BIP-360 co-author: Bitcoin may need 7 years to upgrade to the post-quantum era.

PANews reported on February 18th, citing Cointelegraph, that Ethan Heilman, co-author of Bitcoin Improvement Proposal BIP-360, stated that if migration begins tomorrow, achieving full quantum security for the Bitcoin network is expected to take seven years, a prediction based on an optimistic scenario where all parties reach a consensus on the roadmap. Heilman estimates that the proposal itself will require two and a half years for code review and testing, followed by six months for activation. Afterward, wallets, custodians, Lightning Network nodes, and fund management software will need several years to complete upgrades. "In an optimistic scenario, 90% of participants will have completed the update five years after activation. The stronger the threat perception, the faster the process," he emphasized. He added that if a breakthrough in quantum computing occurs, the timeline will be significantly accelerated, but overall, it remains a daunting task.

BIP-360, merged into GitHub for review last week, proposes a new output type called "Pay-to-Merkle-Root." This type hides the public key while preserving Taproot's upgradeability and functionality, eliminating quantum-fragile paths. This proposal is a backward-compatible soft fork; nodes that haven't upgraded will ignore the new output type. However, Heilman points out that BIP-360 can only defend against long-term attacks (such as those targeting Satoshi Nakamoto's address), not short-term attacks during transaction broadcasts. The latter requires a soft fork to add a post-quantum signature algorithm to Tapscript. Post-quantum signatures are 10 to 100 times larger than current ones; direct adoption would significantly reduce on-chain processing speed, potentially requiring solutions such as witness discounts, larger blocks, or zero-knowledge proof-based signature compression.