Bitcoin Advances Toward Quantum Resistance With Proposed Update

BIP 360, a proposal to prepare Bitcoin for quantum computing threats, has been updated and merged into the official Bitcoin Improvement Proposal GitHub repository, though a merge does not signal endorsement or future activation. The proposal introduces a Pay-to-Merkle-Root (P2MR) output type that disables the key-path spend used in Taproot and commits only to the script path, reducing exposure of public keys. Co-author Hunter Beast, a Bitcoin developer and senior protocol engineer at MARA, called it a first step in a larger set of quantum-resistance proposals, and the proposal is meant to serve as a foundation for later post-quantum signature upgrades.