Bitcoin · CoinDesk
BIP-361, published in April by Jameson Lopp and five co-authors
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A later step of that plan promised a recovery path using zero-knowledge proofs, a technology that lets someone prove to another person that they know a fact without ever revealing it.
Key facts
- CEX trading volumes rose for the first time in five months in June, with spot climbing 15.3% to $1.11T and RWA perpetual volumes surging to a record $311B
- Satoshi mined through 2009 and 2010 and was gone by 2011
- On an M5 MacBook Air, generating the proof takes 243 milliseconds on four cores, verification takes 40 milliseconds, and the whole thing uses about 2 gigabytes of memory and no GPU at all
- Project Eleven's runs in 910 milliseconds on the CPU alone, counting circuit construction, proof generation and self-checking, which it puts at 16 times faster
Summary
A new zero-knowledge proof system from Project Eleven offers a practical way to recover bitcoin locked under BIP-361’s proposed freeze of quantum-vulnerable coins, including Satoshi Nakamoto’s holdings. The scheme exploits the fact that quantum computers can break elliptic curve signatures but not the one-way hashing used in modern wallet key derivation, allowing only true owners with seed material to prove control. Benchmarks show Project Eleven’s prototype is dramatically faster than prior work, but it remains unaudited, incomplete, and would require contentious changes to blockchain rules before it could protect any live coins. The proposal to freeze bitcoin's quantum-vulnerable coins has always carried an asterisk. BIP-361, published in April by Jameson Lopp and five co-authors, would block new deposits to vulnerable addresses after three years and freeze whatever remained after five, stranding coins in more than a third of bitcoin's supply, including the roughly 1.1 million BTC attributed to pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto.