The work on post quantum signatures for Bitcoin continues to advance. Here we have a formal BIP draft for SHRINCS (SPHINCS), a hash-based post-quantum signature scheme):
SHRINCS offers compact post-quantum signatures under conservative cryptographic assumptions. It relies solely on the security of its underlying hash function. In this specification, that function is SHA256, which is already fundamental to Bitcoin's security. Signature schemes from other post-quantum families also rely on hash-function security but additionally require separate hardness assumptions, such as the hardness of lattice problems. Bitcoin outputs may remain unspent for long periods, making conservative cryptographic assumptions particularly valuable. This conservatism gives hash-based signature schemes like SHRINCS a distinct place in the cryptographic design space, even when schemes from other families offer better size or performance.
Signature size is particularly important in Bitcoin because signatures consume scarce block space. SHRINCS therefore offers signers a compact stateful signing path at the cost of additional implementation complexity. This path allows SHRINCS to leverage the fact that a key pair in Bitcoin is typically used only a few times. As a result, stateful SHRINCS signatures can be many times smaller than those of standardized hash-based signature schemes. The minimum combined size of a SHRINCS public key and stateful signature is roughly 13.23x smaller than that of SLH-DSA-SHA2-128s2 and 6.26x smaller than that of the lattice-based ML-DSA-44 scheme (which targets NIST security category 2, whereas SHRINCS targets category 1).
There's also a Bitcoin developers mailing lost post: https://groups.google.com/g/bitcoindev/c/HbVboXIFiG8
Have a look at the draft if you find this kind of stuff interesting, and don't let anyone tell you that bitcoiners aren't taking quantum seriously.
When a quantum computer is able to factor a 2-digit number, I'll maybe consider reading a headline.
I'll think about reading a quantum white paper when it can factor a 24-bit number. Until then "quantum" is nothing more than a fundraising boogey man.
I'm sympathetic to this approach, but I also think that the longer there is serious work being done on cryptography that might be useful in the event that quantum does turn out to be an issue, the better. The worst case scenario in my mind is that we rush the introduction of new cryptography to bitcoin and it ends up having vulnerabilities. So if there are people who do work on it now and it gets poked at and hardened it seems like a positive to me.
You’re probably right with the last sentence, but having a social narrative that “something is being done” helps number go up (sure more coins engulfed by wall street wrappers but also more ideological users to run nodes and build circular economies).
Many potential capital allocators have avoided Bitcoin because it’s not considered quantum safe.