Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Technical Support
Merits 1 from 1 user
Re: Bitcoin with Post-Qunatum Cryptography Feature
by
d5000
on 14/12/2024, 17:00:01 UTC
⭐ Merited by NotFuzzyWarm (1)
You are a bit too optimistic in my opinion.
Okay, perhaps "decades" is indeed a bit too far away. The earliest estimation a quantum computer is expected to achieve hundreds of thousands of qbits (which would be necessary to break ECDSA keys in years) I've read about is around 2030 (that's an IBM estimation). That would be a very expensive device (more than a billion USD). Yes, that would be only five or six years away. But would such a device, a first of its kind, be used to crack Bitcoin private keys during years? I doubt it. It would take several years more for a device which would be accessible to criminals or even state-level actors (and I don't expect the US or China being likely to do that, but instead North Korea with far less resources). A decade is thus the minimum time I expect until really a threat emerges.

I think it is not out of place to start a discussion about a post quantum implementation on Bitcoin, but there is also no need to hurry and to push an implementation of a developer team who came out of nowhere and seems not to be familiar at all with the Bitcoin Core BIP/development process. I don't say the QbitsQ people couldn't learn, but criticism about fearmongering should be allowed. I think if around 2030 Core has a BIP ready to be implemented it would be reasonable.

There are of course several other proposals about achieving quantum safety in Bitcoin, like this one, and I have even read (several years ago) about the idea to use Simplicity (a more expressive scripting language) to implement different post quantum cryptosystems.