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This seems to be the hot button issue today in the lab. Curious what the stackers think?
Yes19.2%
No38.5%
Bitcoin Doesn't Care42.3%
26 votes \ poll ended
31 sats \ 0 replies \ @Golu 11 Dec
Absolutely not as far as I can tell.
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Depends on what time horizon you are referring to.
Eventually, probably. Any time soon, unlikely.
Although I know nothing. Just basing this perspective off what smart people who know a million times more about it than me have said.
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Do those smart people also understand bitcoin?
The people I know who have the greatest expectations for quantum computing don’t know butt about bitcoin.
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Yes
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40 sats \ 0 replies \ @yoshi 11 Dec
I agree it’s a matter of when not if but often these sort of breakthroughs just happen. LLM for example just seemed to come out of nowhere.
The time horizon is unknown but it could happen sooner than we think.
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We need 1 million qubits to decrypt bitcoin cryptography while Google's groundbreaking quantum chip, has reached only 105 qubits with improved error rates.
It will still take many many years.
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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @Aardvark 10 Dec
I'm not an expert so take what I say with a grain of salt, but if quantum computing becomes a threat to bitcoin, it would become a threat to everything.
If it can brute force cryptography, it can brute force a bank account number.
I think better security will frontrun quantum computing, because it will have to.
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Yes, I agree we have bigger problems outside of Bitcoin that would take precedence.
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Bitcoin doesnt have anything to worry about. Even the legacy addresses are secure.
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21 sats \ 2 replies \ @000w2 11 Dec
How so?
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The amount it would take to compute and break one random secret key, its very unlikely. I cant remember how unlikely, but it is very high. Satoshi also thought of a way to mitigate it if it ever happened. Dont worry, your legacy addresses are safe.
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That's not an answer with any understanding behind it.
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For those people voting "No"/"Bitcoin doesn't care", do you want to explain why? In principal bitcoin's cryptographic primitives are broken by a quantum computer.
Are you saying quantum computers that can do useful calculations are not possible?
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advanced quantum computers might theoretically be able to derive private keys from public keys in the mempool before miners confirm transactions, (still wondering if it is even possible), the real question is: would it be worth it? The energy costs would be enormous, making it economically unfeasible. I believe there's an important distinction between what's technically possible and what's likely to actually happen in practice.
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Pay to public key coins, pay to taproot coins and reused addresses wouldn't need to be in the mempool.
And a 10,000 coin utxo is ~$1B today. Breaking one of those keys and also buying a bunch of put options could make it worth the cost.
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Btc doesn't care
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Why not?
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Long term yes because of its brute force ability esp. With original addresses before they moved to the not public keys encryption (I forget what its called the new one ends with an H).
While quantum is undergoing a lot of experimenting and testing at the same time so is quantum proofing agothims and computing. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has been working on this for years because first and foremost the banking system is at risk and is the bugger target but BTC isn't going to be to far behind
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ama 11 Dec
Nah.
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