No idea what to think about this, any thoughts? nostr:note1qvhnl2jxdt4hg6cg8nq359dc7zhgu9664lgu6492q4fa07elpphqa8kf2m
Discussion
Broken English Chinese doesn’t add credibility. Disregard.
Expect more & more & more FUD.
Yep, fo sho ! 🤙
Quantum resistant signature schemes exist and could be soft-forked into #Bitcoin for people who want to upgrade.
Old, unupgraded and lost coins may become bounties for future quantum pirates to claim as booty.
Thanks Jimbo 🤙
The only existential threat to #Bitcoin that I’ve been able to come up with is a zero-day fast crack of ECDSA signatures. If this happened, then there may not be time to soft-fork in a quantum-resistant signature scheme. Pirates would be able to spend a great deal of the existing coin, violating the “your keys, your coins” sacred rule.
A slow crack of ECDSA is more likely, where it’s possible but extremely costly (and slow) at first, but then speeds up over time. In this scenario, we’d expect to see Satoshi’s stash start to move first, since these are the largest bounties. That would be the bellwether signaling that we should soft-fork in an alternative signature scheme and start to migrate coins over.
Yeah, by making the upgrade opt-in, Bitcoiners can have the choice to enhance the security of their transactions using quantum-resistant signatures… Anyway, Quantum computers could compromise the security of coins using vulnerable signatures, emphasizing the need for users to upgrade & secure their holdings against potential threats…
Quantum computers remain highly theoretical and speculative. And even if they existed in a robust form which was controlled by people who want to use them for nefarious purposes, Bitcoin would be one of the last things they attack.
There are a few technical reasons why most modern Bitcoin addresses are already really hard to attack, even with a quantum computer - but more importantly, if you publicly attacked a vulnerable Bitcoin address, everyone would instantly know you have the power to break their encryption, and would upgrade, so you would lose your ability to intercept information. The best option would be to not tell anyone you’ve figured it out and quietly extract as much valuable information as possible.
Furthermore, it would still likely take hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of energy and millions of dollars worth of hardware, and maybe hours or days, to crack a single private key (if you even can). Which means most addresses today would not be profitable to try and steal from, both from a time standpoint and a monetary standpoint.
Big address would quickly send funds to a soft fork address which uses quantum resistant signatures, while small addresses would be relatively safe and could transition at their own discretion.
I’m still really skeptical that quantum computers can ever be practical for solving the problem of elliptical curve cryptography. From my understanding, they work by taking measurements of the state of “QBits”. The problem is that the number of measurements you need to take doesn’t scale linearly with the amount of QBits you add (and it’s really hard to add more QBits)
So if you had enough bits to efficiently break a public key/private key pair, you’d need to make as many state measurements as their are atoms on earth (from my understanding it’s around that magnitude, although I’m way out of my field here)
TLDR: Quantum is not a problem now, it’s not an unsolvable problem in the future, and there’s a decent chance it never materializes in the way its proponents claim it can (fusion anyone?)
pretty much agreed with what Zach says
quantum computers are maybe 50 years in teh future assuming we find a way to make qubits work at a more reasonable temp
schnorr's algorithm is about diffie hellman key exchange (ie ECDH) not elliptic curve signatures - it is for breaking ENCRYPTION not signatures, btw (i'm pretty damn sure of this, i could be wrong)
it is true that edwards twisted curves are more resistant to schnorr's hypothetical quantum factorization algorithm but it's all a moot point while it takes so many kilowatt hours of energy to run the most simple quantum computer at this point, maybe they can make them work better out in a sun-avoiding orbit out in space?
people really have no understanding of how much energy it takes to make a qubit
you can power a small town with the energy for a qubit
Lol