Quote from: Bigeyeone on December 22, 2013, 05:35:50 AM

Quote from: Pantagruel on December 21, 2013, 06:41:07 PM

Bitcoin is the mothership, if it collapses all the others will have a very hard time. They are all Bitcoin forks.

if anything were to crack, like maybe because of the advent of quantum computers, I suspect the first thing to crack is the private key in the wallet, since a powerfull enough quantum computer with enough Qbits could crack the privates keyes using Shor's algorithm.

All the wallets use the exact same public/private key system, so all the coins would be at risk IMHO

if ecdsa over SHA-256 could be cracked last thing to worry about would be your wallets as a lot of systems use this hence why it is in the OpenSSL library

but it is a weakness and a valid point public/private key systems are a weak link in most online and p2p systems

To solve issues like this I did research things like MQQ (multivariate quadratic quasigroups) which I quite like and can be used in a MPKC (multivariate public key cryptosystem)

this paper gives a good balanced view of MQQ and its use as a MPKC
http://www-polsys.lip6.fr/~jcf/Papers/CANS2010.pdf

this is also quite good
http://www.mini.pw.edu.pl/aaa80/Presentations/Talks/Christov.pdf

this could be used to replace the public/private key systems if a problem was found Grin

also you could see the use of a SAT solver for the POW/POS mining but have yet to see more than just a test case on Bitcoin, if a true SAT Solver on the GPU came out for Bitcoin the difficulty system for POW would not work correctly and POS is based on POW so that also would have issues
http://jheusser.github.io/2013/02/03/satcoin.html

why? because the higher difficulty would only help to limit the potential inputs of the search