[glerk]

> The only way to authenticate who owns what coins is with signatures

Maybe the only fully cryptographic absolutely zero-trust way? In practice there are very few bitcoin outputs that aren't linked to an offline identity and most users could easily produce a proof of ownership.

Of course, this is not ideal and everyone would prefer not to go down that route. But even if we prepare in time and Bitcoin provides a quantum-secure address scheme before "Q-day", what happens to all the wallets that didn't upgrade? Is it open season on them? Satoshi's wallet alone could crash Bitcoin's value as a currency if dumped on the open market. I think even with the upgrade plan in place, a hard-fork + recovery will be on the menu, with various degrees of community support.

[EthanHeilman]

> In practice there are very few bitcoin outputs that aren't linked to an offline identity and most users could easily produce a proof of ownership.

Any who is going to in charge of reading that proof of identity and moving the coins? A trusted centralized party? The point of Bitcoin is to avoid exactly that sort of trust relationship, otherwise use the banking system.

> Satoshi's wallet alone could crash Bitcoin's value as a currency if dumped on the open market.

No one knows, but the incentives are aligned with a softfork to burn Satoshi's coins.

[glerk]

> Any who is going to in charge of reading that proof of identity and moving the coins? A trusted centralized party?

Basically you'd have to relax the trust/decentralization guarantees, but you don't have to relax them all the way. Most likely a consortium of trusted actors (Blockstream, major miners, major exchanges, bitcoin-adjacent companies,...). Or something like a consensus mechanism with aligned incentives a la Kleros. I think "we" could come up with "something", even if it is not perfect, because the value of Bitcoin is ultimately in the community of people who use Bitcoin, not just the protocol.

"Hard-fork" might not be the right way to see this. It's more like starting a completely new protocol where people who held Bitcoin at a certain snapshot can redeem a one-time airdrop equivalent to the value they held, provided they can prove ownership. As that protocol's value overtakes the value of the original Bitcoin chain (which will eventually be completely dead), we can all agree to call it Bitcoin.

[realharo]

>The point of Bitcoin is to avoid exactly that sort of trust relationship, otherwise use the banking system.

Most participants don't care about this. For almost everyone, the point of Bitcoin is to go up. As long as they can find enough buyers that also believe it will go up, the rest is optional. Especially if it's temporary, for a one-time migration.