El Salvador has reviewed how the Bitcoin of the Nation stores, saying that change strengthens security today and prepares for technological risks that could arise in the future.
In an announcement on Friday, the Bitcoin office said that the entire country reserve has been transferred from a single wallet and has spread by many new ones. Each wallet will not contain more than 500 BTC, a limit destined to reduce potential damage if any of them is compromised.
The officials described the new configuration as following the practices of the industry established while anticipating the advances in quantum computing. They were observed that quantum machines could someday break the cryptographic mathematics that Bitcoin ensures, as well as daily systems such as banking, email and online communications.
The concern arises when coins are spent. To move Bitcoin, the digital signature that protects these funds must be revealed in the block chain. Today, that is safe, but in theory, a future quantum computer could exploit the information presented to calculate the private key and steal the coins before confirming the transaction.
When changing the coins in many unused wallets, El Salvador reduces the possibility that his reservation is left with too many keys exposed at the same time. Most of their holdings remain blocked behind the information that currently cannot be attacked, and limiting 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 configuration, maintaining everything in one direction for the sake of transparency, created an unnecessary exposure. That address was used repeatedly, which meant that its keys were visible in the block chain almost continuously. In the new model, a public board allows anyone to track the reservation into multiple wallets, preserving responsibility without repeatedly reusing the same address.
In simple terms, change is like getting money from a giant vault and a series of smaller safes. The locks in those boxes remain hidden until they open, and no single safe has too effective.
Beyond the quantum angle, this is also aligned with Bitcoin’s basic cleaning. Experienced users often warn against the reuse of the same wallet over and over again, since privacy and security weakens. They also recommend breaking large balances in smaller pieces, which limits the consequences if something goes wrong.
That is why Adam Back, one of Bitcoin’s first pioneers and the Blockstream CEO, praised change. Writing in X, he said that it is “generally a good practice” to divide the funds into many pieces, called Utxes in the Bitcoin jargon, instead of accumulating them in one place and reusing the same direction.
Back, which invented the HashCash work system that inspired Bitcoin and was summoned by Satoshi Nakamoto, did not directly intervene with the quantum argument. Instead, his comment stressed that the new approach of El Salvador reflects principles recognized for a long time as the best practice in the world of Bitcoin.
Most researchers believe that quantum computers powerful enough to threaten Bitcoin are still a decade or more distance, and the network could eventually take new protections if necessary. But El Salvador is not waiting.
By combining transparency with a more resistant storage model, the country has positioned itself as a proof case of how Bitcoin’s sovereign reserves can be managed in the future, establishing a possible plan that others could follow.
