{"id":82119,"date":"2026-04-17T14:46:32","date_gmt":"2026-04-17T14:46:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=82119"},"modified":"2026-04-17T14:46:32","modified_gmt":"2026-04-17T14:46:32","slug":"nic-carter-says-bitcoin-has-3-ways-to-handle-satoshis-coins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=82119","title":{"rendered":"Nic Carter Says Bitcoin Has 3 Ways To Handle Satoshi\u2019s Coins"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Founding partner at Castle Island Ventures Nic Carter has laid out what he sees as three plausible paths for Bitcoin as the industry moves toward post-quantum cryptography: freeze vulnerable early coins, leave them untouched and accept the consequences, or pursue a legal \u201csalvage\u201d process that avoids a protocol-level confiscation.<\/p>\n

The debate matters because, in Carter\u2019s framing, roughly 1.7 million BTC in old pay-to-pubkey outputs<\/a> could become exposed if Bitcoin eventually deprecates elliptic curve signatures and a cryptographically relevant quantum computer arrives.<\/p>\n

The Third Option In Bitcoin\u2019s Satoshi Coin Battle<\/h2>\n

In a post<\/a> on X, Carter argued that the Overton window around quantum risk has shifted quickly. What was recently treated as a fringe concern, he wrote, is now increasingly being discussed as an eventual engineering and governance problem for Bitcoin itself. \u201cThe thing about the PQ transition is, it\u2019s impossible as a Bitcoiner to claim that this protocol is cutting edge technology if Bitcoin, a monetary system predicated entirely on cryptography, is a laggard,\u201d he wrote, adding that betting the fate of the network on the hope that the technology does not advance would be both reckless and embarrassing.<\/p>\n

From there, Carter sketched the upgrade path he expects. After a soft fork, Bitcoin would likely move through an intermediate phase in which users could sign with existing ECC-based schemes or with new post-quantum signatures. Eventually, he wrote, legacy signatures such as ECDSA and Schnorr would be disallowed entirely. That transition, in his telling, is the easy part. The harder question comes later: what to do with coins that never migrate.<\/p>\n

He framed that dispute as a clash between two camps already taking shape. On one side are institutions, custodians, exchanges, and fiduciaries that would view a freeze of non-migrated coins as the only acceptable option. Carter\u2019s argument is that these actors cannot tolerate the risk that dormant holdings, including Satoshi\u2019s coins, might suddenly be recovered by a hostile quantum-capable party and dumped into the market or otherwise used to destabilize Bitcoin.<\/p>\n

On the other side are hardcore Bitcoiners and ideological purists who see any such freeze as a fundamental breach of the system\u2019s monetary and political principles. Carter described their position in stark terms: \u201cSatoshi set 21 million as the monetary parameter, and no one alive has the authority to arbitrarily modify that to 19.x million. Bitcoin doesn\u2019t engage in selective \u2018irregular state changes\u2019 like Ethereum did after the DAO was hacked in 2016. Even after 850k BTC were lost to Mt Gox, nothing was done at the protocol layer to recover the funds.\u201d<\/p>\n

Carter said he believes the freeze camp is more likely to win than many Bitcoiners assume, largely because the structure of the market has changed since the 2015-2017 blocksize wars<\/a>. In his view, today\u2019s Bitcoin is far more concentrated in corporate entities, ETF issuers, custodians and large asset managers, giving \u201ceconomic nodes\u201d much more leverage than they had a decade ago. He also noted that some influential technical figures have already taken the side of freezing vulnerable coins if a genuine threat emerges.<\/p>\n

Still, Carter\u2019s preferred outcome is neither a freeze nor a laissez-faire approach. His \u201csecret third thing\u201d is a legal salvage framework. Under that scenario, a US quantum leader such as Google<\/a>, IBM or another domestic firm would build the first cryptographically relevant quantum computer and, under court authority, recover the vulnerable coins into trust-like structures rather than take ownership outright.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would go like this,\u201d Carter wrote. \u201cA US firm, whether it\u2019s Google, or IBM, or one of the other quantum leaders\u2026 acquires a CRQC first, and contracts with the US government<\/a> to lawfully recover the 1.7m p2pk coins. They do not obtain ownership of these coins, but are rather appointed by a court as a neutral receiver or court-authorized custodian, tasked with securing and returning the assets to their rightful owners where possible and otherwise holding them in trust pending judicial disposition.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Carter\u2019s ordering, lawful salvage is the best result, a freeze is second-best, and a no-freeze outcome ranks far behind. \u201cIf Bitcoin really does freeze the coins, then something about Bitcoin will truly have died,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIt would survive, but it will be forever changed.\u201d<\/p>\n

At press time, Bitcoin traded at $74,795.<\/p>\n

\"Bitcoin<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Founding partner at Castle Island Ventures Nic Carter has laid out what he sees as three plausible paths for Bitcoin as the industry moves toward post-quantum cryptography: freeze vulnerable early coins, leave them untouched and accept the consequences, or pursue a legal \u201csalvage\u201d process that avoids a protocol-level confiscation. The debate matters because, in Carter\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3,4,5],"class_list":["post-82119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-crypto","tag-doge","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=82119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82119\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=82119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=82119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=82119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}