P2WOTS: Post Quantum UTXO Winternitz Signatures

A Delving Bitcoin thread proposing P2WOTS, a new bitcoin output type that would let users receive coins protected by Winternitz one-time signatures (WOTS), a hash-based post-quantum scheme, as a soft-fork-compatible witness version that leaves Taproot and existing functionality intact.

The thread is most useful read together with its critical replies. Reviewers — notably Murch — pressed on the core difficulty of one-time signatures: an output paid twice forces the owner to either reuse the key (leaking the private key) or abandon the second payment, so address reuse and fee-bumping by replacement are unsafe. The author revised the design across the thread (adding a small Merkle key tree for a limited number of signings). It is presented here as an early-stage proposal under active, and contested, discussion rather than a settled design.