Since 2009, some consensus rules have been added, for example SegWit. It surely does good, it's a solution for the block size limit, but I want to know how did that occur. In
wikipedia it says that SegWit was activated on block 477120, but who begun that? Changes on consensus rules, as good as they are, are changes. If the majority of its users, change a consensus rule, they immediately stop being the majority. The follow their "Bitcoin".
The forum itself says on a quote that miners don't vote on changing consensus rules, only the order of the transactions. Seeing a change like that makes me wonder what else can the developers change. Should they have an impact on bitcoin? Whether if it's for good reason or not.
How did miners accept that change? They were not forced to update their bitcoin client.
-But why did you enter that title?Well, I'm a little afraid of bitcoin's future and thus, my funds'. On the long term, one of these may occur:
- Public key to private key reversal. (I've heard that it may be possible to do that with quantum computing and pollards kangaroo method)
- Finding collisions for RIPEMD-160 hashes. Are we sure that 2160 is strong enough? What if it becomes weak in the next 20-30 years?
Even if the first one can be faced pretty easily by simply creating outputs on addresses that have never spent, the second one requires consensus change. I don't know what they can change in that case, probably use of stronger cryptography, but they will have to change something! Otherwise, bitcoin will be useless. Changing a consensus rule, that important, would sour lots of people. And that's because that moment, the developers would have to "touch" people's money.
It'd be a consensus dead end.Model T, Model A are long gone, now you have Tesla.
BTC is the Model A of crypto.
In the next few years secp256k1 will be cracked, and BTC either move from sha256 to sha1024, or it becomes a training wheel tool for kindergarten crypto
In the next few years, many crypto's will step forward to replace BTC, with larger ECDLP fields, quantum-computers are way off, but 2^256 will be cracked soon with off the shelf hw.
IMHO forever given sha256 and secp256k1 are both NSA, they just wanted to know how long before they're were cracked, of course NSA could crack this stuff all along.
Most corporations and NSA look out 15+ years past what the public see's, always been this way. I remember when the FFT was top secret in big-oil, and was in use in 1950's, but not published until 1960's.
BTC is training wheels for people to learn crypto, when the CIA-NSA is ready to deploy USA-Crypto, you can be sure it will be rock hard, unless they want to back door you.
Quantum Computing is still largely BS, sure kangaroo also seems to be the best to date, its still essentially too slow, a better approach is endomorphisms and there are 1,000's for the secp256k1 field