The ongoing debate on quantum-safe Bitcoin address formats misses the point! A quantum computer capable of breaking modern cryptography could compute private keys from public keys. Some therefore argue that hiding public keys (by hashing them) would keep users safe. Technically, that’s true, if an attacker doesn’t know the public key, they can’t compute the private key. However, this argument is fundamentally flawed for several reasons: 1. Public keys are meant to be public. Every cryptographic protocol, including Bitcoin, treats public keys as public information. No wallet or protocol is designed to keep them secret. Bitcoin’s security cannot depend on the assumption that public keys should remain hidden. 2. Public keys are revealed when spending. When you spend Bitcoin, your public key becomes visible on-chain, creating an attack window. This risk is even greater if you reuse the same address, a poor practice, but one that’s still fairly common. 3. Many coins already expose their public keys. A large portion of on-chain BTC, including Satoshi’s coins, already have public keys visible. If a quantum computer capable of breaking modern cryptography suddenly appeared, attackers could start draining these coins. That would cause massive panic, undermining trust in the protocol and collapsing Bitcoin’s perceived value, even if your coins are behind SegWit. In short: if a quantum computer powerful enough to break current cryptography appeared tomorrow, SegWit wouldn’t protect your Bitcoin’s value. While such an event seems unlikely to me in the near term, it’s not impossible, and the risk isn’t worth ignoring. The prudent move would be to proactively upgrade the Bitcoin protocol to make it quantum-resistant and define a migration path, including a strategy for “lost” coins (like Satoshi’s). Of course, such a migration comes with trade-offs. Lattice-based post-quantum cryptography hasn’t yet stood the test of time, and hash-based schemes feel archaic. We’d also need to rethink BIP32 and would lose Schnorr’s additive signature benefits for multisig setups. Still, Bitcoin’s value depends on trust, trust that the protocol is robust, secure, and technologically sound. If that trust erodes, so does Bitcoin’s value.