bitcoin could easily survive SHA-256 being broken

ByteCoin

sr. member

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Quote from: Garrett Burgwardt on June 17, 2011, 05:56:47 PM

Actually, the addresses and keys are ECSDA IIRC.

The addresses are essentially the base58 representation of the result of the RIPEMD160 hash of the SHA256 hash of the public key point. The derivation of the address from the public key has nothing to do with ECDSA.

Your linked article and recent response to my observations make it clear that you are not fully familiar with the cryptography behind Bitcoin. You may wish to learn more so that your opinion can be taken seriously.

ByteCoin

anisoptera

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Quote from: Garrett Burgwardt on June 17, 2011, 05:56:47 PM

Quote from: ByteCoin on June 17, 2011, 02:24:26 AM

Bitcoin would not survive a sufficiently serious break of sha256 (such as the ability to quickly find first pre-images) as it would become feasible to generate successive blocks which hash to zero.

Your article also only considers the use of sha256 as part of the proof of work. The hashes are also used as a unique identifier for transactions and in the derivation of the address from the public key.

ByteCoin

Actually, the addresses and keys are ECSDA IIRC.

ECDSA is just the signature method. The signed hash of the transaction is computed using SHA256.

Garrett Burgwardt

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Activity: 406

Merit: 256

Quote from: ByteCoin on June 17, 2011, 02:24:26 AM

Bitcoin would not survive a sufficiently serious break of sha256 (such as the ability to quickly find first pre-images) as it would become feasible to generate successive blocks which hash to zero.

Your article also only considers the use of sha256 as part of the proof of work. The hashes are also used as a unique identifier for transactions and in the derivation of the address from the public key.

ByteCoin

Actually, the addresses and keys are ECSDA IIRC.

optionstalker

newbie

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Merit: 0

Quote from: Garrett Burgwardt on June 17, 2011, 01:14:21 AM

A break of SHA 256 would only be bad if it was kept secret, in which case it would be like someone having bought a shitload of video cards to mine with. Otherwise it would only cause a difficulty spike like the move from CPU to GPU hashing did.

http://thebitcoinsun.com/post/2011/06/07/The-Bitcoin-Stress-Test

Read more at my article there.

Thanks for the link, very interesting

ByteCoin

sr. member

Activity: 416

Merit: 277

Bitcoin would not survive a sufficiently serious break of sha256 (such as the ability to quickly find first pre-images) as it would become feasible to generate successive blocks which hash to zero.

Your article also only considers the use of sha256 as part of the proof of work. The hashes are also used as a unique identifier for transactions and in the derivation of the address from the public key.

ByteCoin

Garrett Burgwardt

sr. member

Activity: 406

Merit: 256

A break of SHA 256 would only be bad if it was kept secret, in which case it would be like someone having bought a shitload of video cards to mine with. Otherwise it would only cause a difficulty spike like the move from CPU to GPU hashing did.

http://thebitcoinsun.com/post/2011/06/07/The-Bitcoin-Stress-Test

Read more at my article there.

optionstalker

newbie

Activity: 23

Merit: 0

I think that is one of bitcoin's best features. the difficulty is > 800k so the hardware infrastructure is solidly in place. all that is required is an online vote with > 50% agreeing to the new client. would result in 2 (or more) alternative currencies, but no worries, the new miners and conversion exchanges would be up in days with personal API bots doing most of the trading/converting. it would all be over before any widespread exploit of SHA-256 could disrupt it significantly.

Topic: bitcoin could easily survive SHA-256 being broken (Read 2364 times)