Topic: What is the core dev team plan to fight Quantum computers? (Read 285 times)

Who the heck uses P2PK today anyway? Almost no wallet software supports it, so I would be hard-pressed to find anyone who would be in immediate danger besides dead/vanished early pioneers.

Although it is a subject with many references both on the side of doubts, users, and on the side of those who claim to have the qbits, it is always necessary to have the new season "2023" QBit.

 So it's good, to be concerned, but based on what is known and how the subject has been dealt with in recent years, this information gives you the approach that as a common user, within your limits of knowledge, you must have for later with the advances that They are said to exist in order to understand that Qbits technology does not "travel" so fast in the QBit ratio necessary to have a real concern.

 By the way, you should start your essay or topic of the OP with knowing what level of QBIT we are at, and you can realize that there is no "public" consensus and in that sense not a real QBIT that they claim to have.

In fact, there are disparate data between which countries lead the advances and which companies, and each of them claims to have the best progress.

Quantum computers, once they become powerful enough, have the potential to break the encryption used in current blockchain technology. The core development team for Bitcoin and other major blockchain networks are aware of this potential threat and have been researching ways to address it.

One proposed solution is called "quantum-resistant" or "post-quantum" cryptography. These algorithms are specifically designed to be resistant to quantum computer attacks and could be used to secure the blockchain in the future.

The Bitcoin development team has proposed the use of a specific type of post-quantum cryptography called "Schnorr signatures", which would improve the security and scalability of the Bitcoin blockchain. The proposal is still under consideration by the community and has not been officially implemented yet.

Other blockchain networks like Ethereum have also been exploring post-quantum cryptography. Ethereum's development team has proposed the use of a post-quantum signature scheme called "BLS signatures" which would be part of Ethereum 2.0 upgrade.

It is worth noting that while the development teams are aware of the threat and researching solutions, the implementation of quantum-resistant cryptography is a complex task that still needs more research and development and it is still not clear when and how this will be achieved.

In summary, the core development team for Bitcoin and other major blockchain networks are aware of the threat that quantum computers pose to current blockchain technology and are researching ways to address it, specifically with post-quantum cryptography. However, it is still a work in progress and not yet implemented.

I have been alive on this planet long enough to see where most of the money goes. And it doesn't go to the betterment of the planet. It isn't invested in stopping hunger or preventing war, but the opposite. Scientists built the nuclear bomb as well. The money that is invested in war and warfare could prevent hunger worldwide, but that is not what the 'good guys' need or long for. If you believe someone will build quantum computers to make your life better, you will be surprised. 

You are thinking about how badly it could be used, and not how greatly it could help. You think that it could be broken, but at the same time you are not considering who are developing such things. It's not the sinister evil guy with a moustache behind a curtain, it's the science people who are working on it. We are long long long way to that, but assuming that we will ever achieve it, I can guarantee you that they will use it to help most companies and the world in general instead of hurting.

It won't be available for home usage for maybe even longer than our lifetime (depending on how old you are). It's like we are at basically cracking enigma level of computer right now, not at a level of lets use it to watch youtube videos on it level.

That could be just a small part of the negative consequences of quantum computers. Bitcoin and the whole crypto ecosystem isn't that big in comparison to traditional finance. Bitcoin's encryption could be broken, but so could every other fiat systems we use. Think about your online banking and the services you use in that sector. The encryptions on your credit/debit cards. Now imagine they all become unsafe and useless. It's still just theory. But surely something worth thinking about. Someone somewhere always works on putting theory into practical use. 

now your just knitpicking...

i never said bitcoin uses RSA.. it was a cracking for dummies demo
describing a RSA crack is closer comparative to a ECC crack than a sha1 crack is.

but using a known and researchable RSA crack then give a basic understanding of cracking and then can be used to base how the evolutions need to scale to get down to say 4 minutes end up costing alot more then the known lesser bit crack occured

but hey if you wanna skip the context and just play knitpick of 'he said she said', you go do that on your own in your little corner.
or
think beyond the silly social drama games and understand whats being dumbed down and used as a simple comparison to make things easier for you to then do your own research with a better basic understanding of cracking factorisation and scaling

the ball is left in your court, so you now go play and allow yourself to expand your learning

“If you have a quantum computer today, and you are a government like China for example, in eight years time you can hack a Bitcoin wallet through its blockchain,” explains Fred Thiel, CEO of crypto miner Marathon Digital Holdings who is a member of the US Bitcoin Mining Council led by Michael Saylor.

