Benzinga and Yahoo Finance LLC may earn commission or revenue on some items through the links below.
Mysterious Bitcoin creator “Satoshi Nakamoto” could emerge from the shadows if the cryptocurrency faces an existential threat from quantum computing, Sharplink Gaming (NASDAQ:SBET) Co-CEO Joseph Chalom has reportedly said.
“There’ll be decisions about whether you need to hard fork the protocol [and] what you do with wallets that are dormant,” Chalom told Decrypt. “When that quantum moment comes, somebody is going to wake up and say: ‘I don’t want to be forked.’ Or someone’s going to wake up and say: ‘Fork me.’ That’s a lot of money to leave on the table.”
Don’t Miss:
Chalom told Decrypt that he believed Nakamoto was likely to emerge around this time through “some old, OG accounts,” without clarifying whether it would be associated wallets, email addresses or their Bitcointalk forum account.
Chalom is not the only prominent market observer to suggest that quantum computing risks could force Nakamoto out. In April, Blockstream CEO Adam Back, whose work on Hashcash inspired Bitcoin’s consensus model, reportedly said Nakamoto could reappear to move their Bitcoin in the face of a quantum computing threat.
Nakamoto ceased all public communications in April 2011, telling a fellow developer that he had “moved on to other things” in his final email, adding that Bitcoin was in “good hands.” Despite much interest and investigations, the identity of Nakamoto remains a mystery, with some even speculating that they have remained silent because they may already be dead.
Trending: ‘Scrolling To UBI’ — Deloitte’s #1 fastest-growing software company allows users to earn money on their phones. You can invest today for just $0.30/share.
Quantum computing advancements have put a focus on Nakamoto, as his BTC holdings utilize an old wallet format that is particularly susceptible to quantum computing exploits. The risk has sparked debates on whether to freeze the Bitcoin creator’s assets.
Nakamoto is linked to roughly 1.1 million BTC, currently worth over $124 billion, mined during the cryptocurrency’s early days. These coins have not moved in over a decade.
While concerns at present are centered on the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm encryption used to secure Bitcoin wallets, Nakamoto had provided some guidance on what could be done in the event of a risk to Bitcoin’s core cryptography.