El Salvador has overhauled how it stores the nation’s bitcoin, saying the change both strengthens security today and prepares for technological risks that could emerge in the future.

In an announcement on Friday, the Bitcoin Office said the country’s entire reserve has been moved out of a single wallet and spread across many new ones. Each wallet will hold no more than 500 BTC, a limit meant to reduce the potential damage if any one of them were ever compromised.

Officials described the new setup as following established industry practices while also anticipating advances in quantum computing. Quantum machines, they noted, could one day break the cryptographic math that secures bitcoin, as well as everyday systems like banking, email and online communications.

The concern arises when coins are spent. To move bitcoin, the digital signature protecting those funds must be revealed on the blockchain. Today, that’s safe, but in theory a future quantum computer could exploit the exposed information to calculate the private key and steal the coins before the transaction is confirmed.

By shifting coins into many unused wallets, El Salvador reduces the chance that its reserve is left with too many exposed keys at once. Most of its holdings remain locked beh

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Author: Siamak Masnavi