Hong Kong Gave Banks a 2030 Quantum Deadline: Who Gives Bitcoin One?

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) published a white paper on quantum preparedness on July 27, rating its banking sector 2.3 out of 10 and targeting full readiness by 2030.

Bitcoin (BTC) faces the same quantum threat but has no regulator to set a deadline. Its transition depends entirely on community consensus, which remains divided.

Regulators Can Mandate. Bitcoin Must Agree

The HKMA’s first Quantum Preparedness Index found the sector at an early stage. Around half of the surveyed banks have no formal post-quantum cryptography (PQC) plan. Another 32% have not started their transition at all.

Even so, the regulator can force the pace. It announced a PQC toolkit developed with the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, along with industry workshops. The target is a full score of 10 by 2030.

“The HKMA will continue to support the banking sector’s PQC transition, with the aim of achieving full sectoral readiness (a QPI score of 10) by 2030 through practical guidance, training, and industry engagement,” the regulator noted.

Bitcoin has no equivalent mechanism. Speaking on the BeInCrypto Experts Council, Oxford quantum computing lecturer Stefano Gogioso contrasted this with Ethereum (ETH), where a foundation at least shapes a post-quantum roadmap.

“Bitcoin has a completely different governance structure in that it doesn’t have one,” he said.

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The Quantum Fix Exists, but Consensus Doesn’t

Proposals do exist. Developers merged BIP-360 into Bitcoin’s proposal repository in February. BIP-360 proposes introducing a new Pay-to-Merkle-Root (P2MR) output type through a soft fork. It functions similarly to Pay-to-Taproot (P2TR) but removes the key path spend.

“For clarity, this proposal specifically mitigates the risk of long exposure attacks on outputs that support tapscript and script trees. While some other Bitcoin output types, such as P2SH, are safe against long exposure attacks, taproot is not and taproot is the only currently activated output type that supports tapscript and script trees,” the proposal reads.

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A draft proposal, BIP-361, co-authored by Casa co-founder Jameson Lopp, would phase out Bitcoin’s legacy ECDSA and Schnorr signatures and, eventually, make coins that fail to migrate difficult to access. 

This raises concerns about 1.7 million BTC in early pay-to-public-key addresses, the majority of which are attributed to Satoshi Nakamoto. Still, a greater obstacle remains. Everyone has to agree on what to do next. 

CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju previously warned that consensus, not code, is the real bottleneck. He noted that Bitcoiners rarely unite behind changes that seem to touch the network’s founding principles.

Thus, the HKMA will measure its banks against a deadline. Bitcoin’s readiness has no scorecard, and no one is empowered to create one.