| > but some portion of folks can attest to their ownership. How? Alice pay's Bob 1 BTC at random address 0x1234. Someone shows up and says, I own that address and here is signature proving it. But the signature scheme is broken so anyone can do that. So you ask for documentation they own that address, well they have screencap of a message asking for payment from Alice. Is that real? Maybe you find the email of that user and ask them, but they could be lying. Now if you paid from coinbase, coinbase could vouch for you. So you need some sort of court that sits in judgement over who owns what. That is going to be very expensive. While you are doing this, no one can move funds. What is the most likely outcome of such a system, well there is not CEO of Bitcoin, so you would probably end up with multiple courts producing conflicting rulings that no one would respect. The whole notion of ownership courts is anathema to Bitcoin's philosophy and would completely undermine the social trust that makes Bitcoin valuable. If we are going to save Bitcoin from a CRQC we must act before a CRQC recovers everyone's private key. There are three workable schemes: * For public keys that in hashed addresses such as P2PKH (Pay-to-Public-Key-Hash) et al., if the public key is not known, then you could produce a ZKP that you know the public key (proof of pre-image). The main problem with this approach is that it only protects hashed addresses where the public key has not been leaked or exposed on-chain. It doesn't have enough coverage. * You can do commit-reveal schemes, this makes miners far more trusted and again only helps with hashed addresses that haven't exposed the public key. * You can do ZKP proof of HD Seeds, from most modern wallets have HD seeds. AFAICT You'd have to use STARKs but STARKs for HD seeds are too big for on-chain proofs. Not all HD seeds are protected and not all addresses have HD seeds. Just today Laolu published this demo for doing this, the proofs at 1.7 mbs https://groups.google.com/g/bitcoindev/c/Q06piCEJhkI |