Was bitcoin built to be a quantum canary for RSA-2048? \ stacker news ~bitcoin

Just a crazy idea: What if the purpose of bitcoin was to be a canary for when quantum computers can run Shor's enough to break RSA-2048, since secp256k1 is just a little easier to crack?

Old bitcoin wallets with known public keys are vulnerable to future quantum computers that can do this. The only way to prevent this would be to freeze those wallets or perform some other kind of BIP-level mitigation.

If Satoshi was smart enough to make bitcoin, why wouldn't he anticipate this? It could have been ignorance, it could have been pragmatism, maybe he didn't anticipate the long-term impact -- but what if the entire purpose of bitcoin was to serve as a method of knowing when quantum computers are almost capable of breaking RSA-2048?

10 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 22 Jul

what if the entire purpose of bitcoin was to serve as a method of knowing when quantum computers are almost capable of breaking RSA-2048

what if the entire purpose of making and playing computer games, for decades, was to support a GPU economy that would allow us to train LLMs

... or things that are useful end up being useful in many ways.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @02065574b6 OP 22 Jul

This is a schizopost just play along