Bitcoin’s security story, as tested by things like LBC, is about the infeasibility of brute-forcing private keys in a traditional elliptic-curve, compute-bound sense. SIGNUM’s security, by contrast, is built around infeasibility of resource monopolization, not key discovery. That makes it a different class of “hostile problem,” but one that is just as resistant to shortcuts.
Here’s how SIGNUM aligns with — and diverges from — the LBC-style confidence model.
First, SIGNUM’s cryptography itself is not weaker.
SIGNUM also uses standard, well-understood cryptographic primitives (including hash-based constructions and established signing schemes). There is no “easy math” hiding in SIGNUM. Brute-forcing keys is just as infeasible there as in Bitcoin. From a pure cryptographic standpoint, SIGNUM easily passes the same baseline test: no realistic key search attack exists.
Second, SIGNUM deliberately shifts the battlefield away from raw compute.
Bitcoin says: “Bring all the GPUs you want; the keyspace will still crush you.”
SIGNUM says: “Bring all the compute you want; without sustained access to large amounts of storage, you don’t get power.”
This is an intentional design choice. Proof-of-Capacity (PoC+) makes the dominant scarce resource disk space and I/O, not FLOPs. That immediately kills entire classes of acceleration fantasies:
• GPUs don’t help much.
• ASIC advantage is limited.
• AI is irrelevant.
• Short-term bursts of compute do nothing without long-term plotted capacity.
That’s the SIGNUM analogue to Bitcoin’s astronomical keyspace: you can’t fake capacity.
Third, SIGNUM has already been pressure-tested in practice.
Over the years, SIGNUM (and its Burst lineage) has seen:
• plot optimization races,
• GPU plotting experiments,
• caching tricks,
• read-amplification attempts,
• pool-level optimizations,
• and economic attacks on plot distribution.
Much like LBC with Bitcoin, these efforts didn’t “break” SIGNUM — they clarified where the real limits are. The outcome has consistently been that:
• storage bandwidth dominates,
• latency matters more than raw speed,
• decentralization improves when hardware specialization is discouraged.
That is empirical validation, not theory.
Fourth, SIGNUM’s security margin is economic as much as cryptographic.
In Bitcoin, the cost is energy and hardware amortization.
In SIGNUM, the cost is persistent storage ownership, maintenance, and opportunity cost.
An attacker doesn’t get to “try harder for a weekend.” They must own or control capacity continuously. That’s a very different deterrent profile, and in many ways a stronger one against opportunistic or transient attacks.
Fifth, SIGNUM resists the “sudden breakthrough” fear.
Just as LBC demonstrates that no sudden GPU or AI breakthrough collapses Bitcoin’s security, SIGNUM is resistant to “one weird trick” attacks:
• There is no equivalent of a faster hash.
• There is no kernel to optimize away disk latency.
• There is no symmetry like n-k to exploit at scale.
The attack surface is intentionally boring — and boring is good.
Where SIGNUM differs is in visibility.
Bitcoin has LBC as a dramatic, easily understood demonstration: “Look how absurdly impossible this is.”
SIGNUM’s proof is quieter and more distributed: years of real miners, real disks, and real economic behavior showing that capacity remains decentralized and difficult to game.
So the short, honest answer is:
Bitcoin’s security is validated by futile brute force at scale.
SIGNUM’s security is validated by futile attempts to shortcut physical capacity and time.
Different mechanisms.
Same outcome.
Both systems are secure not because no one tries to break them — but because people keep trying, intelligently, and reality keeps saying no.