The Bitcoin/Crypto Thread
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Well it’s not technically just in its current form.
Shor’s algorithm breaks the math underlying most public key cryptography. But today it requires millions of years of computation whereas a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could do it in hours or less.
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Why does this mean blockchain is doomed?
Only blockchains of certain implementations are doomed. Google's work is fairly specific about cracking the ECDSA 256-bit encryption method in a reasonable amount of time using a quantum computer that Google believes will come into existence sometime in 2029. Blockchains that use the ECDSA 256 (or fewer) bits encryption methods will be "doomed" if/when their underlying encryption can be broken in a reasonable amount of time -- using a quantum computer that may come into existence in 2029.
But blockchain as a general concept will continue to have a place in technology and industrial applications. The U.S. government, especially through NIST, is spearheading the world-leading effort to standardize a bunch of new encryption methods that are expected to be "quantum resistant" -- i.e., encryption methods that even quantum computers cannot break for a very long time. New blockchains can be implemented using these quantum-resistant encryption methods and continue to be secure in the face of quantum computers.
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Well it’s not technically just in its current form.
Shor’s algorithm breaks the math underlying most public key cryptography. But today it requires millions of years of computation whereas a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could do it in hours or less.
Well it’s not technically just in its current form.
Shor’s algorithm breaks the math underlying most public key cryptography. But today it requires millions of years of computation whereas a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could do it in hours or less.
With a 500K qubit computer, which is completely unknown whether that's ever going to work. Nobody knows whether quantum computing will ever be practically useful. I highly doubt we'll have a 500k qubit computer in the 2030s.
Also, cryptographic algorithms can be changed. It just requires a "hard fork" of the blockchain.
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Well it’s not technically just in its current form.
Shor’s algorithm breaks the math underlying most public key cryptography. But today it requires millions of years of computation whereas a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could do it in hours or less.
With a 500K qubit computer, which is completely unknown whether that's ever going to work. Nobody knows whether quantum computing will ever be practically useful. I highly doubt we'll have a 500k qubit computer in the 2030s.
Also, cryptographic algorithms can be changed. It just requires a "hard fork" of the blockchain.
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Quantum computing is way overrated in my opinion. Even if we'd have working quantum computers with millions of qbits, nothing really extraordinary would change. We'd have to upgrade some crypto technology to be quantum resistant. We'd set a few new records in finding large primes. And a few narrow applications, such as certain simulations, would become faster. But it's far from being a general purpose "make my program run faster" machine.
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