Bitcoin “Bunker Mode” and What It Actually Protects

What happened

Bitcoin “Bunker Mode” and What It Actually Protects, Fireblocks announced. In a recent post, Justin Drake, an Ethereum Foundation researcher, asks holders to move Bitcoin to addresses whose public keys are still hidden behind a hash. Drake writes that it is now reasonable to brace for ECDSA breaking through classical means before a quantum attack becomes practical, in the worst case within months.

No such attack exists today, and whether one is plausible at all is disputed. Yehuda Lindell, Head of Cryptography at Coinbase and a professor at Bar-Ilan University, makes the counter-case: AI proving open theorems is no evidence that problems believed inherently hard are about to fall, and a break of elliptic curves would reach far past crypto, to the certificates and code signing the rest of the digital world runs on.