Binance founder Changpeng Zhao's suggestion that the estimated 1.1 million tokens belonging to Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto should be frozen to prevent them from being stolen should quantum computers break the blockchain's cryptography elicited conflicting views among some of the industry's best-known investors, developers and entrepreneurs.
Zhao, widely known by his initials CZ, floated the idea during a podcast last month with Galaxy Digital's Alex Thorn. His idea was to give Satoshi six to 12 months to move the bitcoin , worth about $68 billion at bitcoin’s current price of roughly $62,000. If nothing happened, he said, the community could decide whether to freeze those addresses.
"If we don't do anything with it, then we're basically giving it to somebody who's going to hack it," Zhao said.
Among the concerns is the possibility that someone with access to the tokens might dump them on the market, flooding supply and crashing the price. An alternative worry is the blockchain seizing control of an individual's property in a system that's designed to be permissionless and trustless.