Its no longer news of how cyber crimes is slowly creeping in on digital currencies and to this end, Bitcoin experts advise that the usage of Bitcoin addresses should be done once as it helps to curb the risk of users giving up vital information that could prove costly in the future.
Continuous use of this addresses can prove to be a bad idea for three reasons:
1. It is quite harmful to one's privacy and becomes an impediment to BTC censorship resistance
2. It can leave one open to niche attacks and one becomes vulnerable to these cyber thieves who will extract private keys from signatures after a transaction has been made.
3. Quantum computers could extract private keys if these addresses are re used.
Citing an instance of the Ronin network incidence in March, where $540m worth of cryptocurrency was carted away by thieves hopefully by finding a collision of randomly picked message digest of 2¹³⁰+1 input of hashes causing possible collides by examining the square root of the number of possible output. Making re-use of Bitcoin addresses risky considering the chances of possible collisions even though the entire process might be time consuming hackers might choose to patiently wait till a collision is found just like the case of Ronin network..
1) 1/2 false. It does hurt one's privacy but it does not matter to censorship. If a service wants to block you or an address it will. They will have an easier time if you keep using the same address but all you need to do is generate a new address or a few thousand new addresses.
2) Nope it does not work this way. There are always people talking about it, but it's not something to worry about.
3) A has nothing to do with B. If quantum computers ever get to the point of being able to do something like that (probably not in our lifetimes) the entire encryption of
BTC would be broken. Would not matter if it's one transaction or 1000s of transactions to and from an address. And Roniis is a side chain of an altcoin. Has nothing to do with
BTC.
-Dave
