According to advocates, freezing dormant bitcoin, currently valued at $76,299.33, would prompt an instantaneous repricing, marking one of the most tumultuous trading days for the cryptocurrency since its inception in 2009. The debate surrounding the freezing of inactive tokens to safeguard against the risks of quantum computing has been ongoing among bitcoin developers and industry participants.
Samuel 'Chad' Patt, founder of Op Net, warned that freezing any coins, including 'lost' ones, would set a precedent, signaling to the market that all 19.8 million BTC in circulation are conditionally owned. 'Institutional risk desks do not care about the reason, they care about the precedent,' Patt said.
Market analyst Jason Fernandes, a self-proclaimed pragmatic maximalist, concurred with Patt's assessment but believes a successful quantum attack would trigger a far more severe repricing. 'Institutions won’t just price precedent, they’ll price whether the system can survive a break in its core assumptions,' Fernandes added. The discussion follows weeks of deliberation on how to address the potential threat posed by quantum computing to the bitcoin network, particularly the estimated 5.6 million BTC held in wallets that have been dormant for over a decade. A week ago, core Bitcoin developer Jameson Lopp expressed his preference for freezing the dormant bitcoin, valued at roughly $440 billion, rather than leaving it vulnerable to future quantum hackers.
Lopp and a team of developers released Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 361 (BIP-361), which proposes phasing out bitcoin’s current cryptographic signatures and potentially freezing assets that fail to migrate. Patt cautioned that if this were to proceed, 'bitcoin’s repricing would be instant, not gradual, and would be the worst single day in bitcoin's history, but not because of a hack, but because the network will have proven its core value proposition is negotiable.' Bitcoin maximalist Kent Halliburton, CEO and co-founder at SazMining, said he believes the intentions behind BIP-361 are good but argued that defending Bitcoin by breaking its core promise of inviolable property rights is not the solution. 'We operate data centers on four continents, and our clients own every machine.
That model only works because Bitcoin guarantees unconditional ownership,' Halliburton said. Khushboo Khullar, venture partner at Lightning Ventures and a bitcoin maximalist, described freezing dormant coins as a deeply flawed approach, despite appearing to be a pragmatic solution against quantum threats. 'It directly undermines Bitcoin’s core principles of immutability, permissionlessness, and no central enforcement.
Such a move would require a contentious hard fork, violating the network’s decentralized ethos where no one can unilaterally seize or freeze anyone’s coins,' she said. However, not all maximalists agree with Patt, Halliburton, or Khullar, and some believe Lopp’s proposal is sensible.
Ken Kruger, founder and CEO of Moon Technologies, said, 'It’s extremely challenging to build systems that are truly future-proof, and while Bitcoin has come quite close, quantum may pose a threat that requires tradeoffs participants won’t be happy with.' Fernandes understands the concerns about precedent but believes that the risk of inaction far outweighs any concerns about philosophical purity. 'I don't think there is time; I think quantum will be upon us way faster than anybody thinks,' he said.
'However, framing this as a question of purity misses the bigger issue: quantum risk is an existential threat to the system, not a philosophical debate.' Fernandes believes bitcoin could evolve, as it has in the past with SegWit and Taproot, upgrades designed to improve the network’s efficiency, privacy, and scalability. 'The protocol isn’t ‘finished,’ it’s just conservative in how it changes,' he said. 'But the risk of inaction far outweighs any concern about precedent or philosophical purity.' Ultimately, Fernandes believes that the majority of bitcoin holders, whether maximalists or not, are more interested in preserving capital than preserving some vague notion about what bitcoin is 'supposed to be.' Mati Greenspan, a self-described maximalist and market analyst, echoed the sentiments of many maximalists, saying, 'As with many cases in life, and especially with bitcoin, doing nothing is better than doing something.' He concluded, 'The Bitcoin community seems to feel strongly that freezing coins would be antithetical to bitcoin's quintessential value proposition.'