While at the Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas, executives from US federal agencies promise not to prosecute developers, in reality code is in the dock.

Keonne Rodriguez has entered a US federal penitentiary. Five years. His crime: writing a non-custodial Bitcoin wallet with Whirlpool.

He never touched user funds. He didn't hold the keys. The code was open source. Yet the Department of Justice prosecuted him for "unlicensed money transmitting" under Section 1960 - a charge that requires no proof of intent, no complicity with crimes, no custody of others' funds. His associate William Lonergan Hill got four years.

Running parallel is Roman Storm, co-founder of Tornado Cash - a non-custodial mixer on Ethereum. Arrested in August 2023. A four-week trial in the Southern District of New York. Verdict on August 6, 2025: the jury failed to reach agreement on the two heavy counts (money laundering, violating North Korea sanctions), but convicted him on § 1960. Same charge, same pattern. If the motion for acquittal filed by the defense is denied, Storm faces a retrial in October 2026 with total exposure approaching forty-five years.

Too bad that back in 2019 FinCEN had explicitly written: anyone who develops non-custodial peer-to-peer software without controlling user funds is not a money transmitter. In April 2025, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche issued an internal memo: stop regulatory prosecutions against developers of non-custodial software.

The verdict against Storm came in August 2025. Four months after the Blanche memo. Prosecutors in the Southern District of New York pushed for conviction anyway. In March 2026 they sought a new trial on the other two counts, with the opposite directive written in black and white by DOJ leadership.
If the interpretation of § 1960 applied to Storm holds up on appeal, the perimeter is this: any American developer of wallets, coinjoins, or Lightning Service Providers becomes a potential defendant. The menu is already written. Plead and take four or five years. Fight and risk forty-five.

Code is on trial, whatever the paid feds in Las Vegas may say.
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BIP-361: Post Quantum Migration and Legacy Signature Sunset. The proposal: five years after activation, any bitcoin not migrated to quantum-resistant addresses gets frozen.

The numbers behind the proposal. As of March 1, 2026, more than 34% of all existing bitcoin had public keys exposed on-chain. According to @Jameson Lopp, one of the six signatories, the technically vulnerable bitcoin total 5.6 million. Roughly 28% of the circulating supply. That figure includes 1.1 million bitcoin untouched since 2010, probabilistically attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto.

The proponents’ thesis: if an attacker with a sufficiently powerful quantum computer unlocked those UTXOs and dumped them on the market, the sell-off would hurt every other holder. From the BIP text: “Lost coins make everyone else’s worth slightly more. Coins recovered by an attacker make everyone else’s worth less. Consider it theft from everyone.”
Lopp himself, however, in the hours after the debate blew up on X, stated: “At the moment, I don’t think any of this is necessary.”

The objections come from several directions. @MartyBent raised what he calls “the man in the coma” case: anyone who fails to execute the migration for five years loses all their money, frozen by consensus rules. @Adam Back at Paris Blockchain Week called today’s quantum computers “lab experiments” with “incremental” progress, and argued that Bitcoin can prepare itself through optional upgrades without imposing freezes.

The real point is something else. If consensus rules can freeze addresses based on type, a precedent exists. Governments will have it on the table: freezing sanctioned UTXOs, freezing addresses on OFAC lists, freezing the wallets of politically inconvenient people.

The proposal calls for freezing legitimately held bitcoin in the name of the collective good. Bitcoin exists because no one can block anyone else’s funds. BIP-361 asks the protocol to do exactly that, by design.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
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Less than a week after the quantum terrorism spread by Google Quantum AI's paper, Avihu Levy discovered that the solution is already inside #Bitcoin.

The Chief Product Officer of StarkWare published a research paper on GitHub called QSB - Quantum Safe Bitcoin. The thesis: it is possible to sign Bitcoin transactions resistant to quantum computers using already existing consensus rules. No soft fork. No protocol changes.

The mechanism works in 3 phases
- Transaction pinning: uses public keys and RIPEMD-160 hashes to create computational constraints with a probability of a random string satisfying them of roughly 1 in 70 trillion.
- Digest rounds: searches for subsets among dummy signatures to generate a collision-resistant digest, effectively building a Lamport signature.
- Final transaction assembly.

The numbers
Against Shor's algorithm, the one that should break ECDSA, the system offers approximately 118 bits of security. Standard ECDSA, with a sufficiently powerful quantum computer, would offer 0. Against Grover, 59-69 bits.

The underlying technology is called Binohash, developed by Robin Linus.

Practical limitations
Each QSB transaction costs $75-$200 in GPU power and requires 6-8 hours of computation. Transactions are non-standard and must be sent directly to miners. It is obviously not a solution for everyday use today, but the protocol designed in 2008 already contains the antibodies for a threat that is still closer to science fiction than to physical reality.

I discuss it in detail in Bitcoin Train’s Stop #294.
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Let’s set the record straight:

Google has published a paper claiming that it would take 500,000 physical qubits and 9 minutes to break Bitcoin’s elliptic curve cryptography. Today, Google has 105 physical qubits. It would need 5,000 times that number.

There’s one detail the industry media forgot to highlight: the paper itself specifies that mining attacks using Grover’s algorithm “remain impractical for the next few decades.” So why all the fuss? Let’s see who’s talking about it.

Justin Drake of the Ethereum Foundation co-authored Google’s paper. The same Justin Drake who designs and promotes Ethereum’s post-quantum roadmap. A week before the publication, he had announced a $2 million research initiative. He quantifies the threat and sells the solution.

Nic Carter, founding partner of Castle Island Ventures, led the $20 million Series A round in Project Eleven-valued at $120 million-a company whose business model is to sell protection against the quantum threat. Then he goes public to declare that quantum computing is “the biggest risk to Bitcoin.”

It’s the same playbook as Jamie Dimon with JPMorgan: publicly, Bitcoin was a “Ponzi scheme.” Privately, JPMorgan was buying shares of BlackRock and Grayscale’s Bitcoin ETFs. Fear is a business model.

Meanwhile, quietly, BIP-360 proposes a new type of quantum-resistant address. It’s already on the testnet. The ones warning you about the danger are the same ones selling you the solution.
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On 23 March, a two-block reorg occurred on the Bitcoin network. Some people claimed it was a bug, a vulnerability, or an impending disaster – as is now usual in an environment where debate is turning into a football pitch.

But the protocol worked exactly as intended.

I discuss this in the new #BitcoinTrain article.
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