The National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) has been working on a new standard for quantum-resistant encryption. NIST implements a selection process to select the best candidate and make it standard.

Once post-quantum cryptographic standards are compared, the mass migration process will begin.

Everyone who owns Bitcoin or Ethereum will move their funds from their old digital identity to a new wallet or account that is secured using a new, more secure type of key.

Reference : blockchainmedia

Bitcoin doesn't use RSA so your numbers are all irrelevant. You also need to read my post again, I never said overnight they would increase the speed to minutes. I even used the SHA1 example deliberately for those who are familiar with the story to understand the scenario better.

Schnorr is different from ECDSA but it is still not QC resistant.

yep for years they have promoted QC as some special (sci-fi) extra dimensional gateway to other universes and traversing the lengths of the universe in microseconds.. it was not that!

but it helped delay competition while competition scratched their head for years trying to figure out the real game

QC computing is much more simpler then people think

I don't know if you seen the image of Bill Gates sitting on top of a tree made of papers and holding a CD in his hand saying what's on the papers can fit on this CD.
For how long we were using CD/DVD?, what happened suddenly flash memories, USB memories came to the market to claim their rightful place.
How long we have been using hard drives even to this day?
First when SSD drives were introduced everyone was amazed but not all of them could afford to buy such high speed drives.
Wasn't it 14/15 years ago when Jobs introduced the first iphone/smart phone? those old phones are now a joke compared to the ones currently on sale.

Above points are just examples of how fast technology can advance and grow powerful.  If any of you guys think that there is no QC now or that they will be a thing in the future, think again. Powers at work with access to money and resources tend to hide their advancements especially if it's a technological and more of a security advantage in nature.

Keep in mind that some country like China/US could completely destroy the cryptocurrency ecosystem or just take advantage first for a few years before shutting it all down, and don't think for a second that they will announce it to the world that they have a powerful QC.

I bet they wouldn't even let any developer/ mathematician/ scientist to publicly work on QC resistant solutions and would destroy any published algos, theories, solutions.

I'm more concerned about the Chinese, they even cloned Elen Musk himself.🤣 who knows what they're really capable of.

Note, if you go around the forum and read some concerning topics, you'd see familiar names/ accounts trying to make joke, diminishing the value of sound and justifiable arguments, stating that everything is fine, no need to be worried. Be wary of them and try to identify and remember their names, best course of action is to then put them on ignore, there are agents of enemy lurking here, they might seem very nice and legit but their intentions is sinister in nature.

Makes you wonder how many of the countless times newbie accounts come and ask the same QC question they are really just trying to get their foot in the door so to speak to shill their QC resistant shitcoin.

Guess all we can do is just slap them down again and again as they pop up. Would be nice if the mods put a sticky that had some basic QC points and every new user that asked about them got nuked. But that's just me.

Humor, there has been a webcomic called questionablecontent.net that has been around for 20 years or so now and all the discussions about it talk about it as QC. Better entertainment then the same points that keep coming up here about quantum computing.....

-Dave

May be they don’t need to fight it because who would want to invest in QC just to break the keys? It could be reverse of this, it may happen we will need them to ease the bitcoin mining or speed up the transactions. However, it still seems but costly to invest in QC. It could change the course of bitcoin. It may happen that mining operations might go down world wide and only few of them who are capable of investing into QC will start controlling the bitcoin.

But my thoughts are looping on one thing: QC isn’t cheap to maintain. It’s just unreal to invest on it for any of the purpose mentioned above.

i dont think you understand the math

lets use the announced (yeas ago) RSA 768 'crack'
(to easy display the magnitudes needed to get from a 2 year crack to under 4 minute crack(if all went well and budgets of labs were unrestricted)

RSA 786 takes one binary pc trillions of years natively without any special treatment
but factoring in some efficiency algo's and other things. they can get it down to under 600 years on 1 binary PC

 and creating an algo to use ~300 pc's(288pc of 64bit = 18432bits) brings that down to a couple years
then


its not simply going from 64bit to 65bit to 2x factor the efficiency(2 gates per bit)

its not simply going from 64bit to 128bit per PC to 256bit per PC to 512bit per PC to 1028 bit per PC
meaning its not 4 evolutions of binary cpu architecture to get down to a 45 day hack in a single PC

its buying/creating 300pc's of 64bit pc's(plural) for 2 year test
then 600 pc's of 64bit pc's (PLURAL) for 1 year test
where they only had the budget to buy ~300 PC's(~$100k) to prove the 2 year crack experiment. and not over $20billion to prove they can do it in 4 minutes

