Freezing dormant bitcoin BTC$79,296.63 would trigger an immediate repricing and mark one of the world's oldest cryptocurrency's worst trading days since its 2009 launch, advocates told CoinDesk. Bitcoin developers and crypto industry participants have debated for weeks whether they should freeze dormant tokens to protect them against the risk of theft through quantum computing, whenever those machines begin going online. “Freezing any coins, even ‘lost’ ones, tells the market that all (roughly) 19.8 million BTC currently in circulation are conditionally owned,” said Samuel "Chad" Patt, who is also the founder of Op Net. “Institutional risk desks do not care about the reason, they care about the precedent.” Read more: A simple explainer on what quantum computing actually is, and why it is terrifying for bitcoin Although Jason Fernandes, a market analyst who describes himself as a pragmatic maximalist, said he agrees with Patt's repricing thesis, he said he believes that a successful quantum attack would trigger a far more severe repricing. “Institutions won’t just price precedent, they’ll price whether the system can survive a break in its core assumptions,” added Fernandes, also the co-founder at AdLunam. Mati Greenspan, also a self-described maximalist and a market analyst, said that if “quantum computers ever crack early Bitcoin wallets, it won’t trigger a rollback or a freeze; it will trigger the largest bug bounty in human history.” The debate follows weeks of discussion over how to respond to the potential threat quantum computing poses to the bitcoin network, particularly the estimated 5.6 million BTC. These tokens are held in wallets that have been dormant for more than a decade, in addresses that have not been upgraded and, therefore, are the most vulnerable in the event that quantum computing attacks become a reality.