In the long term?
It's called a quantum-computer and it can make a bit be 0 and 1 at the SAME time, potentially solving any hash in a matter of microseconds.
So far, this still a theoretical thing, but scientists are working and getting closer on the concept.
If anything can destroy bitcoin at it's core, its that thing.
It's called a quantum-computer and it can make a bit be 0 and 1 at the SAME time, potentially solving any hash in a matter of microseconds.
So far, this still a theoretical thing, but scientists are working and getting closer on the concept.
If anything can destroy bitcoin at it's core, its that thing.
But that will not increase the amount of Bitcoins being generated. The rate of creation of new BTCs will remain unchanged. So this will only be having a minimal effect.
Except that every bitcoin adress whith a balance on it will be compromised and the owner of the quantumcomputer can use all those coins as if they were in his wallet. LOL
No problem here surely! Did you know that a keypair is created using cryptography as well?
Herpderp.
Bitcoins are not under great threat by the develpment of a practical quantum computer. They're not magic, Bitcoin is fairly resistant to quantum brute forcing already, and can be upgraded if the threat proves real.
On what facts do you base that?
the wiki for quantum computing very clearly states:
Quote
Besides factorization and discrete logarithms, quantum algorithms offering a more than polynomial speedup over the best known classical algorithm have been found for several problems,[19] including the simulation of quantum physical processes from chemistry and solid state physics, the approximation of Jones polynomials, and solving Pell's equation. No mathematical proof has been found that shows that an equally fast classical algorithm cannot be discovered, although this is considered unlikely. For some problems, quantum computers offer a polynomial speedup. The most well-known example of this is quantum database search, which can be solved by Grover's algorithm using quadratically fewer queries to the database than are required by classical algorithms. In this case the advantage is provable. Several other examples of provable quantum speedups for query problems have subsequently been discovered, such as for finding collisions in two-to-one functions and evaluating NAND trees.
Consider a problem that has these four properties:
The only way to solve it is to guess answers repeatedly and check them,
The number of possible answers to check is the same as the number of inputs,
Every possible answer takes the same amount of time to check, and
There are no clues about which answers might be better: generating possibilities randomly is just as good as checking them in some special order.
An example of this is a password cracker that attempts to guess the password for an encrypted file (assuming that the password has a maximum possible length).
For problems with all four properties, the time for a quantum computer to solve this will be proportional to the square root of the number of inputs. That can be a very large speedup, reducing some problems from years to seconds. It can be used to attack symmetric ciphers such as Triple DES and AES by attempting to guess the secret key.
Consider a problem that has these four properties:
The only way to solve it is to guess answers repeatedly and check them,
The number of possible answers to check is the same as the number of inputs,
Every possible answer takes the same amount of time to check, and
There are no clues about which answers might be better: generating possibilities randomly is just as good as checking them in some special order.
An example of this is a password cracker that attempts to guess the password for an encrypted file (assuming that the password has a maximum possible length).
For problems with all four properties, the time for a quantum computer to solve this will be proportional to the square root of the number of inputs. That can be a very large speedup, reducing some problems from years to seconds. It can be used to attack symmetric ciphers such as Triple DES and AES by attempting to guess the secret key.
As far as i know SHA is one of the algorithms that is threatened by this. Show me what magical special defense system bitcoin has against this potential threath plz.
As noted very well by Nancarrow, quantum computing simply shortcuts some poarts of chryptography, but other parts are no faster. The thinkg about Bitcoin is that it's not based upon the abiluty to hide a secret text from veiwing, but to make the proof-of-work system viable. The most likley result of quantum computing on Bitcoin would be an increase in the hashing rate in the same way that moving from CPU's to GPU's to ASICs have increaced the hashrate, and even then, if we don't likel it, we can switch the algo to something more quantum resistiant. The part that is most at risk in Bitcoin is the private keypaairs to the addresses, but even then, Bitcoin uses an upgrade path to address algos that permits a quantum resistant algo to be adopted in place of the current (version 1 address start with a "1") address algo. Again, quantum computing is not magic.
