EVERY QUANTUM FIX FOR BITCOIN IS STILL MARKED DRAFT — AND 6.04 MILLION COINS ALREADY SHOW THEIR PUBLIC KEY ON CHAIN

Dave Weisberger told his followers on September 20 that the quantum worry is overblown because “Bitcoin devs already have multiple upgrades for active wallets to protect them.” Half of that is true, and the missing half is the half that matters.

The proposals are real. BIP 360 and BIP 361 both sit in Bitcoin’s own repository. Both say Draft. Neither has activated on the network. BIP 360 is not a quantum-proof signature at all, it is a new address shape, and it says so itself: it “does not, by itself, protect against short exposure quantum attacks.” The only real post-quantum signature written for Bitcoin, SHRINCS, is not a numbered BIP yet, and its own abstract still reads “A security proof is TODO.”

The exposure, meanwhile, has been counted. Glassnode puts 6.04 million coins, 30.2 percent of the issued supply, in outputs where the public key is already visible. 1.66 million of that sits inside exchanges, from reusing the same addresses. No wallet upgrade fixes somebody else’s hot wallet.

And there is one fix that needs no soft fork and no permission. Stop reusing addresses. BIP 360 says it in plain language. Purity is not a security model; architecture is. The thing that actually took coins this year was not a quantum computer. It was a random number generator with 72 bits in it.