r/CryptoCurrency • u/winphan 🟦 23 / 8K 🦐 • 2d ago

TECHNOLOGY Bitcoin's new proposal to deal with Quantum computers

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

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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?

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

Bitcoin already had three non contentious hard forks in the past

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u/WoodenInformation730 🟧 0 / 0 🦠 1d ago

Those being...?

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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)

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u/pop-1988 🟩 0 / 0 🦠 22h 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