CZ suggests Satoshi's coins take a quantum nap 🧊

Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance, has raised the possibility of freezing Bitcoin held in quantum-vulnerable addresses, including the estimated 1.1 million BTC mined by Satoshi Nakamoto, if those coins remain unmoved after a future network upgrade. Zhao framed the idea as a community question rather than a personal plan, putting to the network the notion of a roughly one-year timeline after which a fork would lock unmoved coins in vulnerable addresses. He pushed back on the popular framing that he would personally freeze Satoshi's address, calling that interpretation inaccurate and noting the added difficulty of distinguishing Satoshi's wallets from those of other early miners.

The discussion follows Google Quantum AI research published in March, which estimated that breaking the cryptography securing digital signatures could require fewer than 500,000 qubits and run in minutes, well below earlier projections. The vulnerability applies to exposed keys: a quantum computer could derive private keys from public keys and drain the wallets they protect, and more than a third of all Bitcoin had revealed a public key on-chain by March, according to reporting on the research. Satoshi Nakamoto's mined holdings, traced via the Patoshi pattern identified by researcher Sergio Demian Lerner, are valued at roughly $70 billion at Bitcoin's recent market price near $63,244.

Zhao's posture aligns with BIP-361, a draft authored by Jameson Lopp and five other researchers, which would block sends to vulnerable addresses about three years after activation and void legacy signatures two years later. The proposal frames the alternatives bluntly, stating that a quantum thief could seize the exposed coins or miners could slowly recover them, and that the network could instead lock them so that no one wins. The draft cites a Bitcoin creator quotation on the broader question of lost coins: "Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone," attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto.

The dormant holdings are contested on a separate legal front, where an anonymous plaintiff and two Wyoming LLCs are pursuing a New York abandoned-property lawsuit seeking declarations over 39,069 idle addresses, including the Satoshi coins. Galaxy Research head Alex Thorn has published a report expressing doubt about those claims, and Zhao joined Thorn on the Galaxy Brains podcast to outline his community-first framing of any quantum-response decision.