Jameson Lopp, the chief security officer at Bitcoin (BTC) custody company Casa, recently argued against allowing quantum recovery of lost BTC and said that burning these coins to protect the integrity of the protocol was the preferable option.
According to Lopp, allowing individuals or institutions with quantum computers to recover lost coins violates the Bitcoin network’s properties of censorship resistance, transaction immutability, and conservatism.
In a March 16 article, the crypto executive wrote that allowing quantum recovery is not good for anyone. Lopp added:
“Allowing quantum recovery of bitcoin is tantamount to wealth redistribution. What we would be allowing is for bitcoin to be redistributed from those who are ignorant of quantum computers to those who have won the technological race to acquire quantum computers.”
“It is hard to see a bright side to that scenario,” the executive continued before concluding that quantum recovery can only harm the security of the Bitcoin network.
The threat posed by quantum computers to Bitcoin continues to be hotly debated, with some arguing that the threat to modern encryption is decades away, others arguing that quantum computers will never be practical, and some warning that the threat is imminent.
In October 2024, researchers at Shanghai University claimed they broke encryption standards used in military and banking applications using a quantum computer.
However, YouTuber “Mental Outlaw” later asserted that these claims were overblown and that the researchers did not break modern encryption standards.
The YouTuber said that the quantum computer used by the research team could only factorize the integer 2,269,753, which set a new record for quantum computers but still lagged behind some classical computers.
Mental Outlaw added that the device used in the experiment could only break a 22-bit key, while the record set by a classical computer was breaking an 892-bit key.
Modern encryption key sizes can range anywhere between 2048 to 4096 bits, with the option of extending key sizes in the future to make them even more secure.
