By Isaac • October 21, 2026 8:04 am •
Bitcoin’s quantum-computing debate has moved beyond the distant question of whether today’s signatures could someday be broken. The harder issue is what a practical replacement would demand from wallets, exchanges and every node carrying the extra data.
CryptoSlate reports that the current SHRINCS draft can fall back to a 5,777-byte stateless signature when a wallet cannot trust its signing counter. That is more than ten times the draft’s smallest 548-byte stateful signature.
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The larger fallback preserves a path to signing after an old backup is restored, but it also puts a real price on recovery: more transaction weight, more data for nodes and potentially higher fees.
The tradeoff matters because the smaller path depends on state
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