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How would you protect all the old stuck or stale BTC wallets that used the original crypto? An awful lot of cold-stored or presumed-lost BTC would be hard or impossible to migrate to post-quantum protection, no? A quarter of mined BTC? Half?

More of an economic than technical puzzle these days. But wouldn't you need users to protect their wallets post-fork?

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You tell people that value their bitcoin to migrate to new wallets. Bitcoin is self sovereignty and self-ownership. You are responsible for securing your own wallet.

The bitcoin that has been lost doesn't matter, because it's lost. That becomes fair game to whoever can find the computational resources to crack the cryptography of the wallets to get to it. At that point BTC will probably be $500k-$1M in price, and it might just be the driving force behind mainstream adoption of quantum computing.

A forced migration is basically just making a brand new system. It’s not a “protocol fix”.

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