New Paper: The Most Practical Post-Quantum Bitcoin Proposal Yet (SHRINCS)?

Show Notes

Jonas Nick and Mikhail Kudinov of Blockstream Research published a new post-quantum Bitcoin paper, and it contains one of the more practical proposals we’ve seen to date (SHRINCS). Steve Lee walks through why most quantum-resistant signature schemes are too big to be usable on Bitcoin, what's being proposed instead, and the wallet backup/recovery and operational UX tradeoff. PBJ also zooms out to the bigger questions investors keep asking - when does quantum actually matter? What’s vulnerable first? And why you probably shouldn’t panic-move funds today, while still taking mitigation R&D seriously. Full paper: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/2203.pdf Timestamps 0:00 Background 00:34 Signature bloat as the main post-quantum constraint 01:08 SHRINCS proposal and its stateful tradeoff 03:14 Why modern wallet behavior makes the statefulness mostly manageable 05:47 Attack scenarios & framing risks: taproot, custodians, and investor-facing communication 🎧 From the PBJ podcast recorded at 📍Presidio Bitcoin 🔗 Full episode: https://youtube.com/live/H5dDVTNY4R4?feature=share 🌐 Learn more: https://www.presidiobitcoin.org/