In a surprising turn of events, Ava Labs founder Emin Gün Sirer has warned the entire crypto market that the address that Bitcoin founder Satoshi used could be at a risk of hack.
In a X post on December 10th, Sirer wrote that Satoshi’s one million Bitcoins might have quantum threat issues. In order to give the attacker time to grind, it employed the antiquated Pay-To-Public-Key (P2PK) format.
Bitcoin scripts that lock bitcoin to a public key are known as “Pay to Public Key” (P2PK) scripts. The original Bitcoin delivery method, P2PK, is no longer in use since it is less private and secure than other options.
With the market now advancing to use better privacy methods, it might put Satoshi’s held Bitcoin’s at risk.
Satoshi’s Bitcoin Wallets: How Much Bitcoin Do They Have?
At present, the market anticipates many addresses as held by Satoshi. However, the address “1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa” is the most well-known wallet address of Satoshi Nakamoto.
Satoshi used this address to get the 50 BTC reward for mining the first block on the Bitcoin blockchain. It’s also referred to as the “genesis block”.
The tale of Satoshi Nakamoto, the man who created Bitcoin, is among the most intriguing mysteries of the past few decades. Despite creating a technology that has changed the world and mining billions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoin, Satoshi has remained anonymous and his wealth has remained unaltered.
Through the identification of wallets that most likely belonged to Satoshi, researchers have been able to determine that he has not been spending his Bitcoin. However, at present, market participants believe that wallets associated with the Bitcoin creator contain around a million Bitcoin.
Sirer Suggests Freezing Satoshi’s Bitcoins
Sirer in his X post suggested that in order to tap the vulnerable holdings of Satoshi, it is better that the holdings are frozen.
He writes, “Since QC becomes a threat, the Bitcoin community may want to consider freezing Satoshi’s coins or, more generally, freezing all coins at P2PK utxos and providing a sunset date.”
However, on interesting fact to note is that it’s pretty obvious that Satoshi Nakamoto has thousands of distinct Bitcoin wallets, regardless of the estimate of holdings.
Since they were only used to obtain a block reward and have lain dormant ever since, the majority of his wallets are not particularly noteworthy.
Therefore freezing all of them might create an unnecessary havoc in the market.