I lived through the Cold War era, constant ‘Russia’ fearporn. Yes there could be Nuclear armageddon but it serves no purpose. Deep State want control. Bitcoin is a paradigm shift. My hope is it opens a door to higher consciousness and Human prosperity not the opposite
Discussion
I agree with your last sentence. I’m very impartial when it comes to the origins of Bitcoin. Ultimately, it’s here, and we can use it, so it doesn’t really matter.
I am spending a lot of time entertaining this idea not because I care about it from a Bitcoin perspective, but because I’m trying to understand why an organization like the CIA would have done something so incredible.
Bitcoin is money for enemies. I do think it’s a one of a kind discovery that actually aligns incentives among all participants. Although, the ordinals question that started this conversation is a challenge to that notion
And there is always the potential of a rug pull somehow if the CIA really did invent and front run as satoshi, or gains early access to the ability to crack sha256
But all of this has to be weighed against… what’s the alternative? A CBDC? Pass
This is a technicality but SHA256 doesn’t matter (that) much for Bitcoin security - ECDSA is really what would have to be cracked to be significant.
SHA256 cannot be “cracked” because it’s a one way hash function. You could put any data in, and it makes a 256bit fingerprint no matter what. Since the size of the data is irrelevant, any hash output has theoretically limitless possible inputs. So even if you had an efficient way of reversing a hash, you’d have no way of knowing if the correct input you generated was actually the data that you started with. You could have multiple different inputs which generate the same output, though the space is so big that collisions never ever happen (something like 10^77 possibilities)
Ordinals is a complete joke and a total non-threat to Bitcoin. The people who think we need to fork have been, and always will be, only a threat to themselves.
Yes sorry elliptic curve would be the rug
I’m not extremely technical but I read a good piece on what the emergence of quantum would *actually* look like
Does seem like we ought to move to schnorr signatures sooner rather than later though
If you want a fun rabbit hole to go down, I highly recommend researching more about quantum computing.
I’m not an expert and I cannot claim to know anything with 100% certainty, but a lot of it doesn’t make any sense. I’d put my skepticism on the same level as your skepticism about nukes.
Essentially, the only way they would work is by having large sets of QBits entangled in a state of quantum superposition, running a function, and then making a measurement. But the problem is that even though you can get exponentially more efficiency with more QBits, you also have to make an exponentially increasing amount of state measurements.
Modern quantum computers get around this by being
1. Really small and inefficient
2. Segmented into separate sections instead of all entangled together
But there isn’t any known way to make enough state measurements to make them useable to crack sophisticated encryption in reasonable times.
Just my two sats though - definitely DYOR.