El Salvador has reviewed how it hides the country’s bitcoin, saying the change, strengthens both security today and prepares for technological risks that could emerge in the future.
In a message on Friday, the Bitcoin office said the country’s entire reserve has moved out of a single wallet and spread over many new ones. Each wallet will not contain more than 500 BTC, a limit intended to reduce the potential damage if any of them were ever compromised.
Officials described the new setup as a result of established industry practices, while also expected progress in quantum calculation. Quantum machines, they noticed, could one day break the cryptographic math that ensures Bitcoin, as well as everyday systems such as banking, e -mail and online communication.
The concern arises when coins are used. To move Bitcoin, the digital signature that protects these agents must be revealed on blockchain. Today it is safe, but in theory a future quantum computer could utilize the vulnerable information to calculate the private key and steal the coins before the transaction is confirmed.
By changing coins in many unused wallets, El Salvador reduces the chance that its reserve is back with too many exposed keys at once. Most of its holdings remain locked behind information that cannot currently be attacked and to uncover the size of each wallet means that even a violation would not put the entire reserve at risk.
The government also admitted that its previous setup – to keep everything in a single address for the sake of transparency – created unnecessary exposure. This address was used repeatedly, which meant its keys were visible on blockchain almost continuously. In the new model, a public dashboard gives you the opportunity to track the reserve across multiple wallets and maintain accountability without repeatedly recycling the same address.
In general, the shift is like moving money out of a huge, and into a number of smaller safes. The locks of these safes remain hidden until they open and no one certainly has too much cash.
In addition to the quantum angle, it also matches basic Bitcoin household. Experienced users often warn against recycling the same wallet over and over as it weakens privacy and security. They also recommend dividing large balance into smaller chunks, which limits the fallen if something goes wrong.
That’s why Adam Back, one of Bitcoin’s earliest pioneers and CEO of Blockstream, praised the change. When he wrote on X, he said it is “generally a good practice” to divide funds into many pieces – called Utxos in Bitcoin – Jargon – rather than pouring them into a place and reusing the same address.
Back, inventing the proof-of-work system Hashcash, which inspired Bitcoin and was quoted by Satoshi Nakamoto, did not weigh the quantum argument directly. Instead, his comment emphasized that El Salvador’s new approach reflects principles that are long recognized as best practice in the Bitcoin world.
Most researchers believe that quantum computers that are powerful enough to threaten Bitcoin are still a decade or more away, and the network can eventually adopt new protection if needed. But El Salvador doesn’t wait.
By combining transparency with a more resilient storage model, the country has placed itself as a test case for how sovereign Bitcoin reserves may be controlled in the future – that sets a potential plan that others could follow.
