AmericanFortress Says Every Crypto Wallet Can Be Made Quantum Safe Without Anyone Moving Their Coins

Quantum computing has been Crypto’s slow moving problem for years now. Everyone is in agreement that the threat itself is not in dispute. If a large enough quantum computer gets built, the math protecting wallets stops working. What is in dispute is how to move hundreds of millions of wallets to new addresses before that happens. A new paper published by blockchain security firm AmericanFortress argues that the moving step was never needed and users would not need to rotate keys or change wallet addresses.

Address Migration Was Always the Bottleneck

A quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm can derive a private key directly out of the matching public key. This basically puts every crypto wallet out there today at risk of being exposed. The fix here would be to swap assets into a post-quantum signature scheme. Doing this, however, would mean changing the public key format, which essentially means address migration across every participating network.

The fact is, some coins cannot migrate. Satoshi’s 1.1 million BTC for instance hasn’t budged since 2010. Whoever holds the keys to the millions more sitting in dormant wallets isn’t reading migration notices either.

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