Signature · Institutional → Quantum Core Institute
Post-quantum migration isn't one project — it's six, each on its own clock. This ranks them the way a harvest-now-decrypt-later adversary already does: by how long your data has to stay secret, not by how easy the system is to fix.
X data shelf life + Y migration time > Z time to Q-Day ⟶ already exposed
Mosca's inequality. Anything an adversary records today stays harvestable until you've migrated it — so the systems holding decade-long secrets are the emergency, even when Q-Day looks far off. That's why shelf life is the dominant weight here, not criticality.
Your systems — set shelf life, criticality, and migration status
| System | Data shelf life | Criticality | Migration status |
|---|
Criticality × migration status
Chips are colored by shelf life — the dominant weight. The hot corner, top-left, is high-criticality work that hasn't started on data that must stay secret for years. That's the harvest-now target.
Ordered to match the HNDL timeline: longest-lived secrets, least migrated, at the top.
A heat-map is a starting point. A migration plan is the deliverable.
A QCI Quantum Readiness Assessment turns this into a sequenced, governance-ready migration roadmap mapped to your shelf-life exposure and the QCI-QS1 standard.
FAQ
Post-quantum migration for Bitcoin is the process of moving holdings from addresses that use ECDSA (vulnerable to Shor's algorithm on a sufficiently powerful quantum computer) to addresses secured by quantum-resistant cryptography.
The technical layers of the problem:
Address exposure: Any address that has signed a transaction has broadcast its public key. These need to move first. Coins in fresh, never-signed addresses are relatively safer because only a hash is exposed — Grover's algorithm weakens hash security from 256 bits to an effective 128 bits, which remains computationally hard.
Protocol-level migration: Bitcoin's base layer still uses ECDSA and Schnorr signatures. A quantum-resistant Bitcoin would require a protocol upgrade (softfork or hardfork) to support post-quantum signature schemes (NIST-standardized options include CRYSTALS-Dilithium and FALCON). This is a network-wide coordination problem, not something individual holders can solve alone.
Custodian readiness: Institutional holders with custodied Bitcoin depend on their custodian's ability to migrate signing infrastructure. Multi-sig setups require all keyholders to coordinate. Cold storage hardware wallets may require firmware updates or device replacement.
What the checker assesses:
The readiness score across four dimensions: cryptographic inventory (what address types you hold), tooling (whether your custody setup can execute migration), timeline awareness (your estimate of quantum risk window vs. migration timeline), and coordination (whether your counterparties are aligned). A low score doesn't mean you're at immediate risk — it means the gap between your current state and a defensible state is wider than it should be.
Methodology
Scores custodian post-quantum readiness across four weighted dimensions and returns a 0–100 composite with a readiness band.
Signing infrastructure and custodian roadmap carry the most weight — they determine whether you can migrate in time once the timeline tightens. A low score does not mean you are exposed today, it means you have insufficient optionality.