It sounds like you’re assuming I’m advocating for freezing at any point soon or prior to it being incredibly obvious that a CRQC is a short-term reality and largely unavoidable. I’m not.
Discussion
Lopp’s proposal is the only one I know of on this topic that’s sort of concrete in when it’s saying to freeze coins, and every suggestion I have heard is prior to QC being able to do so (as the theft of Satoshis coins would be the obvious and huge first lost to the problem). But even in that context I still land on the “we don’t freeze coins” conclusion because who knows how many people might still be able to move coins and want to come back before any QC decides to go after their UTXOs, etc. I don’t think it is reasonable to assume any QC even after decades of being able to break one with a ton of energy or work, would be able to quickly or in a matter of moments, just break signatures wantonly. Which leaves a massive gap between “they spent 5 years breaking Satoshi’s coins” and “everyone else is immediately vulnerable” landscape.
In other, other words, I still think it is very likely that almost everyone save for the highest and most obvious balances would potentially still have years to move their own coins *after* Satoshi’s were already broken.
Two points. First of all, I’m somewhat confident we’ll learn that a CRQC is imminent with some time left prior to theft being actually possible, see nostr:nevent1qqs8cxj6ukqvh65l3ypqervzdly3fqpru34jv0avlve30u6lttpxe4cpzamhxue69uhkummnw3ezuendwsh8w6t69e3xj7spzamhxue69uhhyetvv9ujucm4wfex2mn59en8j6gpr3mhxue69uhkummnw3ezumt4w35ku7thv9kxcet59e3k7mgprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuumwdae8gtnnda3kjctvg034fh
Secondly, I would be surprised, though it’s certainly possible, if a QC is only able to steal coins after a year of constant compute. While they won’t be instant, maintaining coherence for long is one of the key challenges, so compute being longer than minutes to break a key (with some probability, maybe it takes some number of tries, though) seems somewhat unlikely.
Finally, its worth pointing out that one of the best ways we have to ensure people retain access to their bitcoin (allowing proof-of-seedphrase to allow for spends) *requires* that we freeze vulnerable spend paths before they can be otherwise stolen. So I think that should weigh pretty heavily in favor of freezing.
Of course, however, we cannot decide this for any future community and I think we agree it’s *highly* dependent on the particulars of what public information is available and what the timelines look like. The best we can do is speculate on likely scenarios and then decide what we think should happen in them.
Sadly, the freeze-vs-not decision is important today, because it impacts what choices we have available to begin preparing - if freezing is highly likely, we can “hide” QC safety in taproot leaves today without impacting wallets. If it’s not, it has to be a separate address type which has *huge* deployment timeline challenges (there’s *still* exchanges that can’t send to taproot addresses, for example…)
Err, guess that was more than two points.