Protection from quantum computers is more like just a marketing ploy than true.
Or where we can see the results of this testing?
You're right about the marketing ploy. I was caught up on the QC hype too, hopping from one project to the next, trying to connect all the doomsday scenarios they were painting and how to avoid them in one fell swoop. Then, came across an article that explained it as it really works.
Bad news folks. BTC too is quantum-resistant if you don't reuse the same address. Feels like I've been had
1) We are building a platform this is inherently different than Bitcoin. We are building a useable payments platform that can handle a large number of transactions with a very short latency ALL with world-class privacy. This is in stark contrast to the store-of-value nature of Bitcoin, each platform solves a different thing and can live in parallel. Do we think Bitcoin is going to be broken by a quantum computer in the next 5 years? Probably not, but as I'll discuss in my third comment unless you're happy with the payments platforms of the future supporting less than 10 transactions per second, any new blockchain should be built from the ground up to support post-quantum cryptography as migrating to it with an existing consensus mechanism will be controversial and the resulting platform will be slow.
2) As far as the security of a user's wallet goes, never using an address more than once is excellent advice and mitigates many issues but it needs to be enforced in the protocol and all clients to be effective at preventing a lapse of confidence in the currency. This means changing the entire ecosystem of software and hardware wallets and ensuring that the millions of cryptocurrency owners migrate their currency over to a fresh wallet. The fact remains you are on borrowed time using this approach. Quantum computing will break public-key cryptography and if I can insert myself between you and the network with a quantum computer and block your traffic, I will eventually get your private key. You might be sophisticated enough to identify and protect against an attack like this but the blockchain dream is based on a large ecosystem of people of all technical levels and a wide variety of devices and environments. Regardless, this quantum computing performance isn't expected in the first generation of quantum computers.
3) To really address this, almost all blockchains can adopt post-quantum cryptography but it will bring most consensus operations to a crawl. Hash-based quantum-resistant signatures are massive (lookup the size of a WOTS+ signature compared to an ECDSA signature) and will rapidly saturate the network resources of almost any blockchain. We invented a new approach to consensus specifically to handle these large signatures. Our endorser sampling approach allows the network to scale linearly with the number of nodes while ensuring that we only need to deliver these large quantum-secure signatures to a random but constant-sized subset of the network. We explain this approach in detail in our webinars and technical paper.
4) Even if you secure users' wallets, the consensus algorithm itself is vulnerable to quantum computing in many blockchains. Proof of Stake protocols generally uses quantum-vulnerable cryptography to vote on the validity of a block as well as to generate randomness in the chain. Moving to quantum-secure signatures will result in the same performance issues as in my previous comment. PoW mining is resistant to early quantum computing but will eventually become vulnerable as Grover's algorithm cuts the difficulty of mining a hash preimage in half. If quantum computers become an enterprise tool held by corporations and governments, the mining environment may look very different.
I request everyone to check out the webinars -
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmfUaqB2HQnEHU0o4Z7Es0Q
this is a heavy duty sale
