Muneeb Ali Warns Post-Quantum Upgrade Could Cut Bitcoin Base-Layer Capacity Tenfold

Bitcoin faces a critical timeline to adopt quantum-resistant cryptography, which could reduce base-layer transaction capacity by roughly tenfold, Stacks co-founder Muneeb Ali warned at Token2049. Ali stated Bitcoin has roughly two years to initiate a post-quantum upgrade and two more for coin migration, ahead of NIST's 2035 phaseout target for legacy schemes. Because post-quantum signatures like ML-DSA-44 require 2,420 bytes compared to 64 bytes for Schnorr, modeled capacity per block could drop from approximately 4,200 transactions to just 84, pushing everyday activity to layer-2 solutions.