Re: Quantam: How Long Before Computers Crack Private Keys
Bitcoin and altcoins need to adapt to any perceived threat before they can cause any harm therefore need to be prepared for any and every eventuality.
Yes, definitely. The question is when should bitcoin adapt, and that is a balancing act.
Move too late, and people won't have sufficient time to move their coins to quantum-safe addresses.
Move too early, and there will be chaos as a) there isn't a consensus on exactly what is the best quantum-safe cryptography to move to, and b) as QCs are still widely considered a future rather than current threat, the inevitable disagreements about whether or not to burn coins that don't move could erupt into civil war, or if not that then people would at least separate into opposing camps and begin to become entrenched in their opinions.
the dilemma is further compounded by the fact that all known quantum-safe signature algorithms are very unwieldy in size. lamport transactions would likely be hundreds of times larger than their ECDSA counterparts. https://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/51947
this would be horrible for scalability, absent significant technological/infrastructural progress re bandwidth, latency, storage. it would also force us to revisit the question of increasing block size---already a contentious issue.
it's a clusterfuck with no easy solutions, which is probably why no one is talking about it.
Kind of strange that burning is stealing, but using a QC to hack someone else's private keys and take their coins isn't.
indeed!