In the face of the threat of quantum computing, Ledger Chief Technology Officer Charles Guilmet warned on April 27 that Bitcoin faces a governance problem rather than a technical problem.
Guillemet said in a post on X that the community needs to come to a consensus on a transition plan. Before uncertainty undermines confidence In protocol.
The executive was responding to a thread started by Connor Brown, an analyst involved in the Bitcoin ecosystem, after he offered a bounty for an alleged experiment in the wake of Project Eleven’s so-called “debacle.” This would break the elliptic curve keyquestioned by various engineers and experts in this field.
Guilmet said the central question is not whether or not a quantum computer capable of decoding Bitcoin exists, but when and how. According to the manager, Building a discussion solely around that issue is “leading to disaster.”. For decentralized networks like Bitcoin, the risks are governance, not technical. “This is not a technical problem, it’s a decentralization problem,” the executive said.
Among the outstanding decisions, Guilmet listed:
- what new signature scheme to adopt, whether to depreciate ECDSA and Schnorr;
- Block size and its impact on network performance,
- Need an update? soft fork ah hard fork,y
- What will happen to the BTC that will not be migrated, such as funds from addresses whose public keys have been made public and those belonging to Satoshi Nakamoto?
Decentralized governance models: The heart of the matter
With this approach, Guillemet disagrees with Brown’s statement. It met every six months and proposed the creation of a public technical association.consisting of quantum computing academics, Bitcoin core developers, and quantum hardware builders from large-scale labs.
This effort involves the production of regular reports on the threat landscape and available crypto alternatives, with a clear bias towards marketing promises. Brown suggested that the Bitcoin Policy Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization, could organize such a space.
Project Eleven CEO Alex Pruden supported the proposal, saying his company: Don’t seek to stand out in post-quantum conversations. Pruden has previously suggested that around 7 million BTC is exposed to a hypothetical quantum attacker, a figure that contrasts with more conservative estimates by other companies in the space.
Guilmet warns that time is limited. According to Ledger’s CTO: The industry takes approximately nine years to update each relevant cryptographic system.and that luxury is “not much time.” The manager’s position is that trust in the security of the system has already reached an inflection point, and rebuilding trust once lost will take time that is impossible for the ecosystem.
