This is something that I have brushed over in school a little, but I am not smart / educated enough to know how it will affect BTC. Will the 'store now, decrypt later' stuff compromise a lot of BTC wallets when someone makes a massive breakthrough in quantum computing?
In a discord server I'm in, this question is brought up so much the mods made a bot command for it. This is the output of that command.
A general purpose and stable high qubit quantum computer (which doesn't exist and no one is sure if will ever exist) can run an algorithm called shor's. Shor's is used to factor numbers. You can thus use shor's to derive a private key from a public key. Bitcoin exposes public keys in the scenarios of certain address reuse and when certain transactions are sitting in the mempool, as well as very old 2009 era pay to pubkey coinbases and new taproot transactions. What will happen if such a computer ever exists is slowly attempts to mine the most static of these coins, probably the old coinbases, will occur. Once this happens everyone will know there is a quantum actor and avoid address reuse or in the worst case just move to a new address format. It's also important to remember that a quantum attack takes considerable time, not dissimilar to mining, as it's the process for searching for a private key. Another Algorithm, called grovers, will enable a new kind of mining ASIC, similar to how generations of PoW devices have always functioned.
reply
I am kind of confused by this "What will happen if such a computer ever exists is slowly attempts to mine the most static of these coins, probably the old coinbases, will occur."
But my understanding is that (in theory) these attacks won't take a lot of time and are undetectable unless the coins are moved. This means someone could gather a bunch of private keys for lost BTC over time without moving them and then move them all at one (probably amounting millions of BTC).
reply