PANews February 18 News, according to Cointelegraph, co-author of Bitcoin Improvement Proposal BIP-360 Ethan Heilman stated that if the migration begins tomorrow, it will take approximately seven years for the Bitcoin network to fully achieve quantum resistance. This estimate is based on an optimistic scenario where all parties reach consensus on the roadmap. Heilman estimates that the proposal itself will require two and a half years to complete code review and testing, followed by six months for activation. After that, wallets, custodians, Lightning Network nodes, and fund management software will need several years to upgrade. "In an optimistic scenario, 90% of participants will have completed updates five years after activation. The stronger the threat perception, the faster the process," he emphasized. He also noted that if breakthroughs in quantum computing occur, the timeline could be significantly accelerated, but overall, it remains a challenging task. BIP-360 was merged into GitHub for review last week, proposing a new output type called "Pay-to-Merkle-Root," which retains Taproot's upgradeability and functionality while hiding public keys to eliminate quantum-vulnerable paths. This proposal is a backward-compatible soft fork; nodes that do not upgrade will ignore the new output type. However, Heilman pointed out that BIP-360 can only defend against long-term attacks (such as against Satoshi addresses) and cannot prevent short-term attacks during transaction broadcasting. The latter requires adding post-quantum signature algorithms in Tapscript via a soft fork. Post-quantum signatures are 10 to 100 times larger than current ones; directly adopting them would significantly reduce on-chain processing speed. Possible solutions include introducing witness discounts, expanding block sizes, or compressing signatures using zero-knowledge proof techniques.