discounts or increased
> block sizes to compensate for the sudden increase in transaction sizes.
> Maybe we would decide against such an increase, but there's no question
> such a conversation would happen and it would be premature to have it today.
>
> Matt
>
> [1] Of course I believe that the lost coin pool is large enough that the
> Bitcoin community will, almost without question, fork to disable insecure
> spend paths and burn some coins in the process, but reducing the number of
> coins burned to the absolute minimum is of course best for everyone.
>
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>
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2026-04-28 20:47 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 24+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2026-04-15 16:37 [bitcoindev] PQC - What is our Goal, Even? Matt Corallo
2026-04-15 17:24 ` Anthony Derbidge [this message]
2026-04-20 1:37 ` [bitcoindev] " Antoine Riard
2026-04-20 18:04 ` [bitcoindev] " 'Antoine Poinsot' via Bitcoin Development Mailing List
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2026-04-15 16:37 Matt Corallo
2026-04-15 18:08 ` Erik Aronesty
2026-04-16 11:17 ` Matt Corallo
2026-04-16 16:28 ` Erik Aronesty
2026-04-16 16:31 ` Erik Aronesty
2026-04-16 17:34 ` 'conduition' via Bitcoin Development Mailing List
2026-04-17 20:44 ` Matt Corallo
2026-04-17 21:28 ` Ethan Heilman
2026-04-18 0:37 ` Matt Corallo
2026-04-18 15:44 ` 'conduition' via Bitcoin Development Mailing List
2026-04-18 16:34 ` Erik Aronesty
2026-04-19 0:29 ` Matt Corallo
2026-04-19 12:57 ` Erik Aronesty
2026-04-19 13:36 ` Matt Corallo
2026-04-19 16:27 ` 'conduition' via Bitcoin Development Mailing List
2026-04-19 16:37 ` Matt Corallo
2026-04-19 19:43 ` Matt Corallo
2026-04-20 20:20 ` 'Antoine Poinsot' via Bitcoin Development Mailing List
2026-05-20 2:02 ` 'conduition' via Bitcoin Development Mailing List
2026-05-20 18:48 ` 'Antoine Poinsot' via Bitcoin Development Mailing List
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