Quote from: bizul on January 03, 2018, 10:05:14 AM

I don't like it. They claim to design a secure ledger today that will be secure from the future quantum-attacks. In security, there is no such thing as future-proof. You need to continuously asses your platform against technological advancements. Also, quantum-computing is not yet fully understood and the limits aren't explored. How can they define the limit of their coin resistance.

Quantum-computing shall exponentially increase the computational speed. A brute-force attack will be carried out in seconds rather than years. However, at what rate and to what extent that computational speed is still unknown. Based on this, they will either have to fork QRL multiple times to adapt to the expansion of quantum-attacks, or they will remain vulnerable until we find the limits of quantum-hardware at that time.

I'm not saying they are a scam. Please don't get me wrong. To make it simple... a non-QRL coin may be broken in a 1-second quantum-attack. A QRL coin may be broken in 1.5-second quantum attack. Nothing is for sure. Until we actually know the limits of quantum-attacks, we can't protect ourselves from it. I can claim to have a quantum-attack-resistant coin even if it can resist a quantum-attack for 0.0000001 seconds, but I'm not going to come out and say I have a quantum-attack-resistant coin that is vulnerable because that word is bad publicity for me.

Actually, quite a lot is known about the capabilities of quantum computers. ECC, used by Bitcoin and most other cryptos, can be broken by Shor's algorithm in O((log N)2(log log N)(log log log N)) time. Grover's algorithm, which can be used to break the hash-based cryptography used by QRL, runs in O(sqrt(N)) which is much slower. So using hash-based cryptography you can regain your original level of security against a quantum attack by doubling the number of bits in your key but against ECC you need to increase the number of bits by a much larger proportion - to a point that may be impractical.

At the moment QRL is being held back by the fact that it's available only on Bittrex, which is not accepting new accounts, and on Liqui, which many seem skeptical about. And it's currently an ERC20 token not yet running on its own blockchain - but that is coming "soon". But it's a real project, with a competent development team. I expect it to do well once these constraints are removed.

Disclosure - I own some.

sp_skeptic

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