Just had a thought.. If we don’t update bitcoin to post quantum cryptography before it happens, it’s all gone. Our secret keys *are * our identity. There is no hard form that returns our money. Is this true? #asknostr #bitcoin #quantum
Discussion
Yes. This was one reason I almost did not get into Bittie or any other crypto. People need to be serious about this.
Google has switched Chrome over to a quantum resistant hybrid of Kyber-768 and X25519.
This is a sign that this is a puck to skate in front of.
“Bitcoin fixes this…” will sound moronic if a slew of funds starts to disappear and people see that this is no joke.
At the same time, quantum has been sooning so long I understand why people have a hard time taking it seriously.
But Google has changed over, and they are not the only group concerned with this.
It’s a current focus at NIST, and advances come to light so frequently in this domain that we need to start hardening against quantum.
That is my opinion and I’m curious to hear what others think.
Thank you.
When you say a “slew of funds” are you meaning to say won’t be all UTXOs, all at once?
Things I’ve seen, like Shor’s algorithm, have a better chance of finding, say, the private key for any given SHA-256 public key. AFAIK it would not mean they would get the whole rainbow table made GGEZ all at once. More like there’s more of a chance to not strike out all the time so bad when looking for needles in haystacks of haystacks of haystacks due to being able to harness qubits to bring factorial time complexity down to polynomial time
When it first starts to be compromised, I think it is likely it will maybe it will be possible to spend a not prohibitive amount of time compromising one address… let’s say a year. Then as things get more and more sophisticated the whole shebang is completely compromised.
The timeframe is usually 10-20 years from now when you hear security researchers mention the horizon.
I prefer pessimistic and consider that safety is more likely 2-5 years with great confidence and reassess based on current news at regular intervals.
I doubt criminals to be the first people to have their hands on quantum computing.
First will be scientists. They will let the world know that hash was broken.
Bitcoin price will go down a bit.
We will upgrade the network and everything will be fine.
That’s my guess.
Last I researched it, quantum won’t mine faster, just guess keys, and it would start by guessing old pay to public keys, thus alerting us all to the problem. And attacking existing coins would mean guessing keys before they’re mined into a block. So it’s nuanced. So it’s not as simple as BOOM it’s over but yeah I agree it’s probably really important to do asap
Interesting… my understanding was that quantum computers should be able to reverse the elliptic curve signature, so the existence of a signed transaction (and maybe an address) on the chain would make it possible to find the secret key, and therefore find and move all the UTXOs controlled by that private key. Or at least have the information needed to claim to own if we were to see miners reacting by stopping all new transactions other than coinbase ones until it was sorted out.
I’ll have to read some more.
What you’re saying makes sense now, that the P2PKH ones would be first. I was going to say that we’d see Satoshi addresses move first, but maybe they’d avoid those to avoid at
reducing how much they can convert to some other asset (atomic swap?) before people start reacting.
Fascinating to think what their strategy might be… move 1B all at once? Do it slowly over time? Design their work to look like traditional hacking instead?
“We assume that the Bitcoin community has agreed on and deployed a quantum-resistant signature scheme, either as a measure of precaution or as a reaction to the appearance of a (fast) QCA. Independent of quantum computing, our protocol can be generally applied to react to the appearance of vulnerabilities rooted in Bitcoin’s public key cryptography. The transition can be implemented as a soft fork using a similar approach as, for example, SegWit “
It’s true but you have to consider that we’re still using modular quantum computers. We have to rebuild the entire thing just to feed it a new task. That said progress is being made, we’re not that far away. I recently made a post about quantum encryption if want to check it out.
Can be patched with Lamport addresses.