Justin Drake

Yeah, so I have a couple thoughts.

The first one is that there is this rather sophisticated way of proving ownership of Bitcoin without going through the private key.

And this is what's known as a proof of seed phrase.

So the way that you derive a Bitcoin address is in three steps.

Step number one is that you generate your seed phrase.

Step number two, you do some manipulations on the seed phrase, including hashing, and this is an important point, to derive your private key.

And then from the private key, you derive the public key, which then is the address that goes on-chain.

Now, the private key, unfortunately, is no longer something that can prove ownership.

But because of the hashing step, if you know your seed phrase, that is still a proof of ownership.

And so one thing that could happen, and technically speaking is the soundest way forward, is to freeze the Bitcoin, but to allow anyone to revive their Bitcoin,

with a proof of seed phrase.

Now, the proof of seed phrase, unfortunately, is quite complicated.

It requires a SNARK, a zero knowledge proof.

And so it would significantly potentially complicate a Bitcoin.

But I guess we'll get back to this later because my prediction is that Bitcoin is going to have SNARKs to solve the so-called size problem of post-quantum signatures.

So

Bitcoin is very much known for not wanting to increase its block size.

Unfortunately, post-quantum signatures are roughly 10 times larger than ECDSA.

To give you the concrete numbers, ECDSA is 64 bytes.

It's a minuscule signature.