Founding partner at Castle Island Ventures Nic Carter has laid out what he sees as three plausible paths for Bitcoin as the industry moves toward post-quantum cryptography: freeze vulnerable early coins, leave them untouched and accept the consequences, or pursue a legal “salvage” process that avoids a protocol-level confiscation.
The Third Option In Bitcoin’s Satoshi Coin BattleFrom there, Carter sketched the upgrade path he expects. After a soft fork, Bitcoin would likely move through an intermediate phase in which users could sign with existing ECC-based schemes or with new post-quantum signatures. Eventually, he wrote, legacy signatures such as ECDSA and Schnorr would be disallowed entirely. That transition, in his telling, is the easy part. The harder question comes later: what to do with coins that never migrate.
He framed that dispute as a clash between two camps already taking shape. On one side are institutions, custodians, exchanges, and fiduciaries that would view a freeze of non-migrated coins as the only acceptable option. Carter’s argument is that these actors cannot tolerate the risk that dormant holdings, including Satoshi’s coins, might suddenly be recovered by a hostile quantum-capable party and dumped into the market or otherwise used to destabilize Bitcoin.
On the other side are hardcore Bitcoiners and ideological purists who see any such freeze as a fundamental breach of the system’s monetary and political principles. Carter described their position in stark terms: “Satoshi set 21 million as the monetary parameter, and no one alive has the authority to arbitrarily modify that to 19.x million. Bitcoin doesn’t engage in selective ‘irregular state changes’ like Ethereum did after the DAO was hacked in 2016. Even after 850k BTC were lost to Mt Gox, nothing was done at the protocol layer to recover the funds.”
In Carter’s ordering, lawful salvage is the best result, a freeze is second-best, and a no-freeze outcome ranks far behind. “If Bitcoin really does freeze the coins, then something about Bitcoin will truly have died,” he wrote. “It would survive, but it will be forever changed.”
At press time, Bitcoin traded at $74,795.
