Bitcoin developers are trying to build quantum defenses. Your coins could pay the price. A proposal has been updated on Bitcoin's official repository, calling for freezing of quantum-vulnerable coins. What to know: - The BIP-361 would require bitcoin holders to migrate their coins to quantum-resistant addresses or risk having them permanently frozen by the network. - The plan, prompted by warnings that future quantum computers could crack Bitcoin’s current cryptography, would phase out vulnerable address types over several years and ultimately invalidate legacy ECDSA and Schnorr signatures. - The proposal has sparked backlash from parts of the Bitcoin community, who argue that freezing coins violates the cryptocurrency’s core promise of sovereign, permissionless control, while developers frame it as a necessary defensive measure. Bitcoin That promise is now, for the first time in Bitcoin's 16-year history, being challenged from the developer community itself, as a part of measures to build defenses against future quantum computers that could compromise Bitcoin's blockchain and steal your coins. The proposal Jameson Loop, one of the outspoken bitcoin contributors, and other cryptographers, have proposed a move that could force bitcoin holders to migrate their coins to new quantum-resistant addresses or face having their coins frozen permanently by the network itself. In that scenario, holders would technically still “own” the coins, but lose the ability to move them. It is called Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP)-361 and was updated in Bitcoin's official proposal repository Tuesday with the title "Post Quantum Migration and Legacy Signature Sunset." This comes as a recently released Google report warned that a sufficiently powerful quantum machine could require significantly less firepower to compromise the Bitcoin blockchain than initially estimated. This prompted some observers to cite 2029 as the quantum deadline for bitcoin. To understand the need to freeze coins, you need to know what