Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Re: Wall Observer - MtGoxUSD wall movement tracker
by
humanitee
on 26/03/2013, 23:30:57 UTC

Bitcoin does not need to update to "keep up with the quantum revolution."  It is not reliant on large numbers being hard to factor.  

+1 no quantum computer can solve RIPEMD-160(SHA-256) ... IMPOSIBLE

The speaker says that ECDSA is not susceptible to QCs -- that's just wrong.  ECDSA is most definitely broken by QC's, as well as just most asymmetric crypto algorithms on which internet security relies.  But Bitcoin is better prepared to deal with QCs than most other crypto systems: (1) if you never reuse addresses, then no one knows your public keys and thus there's nothing for a QC to solve.  By the time someone gets your public keys, you've already spent the funds, (2) the crypto algorithms in Bitcoin can be changed to quantum-resistant ones.  Given that we'll probably have two decades advance notice before QCs with enough qubits exist to even threaten Bitcoin, we'll have plenty of time to make the switch.

I am not an expert on these things, but I have seen this opinion expressed before by a few others.
It's resistant as long as the clients are designed not to reuse addresses, but there does exist the potential for quantum shenanigans via Bitcoin in its current form.