---

now do the same math of quantum to get from 8 hours to 2 minutes in a factor 4gate logic

and then do the math of how many QC's are needed
oh.. and once you do the math. realise that simply making multiple QC's of 2048qubit still has algo problems of syncing all QC together to get such efficiency factor

and then. final task. work out the total cost of all them QC's synced together

oh one last thing. if you still dont get it yet
most of the efficiency is not just native bit/qubit counting
its mulltiplying the amount of whole machines and also having the right algo's to make it all work.
and having other efficiency algos such as shor and schnorr to cut down on that time too

oh and a reminder. the new tx format uses schnorr already. so a QC cant schnorr a schnorr, thus it cant use schnorr to gain trick efficiency if a bitcoin format is already using it to stay ahead

thus p2tr is already an efficiency stage ahead of QC making it less easy for QC to break p2tr compared to p2pkh

so once you can compute all that.. sit back have a nice day

Other types of Bitcoin address are deemed safer since,
1. It's public key isn't revealed until you spend the coin.
2. QC takes some time to find private key from elevated public key.

And talking about security on P2SH, it gets more complex due to custom script (e.g. P2SH for 2-of-3 multisignature) and 80-bit security size.

I am not sure what is more dangerous: having such a lab operated by people with unknown intentions who have a quantum computer powerful enough to get a private key from its public key, or having that QC land into the hands of the FBI or a similar agency that will use it and improve it further for "national security", "the fight on terror" and similar orchestrated scams?

I am sure I have already seen such claims already and there are already shitcoins promising to be impenetrable by (nonexistent) quantum computers.   

I'm not sure that it will be really powrless in the near future. A lot of money in the QC industry, sooner or later it will become more powerful. We should think about a long term treat for BTC. Hope to see more quantum resistance algos in the future

I'm not the biggest expert in the subject, but I think that the best plan for "fighting" Quantum technology would be "if you can't beat them, join them". Making the Bitcoin Core blockchain quantum resistant would mean that the BTC blockchain must adapt to the new world of quantum computers.
By the way, why is everybody asking about the impact of quantum computers over crypto and nobody is asking about quantum computers impacting the fiat financial system? There's an assumption that Bitcoin/crypto will be severely damaged by quantum computers, while the fiat banking system will be just fine. This seems ignorant to me.



"Quantum resistant shitcoins" will be gone into oblivion the moment everyone realizes that they aren't quantum resistant.

I am starting to feel like a "Quantum resistant gems (aka new shitcoins)" will be the new narrative in the upcoming years. Although, we should get a fork for bitcoin to solve any issues.

Does this mean P2SH and bech32 are considered safer ? I only thought they were faster but security-wise all types depend on only one blockchain.

The whole Bitcoin would be at risk not just certain outputs. You see if some day an algorithm is found and hardware improves so much to solve ECDLP at reasonable time it would just be a matter of [short] time before they can reverse any public key including the public keys revealed in the transactions waiting in the mempool for a couple of minutes to be confirmed.

From an economical standpoint if suddenly public keys are being reversed for certain outputs and the coins start moving there will be panic sell followed by market crash followed by hashrate dropping followed by insecure blockchain...

In my opinion what we will see in the future regarding ECDLP is going to be similar to SHA1. When it was considered weak, slowly everyone started moving away from SHA1 and it took years to switch to new replacement algorithms. The attack itself and the collision became feasible a couple of years after the switch.

Simple: Get ahold of the QC first, use it to find a parallel universe that has mastered time travel, build a time machine based on their blueprints, and then go back in time to stop QCs from ever being developed.

It is real and fixes exist. It's just that it's not yet necessary so there is no need to bother with.
In short: it is called post-quantum cryptography and various quantum-proof algorithms exist, which would replace the old public key crypto.

