A Bitcoin Core developer has proposed a scheme that would force any future quantum-equipped thief to wager their own coins before attempting to touch anyone else's.

Cory Fields, who works on Bitcoin's software at MIT's Digital Currency Initiative, posted the concept — called "quantum landmines" — to the bitcoin-dev mailing list, the long-running forum where many of the network's protocol changes are first proposed and debated. Under the mechanism as described, a would-be quantum thief would have to stake 1 BTC for 30 days before gaining the opportunity to steal exposed funds, turning any theft attempt into a costly bet with the attacker's own capital at risk.

Why the quantum threat matters

The proposal arrives amid years of discussion about quantum computing's theoretical threat to Bitcoin. The network's signatures currently rely on the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA), which cryptographers note could in principle be broken by a sufficiently powerful quantum computer running Shor's algorithm, allowing a private key to be derived from an exposed public key. Attention has focused on outputs whose public keys are already visible on-chain — notably legacy pay-to-public-key outputs from Bitcoin's early years, including coins widely attributed to the network's pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Newer address formats conceal the public key until coins are first spent, narrowing, though not eliminating, the theoretical exposure.

Bitcoin contributors have explored post-quantum defenses for years, including migration paths toward signature schemes regarded as resistant to quantum attack, such as the hash-based and lattice-based designs standardized by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which finalized its first post-quantum cryptography standards in 2024. Fields, a longtime Bitcoin Core contributor who in 2019 publicly disclosed a compromised mirror of the Bitcoin Core website, approaches the problem from a different angle: rather than seeking to block key recovery outright, his "landmine" design aims to make any attempt to exploit vulnerable coins economically punishing for the attacker.

As posted, the concept remains a proposal under discussion on the mailing list and is not part of Bitcoin's released software. Nor is the mailing list a fast track to adoption: changes to Bitcoin's consensus rules typically move from mailing-list debate into a formal Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) and, from there, require broad acceptance across developers, node operators, and miners before any change is activated — a deliberately conservative process that has historically unfolded over years. For Fields' concept, the nearest observable milestones are the substance of the technical feedback it draws from other contributors and whether it is eventually drafted into a formal proposal, either of which would indicate where it stands in that pipeline.

This report was first published by COINOTAG on November 6, 2026.