• Every mechanism requires spenders of legacy-protected Bitcoin to lock up collateral equal to the amount spent.
• Quantum Landmines lets owners pre-create cryptographic proofs and claim an attacker's collateral after an attack.
• Staked Auction would permanently burn quantum-vulnerable coins rather than return them to previous owners.
Quantum Landmines, Staked Auction and Sats Auction
Bitcoin (BTC) Core developer Cory Fields has put forward three mechanisms designed to make quantum-based theft economically irrational before such attacks become technically possible. The proposal, dated November 7, introduces designs named Quantum Landmines, Staked Auction and Sats Auction. All three share one premise: once quantum computers can forge the elliptic-curve signatures that protect the network's outputs, anyone moving coins still secured by legacy cryptography must post collateral equal to the amount being spent. An attacker who forges a signature would then have to risk as much capital as the theft would yield, which removes the profit that motivates the attempt. The proposal is architectural rather than market-driven; nothing in it touches the Bitcoin (BTC) price, trading conditions or investor positioning. Quantum Landmines relies on preparation by owners: a user builds cryptographic proofs in advance, and if a quantum attack occurs, that user can claim the collateral the attacker deposited. The other two designs, Staked Auction and Sats Auction, target a different class of coins, those whose private keys are presumed lost. There, third parties compete to seize an attacker's collateral, so even where the original owner can no longer reach the assets, the attacker still faces probable economic loss. Fields is a longtime contributor to the Bitcoin Core client, and his proposal enters an ongoing discussion about whether a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could break the cryptography behind exposed public keys, one of the long-term security questions the project's developers continue to weigh. The threat model here differs from a replay attack, which reuses a valid signature instead of forging one. It also differs from the proof of work mining that orders blocks, where quantum speedups are considered manageable; the exposure sits in signature verification, where public keys already revealed on-chain become forgeable targets for a capable enough machine.
A Burn Clause in the Staked Auction
The most contentious element sits in the Staked Auction design. Under that model, coins vulnerable to a quantum attack would be burned permanently rather than returned to their previous owners, meaning a successful attacker keeps nothing, the original holder recovers nothing, and the supply shrinks by the amount disputed. Fields presented the burn as part of the deterrent arithmetic, not as a recovery tool. The two auction designs work on a related assumption: when the original owner has lost access, third parties will bid against the attacker for the posted collateral, creating competition for the seizure itself. That competition is what guarantees the attacker's expected loss even in cases where no legitimate claimant exists. The collateral rule spans the whole proposal: after quantum capability arrives, anyone spending coins still guarded by older cryptographic methods locks up BTC equivalent to the amount in question, turning a forged spend into a wager that at best breaks even. Fields acknowledged that all three mechanisms remain at the conceptual stage. Technical implementation details, including how the pre-created proofs are constructed, how the auctions clear and how the rules would be introduced, still need development, and no timeline was offered. The designs also leave open which outputs the protection would actually cover. Coins that have never been spent, including holdings in Segregated Witness addresses, keep the underlying public key hidden until the first spend, while older pay-to-public-key outputs expose it from creation; exposure, not age alone, is what makes an output forgeable in this scenario. The proposal does not modify consensus rules today and specifies no activation path, leaving coverage questions for the implementation work ahead.
Economics Ahead of Cryptography
What separates these proposals from the usual post-quantum debate is the substitution of economic deterrence for key replacement. Fields's designs leave the existing signature scheme in place and change the payoff instead, which avoids committing the network to a fixed migration deadline for elliptic-curve cryptography. The burden shifts to activation: any mechanism that burns a holder's coins, as the Staked Auction clause does, faces a hard path through Bitcoin's consensus process, and a change of that kind would draw sustained opposition, particularly from early adopters still watching over long-dormant coins they continue to HODL. The question that would settle the matter is timing, whether quantum capability arrives before a standard post-quantum migration ships. Nothing in the record settles it, and Fields himself marks the work as conceptual.