Interestingly, symmetric crypto is not really affected by quantum computers, so AES remains safe for instance.

seems the topic creator has not read the other quantum risk topics..

so here goes

P2PK is at risk. so its advised dont use P2PK(especially with large tempting amounts you dont want to lose)
also when spending funds on any format. it reveals the PK.. so dont re-use the addresses of any formats after spending them. generate a fresh address to receive change and future funds. and make the one you spend obsolete

---

satoshi (whether he realised/intended to do it or not) left a huge stash of coins over thousands of p2pk address. and a few of them (atleast one) is a used and re-used address..
.. setting up a good testing ground/challenge of "try and attack it if you can" as a security test. which so far for 14 year no one has stolen his stash

if a company with a multi billion dollar system was to waste days (yep still days) reverse-engineering Public-Key to private. then the reward would need to be worth it.

so 1 address of 50 coins.. maybe not even be good enough($1m in comparison to the machines cost. is small fry*)

however there is currently at time of writing this a more worthy address to target should a QC try:
1LQoWist8KkaUXSPKZHNvEyfrEkPHzSsCd   124,347 BTC (worth over $2bill) is a re-used address, ripe for the picking

and so if QC was to try. i would see them try it on this address, to be worth their time and effort and to really scare the community

however expect them to then be getting knocks at the door by the FBI

so all in all dont worry about your small amount coins. especially if you atleast practise "dont re-use addresses"

*but if a QC business was to do it.(they wouldnt) but if they did. they would quite quickly have the FBI knocking on their lab door seizing their hardware

To answer your question which I think pooya87 pretty much cleared up. There's been no official discussion to my knowledge of Quantum Computers, and how Bitcoin plans to deal with them. There's been plenty of unofficial discussions like others have suggested, but that's not what you asked. Official discussions aren't likely to take place, until Quantum Computers start posing a threat. It'll be before they are a threat, but much closer than we are now.

We aren't that close despite what Sci Fi news sources claim. I imagine there will be a thread here on Bitcointalk when that does come around, likely in Development & Technical Discussion or depending on the severity Important Announcements.

I haven't seen any serious or "official" discussions on alternative cryptography algorithms to replace what Bitcoin uses in case some day in the far away future the quantum computing threat became real but the "unofficial" statements sometimes point to algorithms such as Lamport signatures or Merkle signatures. And of course the general work that is being done in the world (ie. unrelated to bitcoin) for the post-quantum-computer era for cryptography.
But the problem with these algorithms is that they produce larger signatures that would increase transaction size and obviously eat up block space much quicker so it is going to be challenging to find a good replacement. Another problem off the top of my head is for example keys in Lamport signatures can not be reused, which is something a lot of bitcoin users do.

The good news is that we are still years (probably decades) away from needing a real replacement.

That’s how I remember it too… the devs aren’t afraid of quantum computing at all because the whole banking system will be at risk if quantum computers are capable of cracking SHA256. They probably think that there are only 2 possibilities.

1- Quantum computing is fugazi.
2- If it is real, somebody else will come up with a fix and we will apply that to bitcoin

Why should Bitcoin devs waste their time on a threat that is powerless today, will be powerless in the near future and unclear when or even if it will ever be serious enough to put private keys at risk. And this threat is not unique to Bitcoin, your credit card and Internet connection also could be hacked by a quantum computer, yet cryptography researches are not rushing to shift towards quantum-resistant cryptography, because they know there's still a lot of time left.

Quantum computing is one of the most discussed topics of the forum for the past 10 or so years. Use the search options snv you will discover multiple topics which answer your question and you can bump any of the old ones if you have new questions.

Check here - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/can-quantum-computers-destroy-blockchain-and-bitcoinssha-256-specifically-5381812
And here on stackexchange - https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/6062/what-effects-would-a-scalable-quantum-computer-have-on-bitcoin/7134#7134

So you have been told developers won't let it die? Questions arise, who supports QC development and who supports an open source decentralized application?
Who has more money and power?
Have you seen any scientifically provable quantum resistant algorithms that could be used with bitcoin?

I'm sure governments already have their own quantum solutions, but does a multi-billion dollar open source market have it's own or we need to believe whatever is written on an internet forum?

I am not sure if there is a official plan towards the existence of quantum computing.
Last time I checked this argument, people seemed to agree (sort of) that a hard fork would be necessary to fully harden Bitcoin against those threats.

As long term investor I am also worried about the defense of the protocol, the technology is advancing very fast, however, I have been told around here not to worry about it, since the developers won't let the project to be killed by qubits.

Is there any plan at all? Is there any official announcement from the developers? Do they even know how to prevent an attack from a QC?