Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Lost coins vulnerable to theft in the future?
by
Adam_xx
on 20/06/2022, 08:35:11 UTC
Mulling this, I am quite confident that a practical post-quantum ZK proof emergency salvage system could be designed not based on seed derivations, but for all UTXOs that require unrevealed public keys.  This includes P2SH/P2WSH.  The only coins that could not be safely salvaged are those in addresses with known public keys:  Reused P2PKH/P2WPKH, all P2TR, reused P2SH/P2WSH multisig, etc.  (About those, I absolutely agree with you that coins vulnerable to theft cannot be locked or seized; the idea flies in the face of all that Bitcoin means!)

But what about all those other UTXOs (reused P2PKH/P2WPKH, P2TR, reused P2SH/P2WSH multisig)? I think that is the main dilemma here. I would quote Pieter Wuille here: "If a QC can ever spend lost ECC-locked coins, I believe it's game over for Bitcoin. How can an asset maintain value if an attacker has the ability to flood the market with the significant portion of the entire supply?".

I don't like the idea of some coins being locked by consensus, however, Pieter has a point that the economical impact of flooding the market with all these coins could be unsurvivable.