So for people that have bitcoin on the blockchain that dont actually move it, we would lose it?
20 sats \ 3 replies \ @OT OP 13 Oct
When the time comes, you might have to upgrade your keys.
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Wont it come too late? Even with the fork, people will lose their savings of bitcoin. I dont see hackers just giving a warning.
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20 sats \ 1 reply \ @OT OP 13 Oct
For some it might. This article is talking about cracking military grade encryption. We still have time to come up with something before it happens, but maybe not as much time as we thought.
You could be right about not giving a warning. If someone moved 50 BTC from Satoshis address the market would likely tank but recover. The attacked might wait till they had a massive amount say 100k-1m BTC to show the network that SHA256 has been cracked.
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Right, could be scary. Can you imagine the first million or so just migrating to coinbase?
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Not necessarily. The best practice is not to reuse addresses. One reason is that by spending, the public key is revealed and can be attacked. Prior to spending, only the HASH160 of the public key, i.e., RIPEMD160(SHA256(pubKey)), is known, which is not vulnerable to direct quantum attack.
Ancient P2PK transactions did not have this protection and the public keys are known. Meaning they are the prime targets for exploitation, and in some sense the best way to demonstrate viable large-scale quantum computer capable of generating private key for a given public key.
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