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There is a ~$120 Billion bounty if someone can crack Satoshi’s #Bitcoin holdings.

If quantum computing was near-term viable, why wouldn’t someone loan $10 Billion out of thin air to fund a team to target this with such a payout on offer?

The only thing I can think is that this tech is going to be restricted by government for cyber warfare; you could bring down a country in weeks if you could target and break the encryption of all their banks, utilities, infra, ecommerce, healthcare etc.

And ultimately as hard as it is to get Bitcoin to change, updating it for quantum is going to be much easier than getting those aforementioned institutions coordinated to update their encryption.

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Discussion

halalmoney 6mo ago

Great note!

KoalaSat 6mo ago

It's not a bounty. Investing X money on (presumably) breaking Bitcoin's cryptography and succeed on it would literally drop the price to 0 so it would be like taking a huge loan in exchange of nothing.

Of course, assuming this is even possible.

StackSats.IO 6mo ago

It would not drop price to 0.

Lots of variables - we’d see some coins move onchain but wouldn’t necessarily know if it was Satoshi or an inheritance or anything. Possibly we get a signed message but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s Satoshi either, just that the key is his.

Possibly other Satoshi coins then move but it might again be Satoshi/heir racing to beat the next wallet crack or the quantum cracker stealing more - we wouldn’t know. And we wouldn’t know how long a crack takes - 6 months is very different to 6 weeks to 6 days to 6 hours.

There’s still utility and value in Bitcoin so long as your coins are not vulnerable to the quantum cracker - that means both having the less vulnerable utxos but also, smaller wallet balances (because an attacker is likely going to go after the biggest most vulnerable balances first).

This would definitely drop price, but not to 0. And unlike any other “theft”, there’s no other heist like this where you’ve got zero recourse to get your property back once the coins move so it could actually stick if successfully achieved unlike printing money to then go hack a bank for example.

CitizenPleb 6mo ago

We’re already at a point where the incentives to the institutions and nation states would be to promote quantum resistance to the network. This game theory incentive will only strengthen over time.

Another way of saying that bitcoin does not exist in a vacuum with regard to quantum computing.

StackSats.IO 6mo ago

Not sure I understand what you mean with that first paragraph?

CitizenPleb 6mo ago

10 years ago everyone from Blackrock to Bhutan couldn’t care less if bitcoin faced external threats to its protocol. This has flipped.

Thursday 5∞ 6mo ago

The $120B bounty is spread across multiple addresses. I wouldn't be surprised if SN automated those in case of doomsday scenario. Assuming these are sitting and waiting for any jackass to crack them open is hilarious.

StackSats.IO 6mo ago

Automated in what sense?

Thursday 5∞ 6mo ago

Move them to other addresses if certain conditions are met, for example. You can only view the block rewards and link them chronologically to the Genesis block. There is no way of knowing what he had in mind with those bitcoin. I'd wager that bitcoin mined at later stages are more likely to be "hacked" than the ones SN mined, if this will ever be the case.

MrTea 6mo ago

The physics of QC are hard! They aren’t close to do anything useful despite the hype

mndwave 6mo ago

if you cracked it it would no longer be worth anything

StackSats.IO 6mo ago

This is not correct.

Cracking one key just means others can be cracked - it doesn’t mean the cracker has sufficient resources to continue cracking every wallet before they can be upgraded, and all the while all of the other properties of #Bitcoin remain in tact.