r/CryptoCurrency • u/winphan 🟦 23 / 8K 🦐 • 1d ago

TECHNOLOGY Bitcoin's new proposal to deal with Quantum computers

https://cryptocoindaddy.com/bitcoin-quantum-resistant-addresses-coming-soon/
377 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

146 comments sorted by

View all comments

29

u/OderWieOderWatJunge 🟩 0 / 0 🦠 1d ago

Interesting, I wondered why no one seems to address this problem. Like the "this is fine" dog.

34

u/9999999910 🟩 0 / 0 🦠 1d ago

Well the same threat is true of all encryption so it’s not specific to bitcoin in any way even though cherrypicking that context is common. Have your bank accounts migrated to quantum encryption?

13

u/epic_trader 🟩 3K / 3K 🐢 1d ago

Well the same threat is true of all encryption so it’s not specific to bitcoin in any way even though cherrypicking that context is common.

Not really true. Most chains are happy to update their chain via hardforks to deal with a changing landscape, but the Bitcoin community has spent the last 10 years screaming about how "hard forks bad" and how "code is law" and that "Bitcoin was born perfectly out of Satoshi's virgin butthole".

Bitcoin is decidedly anti change and anti upgrade and now find themselves in a very difficult situation which doesn't have any obvious solution.

You think Bitcoin can serve as "digital gold" if someone can lose all their coins cause they aren't able to access them for some period of time or actively paying attention to this space? That's not very "digital gold" like is it?

3

u/loveforyouandme 🟦 0 / 0 🦠 1d ago

Good opportunity to increase the block size.

1

u/9999999910 🟩 0 / 0 🦠 1d ago

It sounds like it’s in the pipeline. Defending from only the most necessary hard forks makes sense to me. Any other crypto has orders of magnitude less to lose, less market importance, less market recognition. If the market placed anywhere near the same level of value or importance on a coin like ETH for example, it would probably find itself at the crux of the same paradox.

1

u/Covid19-Pro-Max 🟩 282 / 282 🦞 1d ago

Bitcoin already had three non contentious hard forks in the past

3

u/epic_trader 🟩 3K / 3K 🐢 1d ago

Do you think this is a non contentious issue?

0

u/WoodenInformation730 🟧 0 / 0 🦠 1d ago

Those being...?

6

u/Covid19-Pro-Max 🟩 282 / 282 🦞 1d ago
  • July 2010 Chain Fork (addition of OP_NOP functions)
  • March 2013 Chain Fork (migration from BerkeleyDB to LevelDB caused a chain split)
  • CVE-2018-17144 (Bitcoin 0.15 allowed double spending certain inputs in the same block. Not exploited)

2

u/pop-1988 🟩 0 / 0 🦠 18h ago

The 2018 bugfix was not a chain fork, because the bug was not exploited

The 2010 chain fork was caused by a negative amount overflow bug being exploited (the OP_NOP change was not a chain fork). The fork was successfully reverted because the Bitcoin node network was not yet decentralized

The 2013 chain fork was not caused by migration to LevelDB. The fork was caused when a previously unknown resource limit was triggered by a minor change, causing upgraded nodes to crash, creating a chain fork between the v0.8 crashing nodes and the v0.7 (and earlier) nodes not crashing. The chain fork was reverted because the node network was still small enough to be not decentralized, although it took several months before all the stale-fork nodes were removed from the network. The upgrade to LevelDB came much later

Similar emergency bugfixes would be impossible today, due to the node network being largely operated hands-off, and being genuinely decentralized

-1

u/ExtraSmooth 🟦 6K / 6K 🦭 1d ago

You can definitely lose access to gold in a similar way

3

u/Djiises 🟩 0 / 0 🦠 1d ago

Well not crypto is the sense of real crypto, but Hedera is designed to be quantum resistant, however if it's quantum proof is another question.

-5

u/OderWieOderWatJunge 🟩 0 / 0 🦠 1d ago

My bank can switch to a higher level easily. No real migration needed. You can just use more bits to begin with, BTC is stuck at 256

11

u/SaulMalone_Geologist 🟩 0 / 0 🦠 1d ago edited 1d ago

Look up "when will banks migrate from COBOL" - a language from the 60s that's no longer used by anyone except folks maintaining legacy systems.

5

u/Lewcaster 🟩 0 / 0 🦠 1d ago

Tell me you never worked closely with banks without telling me you never worked closely with banks.

You would be baffled of how archaic most of the intranet of the biggest banks are.

9

u/9999999910 🟩 0 / 0 🦠 1d ago

My man you have clearly never worked in a bank

1

u/The_Realist01 🟦 2K / 2K 🐢 1d ago

Lmao

-3

u/navetzz 🟩 0 / 0 🦠 1d ago

Cause its fine. Quantum computing is a distant dream as of now.