Event Overview

Topics

• ● The Quantum Timeline: How close are we to “Q-Day”, when quantum computers are powerful enough to break widely used cryptographic methods? 3 years? 10 years? 50 years? Never? Depending on which “expert” you ask, you’ll get a different answer. Join us as we bring together the sharpest minds - across all views on this topic - to debate the path to Post-Quantum and provide mental models for conceptualizing this timeframe.
• ● The State of Quantum-Resistant Cryptography: What is the status of quantum cryptography, and how does it compare to current industry-standard cryptographic primitives? How far have we come in the past 10-20 years and where do experts and researchers predict we’ll be in the next 5, 10, 20 years? Join us as we build a robust picture of the cryptographic landscape and discuss modern quantum struggles such as massive computational requirements and large signature data.
• ● Quantum’s Threat to Proof-of-Work: Proof-of-work relies on cryptographic hash functions, which are believed to be post-quantum secure. However, quantum algorithms, such as Grover’s algorithm, could introduce efficiencies, significantly speeding up a miners’ ability to calculate a block hash below the target. This speedup could disadvantage classical miners, thus concentrating hashrate among miners with access to quantum computers.
• ● What Should Bitcoin’s Plan Be? There are various ways to mitigate a quantum threat, but they each involve trade-offs. This means we’ll have to weigh the goal of efficient quantum resistance against the practical and philosophical constraints that bind us.
• • ○ From a consensus perspective, should we change consensus rules today to add an (inefficient) quantum-resistant cryptography that wallets and users can adopt? If so, how would this be implemented? For example, as a taproot leaf spending path?
• • ○ From a network-health perspective, should we increase the witness discount if bitcoin’s post-quantum signature is substantially larger than ECDSA or Schnorr signatures? If we don’t increase the discount, will bitcoin’s transaction rate decrease? Conversely, would the tradeoff justify a higher discount, as it could overly favor non-transactional data?
• • ○ From an ethical perspective, what should we do about coins that are subject to theft? Should we let hackers steal these coins or “freeze” them - perhaps by burning them or adding, yet another, consensus change that would require a zero-knowledge-proof of a seed phrase to spend these coins?