Strategy founder Michael Saylor imagines that a potential hard fork, designed to protect the Bitcoin blockchain from the threat of quantum computing, could reduce the supply from 21 million to as low as 16 million.

Saylor gave this forecast in an interview with Galaxy Digital’s Alex Thorn in which the pair discussed Bitcoin’s quantum vulnerabilities.

Put another way, Saylor thinks Bitcoiners can solve quantum by freezing coins belonging to Satoshi Nakamoto and other early adopters.

Bitcoin faces a range of threats from quantum computing as private companies race to develop more sophisticated machinery, and governments continue to work on advanced encryption and mathematics.

Although quantum computers might be able to sort nonce candidates by probability of success or perform other preparatory tasks that could affect mining, the immediate concern is less about mining and more about their ability to derive private keys.

Read more: The internet is laughing at El Salvador’s ‘quantum-safe’ bitcoin

Re-encrypting old bitcoin for quantum protection

Some public keys, such as Satoshi’s large holdings in P2PK outputs, have exposed public keys that make them an immediate attack vector for quantum computers. 

The best way to secure these coins, according to Saylor, would require Satoshi and anyone with exposed public keys to “re-encrypt” them in a new wallet during a hypothetical, one to two-year notice period.

For a large part of the Bitcoin community, this proposal — requiring the action of a passive holder who might be offline or incapacitated for years for legitimate reasons — is a non-starter and tantamount to theft.

For Saylor, it’s completely reasonable.

Saylor assumes that Bitcoin developers will come up with a hard fork proposal as the world reaches a “global consensus” about the threat of quantum computing to all financial systems.

During this future time, in Saylor’s view, governments, banks, and almost every financial institution on earth will be upgrading their security practices for quantum resistance. 

Bitcoin will be no different, he explained, and will provide a global notice to all coin holders that they must re-encrypt their coins into quantum-safe wallets.

If they don’t, he claims, they must surrender their value as frozen.

Saylor thinks quantum will reduce the supply of bitcoin

“If they’re dead, they’re not going to re-encrypt,” Saylor said. “And if they’ve lost the keys, they’re not going to re-encrypt.

“This is going to be a massive upgrade to network security, and it’s going to be a massive deflationary event,” he continued.

“And we’re going to get the answer to the age-old question: How much BTC has been lost?

“If the number is 5 million, we’re going to see that the supply of BTC is going to go from 21 million to 16 million.”

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