TRANSKRIPT 🔗
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Output Type Design Considerations.
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Notes from a panel with Pieter Wuille and conduition, moderated by Justin of Localhost Research, at the Post-Quantum Bitcoin Workshop at Stanford, 28 August 2026, written by Mike Schmidt.
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This is an AI recording.
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Find the original text and more information on btctranscripts.com.
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Reference: delvingbitcoin.org — PQC output type discussion
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Framing
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Topic: how do PQ schemes hook into Bitcoin consensus — output types and their design?
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This isn't Bitcoin's first output-type transition (BIP11, BIP16, SegWit, Taproot) — but this time we're more informed, with real usage and migration data.
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The Two Main Proposals
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P2TRv2 (Pieter)
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Background: Taproot's key path / script path design, with unused paths hidden. Taproot hasn't seen the adoption hoped for — partly because the low-feerate environment blunts its space savings.
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P2TRv2 = P2TR with PQC opcodes / leaf types added.
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Crucially, with the explicit agreement and clear expectation that a user opting into this output type accepts that EC spending can and will be disabled.
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P2MR (Conduition)
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P2TR with EC key tweaking removed (~360 origins).
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No depth-zero trees — removes the mal-incentive toward a single spending condition, which degraded privacy.
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Possible combinations with other ideas: CISA, key recovery — since P2MR is less efficient to use pre-Q-Day.
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The Tripwire
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Codifies the expectation of disabling EC spending: if secp DLP is demonstrably broken (example triggers were listed), EC spending in P2TRv2 is disabled.
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Disabling applies only to P2TRv2 — not P2TR or other types. Because it's explicit in the output type, it avoids being seen as confiscation.
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Pieter doesn't actually expect EC disabling to happen via the tripwire — its purpose is an upper bound that forces users to take EC-disabling seriously, removes doubt, and removes the risk of EC disabling in it being considered confiscatory among users and potential migrators.
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Criticisms and alternatives discussed:
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Some see it as "at best a psychological thing."
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Similar proposals use toy curves — a ladder of increasing curve sizes — but there's no way to know whether attack progress will be fast or slow, and individuals can run such demonstrations independent of consensus rules.
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Tripwires could serve other purposes too (e.g., triggering rescue protocols), not just EC disabling.
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Incentivization: tripping the wire is a public good (cf. Google's demonstrations) — people could donate to the tripwire address to form a bounty.
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Steal vs. Freeze — "The Existential Threat"
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"The biggest threat, the hardest problem, is the steal-vs-freeze discussion" over Satoshi-era coins:
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Letting quantum computers steal violates the expectations people have of cryptocurrency — what's the point?
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Freezing coins — then what distinguishes Bitcoin from anything else, if coins can be frozen?
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Taking coins out of this equation — via migration — is the priority.
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Witness Structure & Costing PQ Signatures
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Pieter: introducing a new witness is a big step (but slightly less than segwit was), especially for hash-based signatures, given the bytes-vs-cost distinction.
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Effectively a block size increase available only to PQ signatures — justified because those bytes are easier to process.
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On costing: you could price PQ sigs per-byte like Schnorr, but that doesn't make sense — instead I argue for something based on both bandwidth and computation costs.
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Audience member comment: keep throughput the same and adjust the costs, alternatively
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Response to the above: Keeping the throughput the same is a technical possibility, not a goal on itself..
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PQ data blob / new witness lessons learned: DoS concerns exist just at the P2P layer, plus data structures get duplicated everywhere. You can introduce a new witness and nest the old hash inside it — somewhat less painful to upgrade than the original SegWit witness.
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Should We Wait for Better Cryptography?
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Today's cryptography doesn't let Bitcoin migrate fully to PQ (no HD keys, limited confidence in schemes, etc.).
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To avoid the freeze/steal dilemma, migration should start sooner — especially for the long tail. The scheme should be reasonably adoptable by everyone (industry, Lightning, etc.).
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Having "something" people can adopt is enough to establish Bitcoin as quantum-ready ("street cred"). Throwing more features in risks delaying implementation and activation.
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Real-world adoption constraints:
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Engineering cost for the ecosystem (wallets — including multicoin wallets that rarely ship Bitcoin updates)
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Users must want to adopt it; fee considerations matter
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Witness changes are more invasive and more political
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Recommendations & Comparison
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Pieter's short-term recommendation: P2TRv2 with tripwire, using the simplest PQ signature scheme. P2MR later, or with a more advanced scheme.
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User/usage types influence the approach: assuming perfect usage (no address reuse or key disclosure), P2MR is PQ-secure — but assuming perfection isn't great. Thus the tripwire applies equally to both proposals.
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P2TRH was covered at a high level — summarized as "a weird middle ground" and not an easy-to-roll-out solution.
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A hash-based first step is the conservative option and can migrate the long tail of users without further action on their part.
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CISA / Signature Aggregation Impact
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Brief overview of cross-input signature aggregation (DahLIAS, etc.): more efficient blockspace use, lower fees.
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More beneficial to P2TRv2 than P2MR (P2MR needs the pubkey among other fields; 64-byte lower bound; half-agg gives ~96 bytes with P2MR).
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Note: these benefits exist only pre-Q-Day. Audience comment: this incentive muddies the waters.
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Audience Q&A
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Should the output type discussion be tied to a new PQ opcode? Runs into confiscation risks; P2TRv2 already carries both EC and PQ options. There's no realistic enforcement mechanism — that's what the tripwire is for — and people could just add a dummy key if forced. Since P2TRv2 has no other advantages, the whole point of using it is PQ.
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Spending from PQ back to quantum-vulnerable outputs defeats confidence — can it be made one-way? Idea floated: a standardness rule refusing to relay PQ→quantum-vulnerable spends. Pieter sees this as unrealistic — you couldn't pay "anyone" anymore.
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Special key-path key signaling the key path is disabled? No benefit vs. P2MR; feels hacked-in. (Debate about whether it eases deployment.)
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NUMS point generation for the tripwire? Options discussed for a BIP-specified generation process; also an OP_RETURN-with-private-key option; also: a Taproot script-only key put on chain — if it's ever spent via key path, that's proof DLP is broken. Counterpoint: a rational attacker will simply avoid the tripwire.
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Is the tripwire immediate, or does it take effect next targeting period? (Raised; discussion not captured.)