Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: A valid criticism of Bitcoin's design?
by
Foxpup
on 17/12/2012, 11:45:34 UTC
I thought Shor's algorithm will break elliptic curve encryption once quantum computers are sufficiently large?

It just cuts the effective key size in half.  The current 160-bit signatures will be brute forced in 2^80 operations.  That sounds weak, but it's going to be a long time before quantum computers reach 160-bit levels (if ever), and even when they do the operations per second will be very low and 2^80 will be infeasible for a long time thereafter.
You're thinking of Grover's algorithm. Shor's algorithm does indeed break ECDSA in polynomial time, though we're a very long way off a useful implementation. And note that Bitcoin public keys are 256 bits, not 160 bits - the hash is 160 bits, but this is not broken by Shor's algorithm.