TLDR Tech / Crypto
Q-Day Urgency Increases as Trump EO Accelerates Timeline
President Trump signed two quantum computing executive orders on June 22, one directing the Department of Energy to deliver a fault-tolerant quantum computer and another setting federal deadlines for migration to NIST post-quantum cryptographic standards by 2030 for key establishment and 2031 for digital signatures, to defend against Shor's algorithm before "harvest now, decrypt later" attacks become viable. The defensive order targets the same cryptographic attack vector facing Bitcoin: ECDSA and Schnorr signatures break under Shor's algorithm, and Project Eleven estimates roughly 7 million BTC sit in addresses with exposed public keys, including 1.7 million in dormant wallets and an estimated 1 million likely belonging to Satoshi Nakamoto. Federal agencies can mandate migration by deadline - bitcoin cannot, and the community's proposed responses, BIP 360 (a quantum-resistant P2MR address type) and BIP 361 (a migration deadline paired with a coin freeze for non-compliant UTXOs), carry no confirmed activation timeline and remain contentious across the developer community.
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