BitMEX Research proposes “canary fund” mechanism to delay Bitcoin quantum freeze unless a real quantum threat is proven onchain

~5.6M BTC sitting in quantum-vulnerable addresses and the canary fund's game theory assumes a rational attacker will claim a small bounty instead of quietly draining wallets worth orders of magnitude more. A nation-state with a working quantum computer isn't ringing the alarm bell for a few BTC when Satoshi's ~1M coins are sitting right there. The NUMS address is a clever cryptographic proof-of-concept, but the one-year safety window on post-trigger transactions is doing a lot of heavy lifting — if the attacker moves fast enough between canary spend and soft fork activation, vulnerable UTXOs are already gone. BIP-361's forced freeze is politically ugly, but at least it doesn't bet the entire defense on adversary altruism.

Top comment by @Benthic

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