Live data from Hacker News

Safeguarding cryptocurrency by disclosing quantum vulnerabilities responsibly

research.google

11–20 of 40 posts

Re: Safeguarding cryptocurrency by disclosing quantum vulnerabilities responsibly

#11
post #7

If I find a cryptocurrency vulnerability I am reallocating (the blockchain never lies) as much of it as I can and cashing it out. Its the only responsible thing to do.

If someone else finds a cryptocurrency vulnerability, they too will reallocate as much of your allocation as they can and cash it out.

Re: Safeguarding cryptocurrency by disclosing quantum vulnerabilities responsibly

#12
I haven't seriously looked at Bitcoin's PQ plan for a couple of years, so I might be (I am almost certainly) out of date, but my recollection is that there's a "pre working attack" phase required, in which everyone basically signs a new PQ secure address, and a cutoff date.

This would leave holders who did not sign in two categories:

1) If you never sent a tx with an address, then you did not reveal your public key, and have some safety, e.g. you could do the PQ signature, wait, and be fine.

2) If you did, then you revealed your public key, and didn't bother to make the cutoff, and well, too bad.

There was a bunch of frankly dumb analysis about how long this would take the chain to process and how expensive it would be assuming that miners would all continue to enforce 10 minute blocks and transaction fees for these signature txs. I would be very surprised if the mining industry shot itself in the foot like that. The actual time to process 200mm or so new signatures just isn't that long. Hey we could do it on Solana if we needed to. That said, I imagine the papers this week plus Google moving up its timeline mean that there will be a concerted effort in Bitcoin land to get a real process down and tested in the next couple of years. Pretty cool.

Finally, I've read very little analysis about whether or not miners would choose to continue the energy dependent nature of mining, or try and move on. I think this is a pretty interesting economic question; I'm looking forward to finding out the answer. I expect mining will have a longer lead time than the signature problem - we're a long way from having Grover implementing SHA-256 as far as I know. And even then you still have 128 bits to deal with ONCE you get an equivalent amount of Grover-capable quantum compute out to the current ASIC ecosystem.

Re: Safeguarding cryptocurrency by disclosing quantum vulnerabilities responsibly

#13

It's unfortunate that we're past the point where all quantum computing progress is public. Between this and the unbearable secrecy of AI labs, balkanization of knowledge is in full force.

You are assuming they have things to hide about QC...

Re: Safeguarding cryptocurrency by disclosing quantum vulnerabilities responsibly

#14
post #5

Why do they care about cryptocurrencies but not about the entire world's infrastructures that are based on RSA and elliptic curve algorithms, such as HTTPS and many other electronic signature solutions? Is this a case of cryptocurrency market manipulation? And why do they think that the US government would care about securing cryptocurrencies? Aren't they designed to circumvent the government regulation?

For one thing, stablecoin issuers hold more than $100B of US treasury bills, on the same level as some major countries. For better or worse, the old and new systems are interconnected now.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-rise-of-stablecoins-a...

Re: Safeguarding cryptocurrency by disclosing quantum vulnerabilities responsibly

#15

It's unfortunate that we're past the point where all quantum computing progress is public. Between this and the unbearable secrecy of AI labs, balkanization of knowledge is in full force.

I think the incentive to share progress is still orders of magnitude higher than the incentive to keep it private.

Re: Safeguarding cryptocurrency by disclosing quantum vulnerabilities responsibly

#16
post #9
post #5

Why do they care about cryptocurrencies but not about the entire world's infrastructures that are based on RSA and elliptic curve algorithms, such as HTTPS and many other electronic signature solutions? Is this a case of cryptocurrency market manipulation? And why do they think that the US government would care about securing cryptocurrencies? Aren't they designed to circumvent the government regulation?

> Is this market manipulation? No > why do they think that the US government would care about securing cryptocurrencies? Our largest institutions manage tens of billions of dollars in cryptocurrency and the US government has designated currencies appropriate for the strategic crypto reserve > Why do they [not care] about the entire world's infrastructures that are based on RSA and elliptic curve algorithms, such as H…

I'm also sure that someone at Google do care about those. It is strange to see a blog post targeting cryptocurrencies while it is certainly a specific case of a much larger problem.

Re: Safeguarding cryptocurrency by disclosing quantum vulnerabilities responsibly

#17
post #14
post #5

Why do they care about cryptocurrencies but not about the entire world's infrastructures that are based on RSA and elliptic curve algorithms, such as HTTPS and many other electronic signature solutions? Is this a case of cryptocurrency market manipulation? And why do they think that the US government would care about securing cryptocurrencies? Aren't they designed to circumvent the government regulation?

For one thing, stablecoin issuers hold more than $100B of US treasury bills, on the same level as some major countries. For better or worse, the old and new systems are interconnected now. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-rise-of-stablecoins-a...

$100B sounds like a lot of money to any sane human being, but for the T-Bill market it's really a drop in the ocean. Current T-Bill Market cap[1] is 29 Trillion give or take a little, so $100B is about 30bps of the total. Would nudge the market a little bit, but not that much.

[1] Here's my source and they should of course know https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MVMTD027MNFRBDAL

Re: Safeguarding cryptocurrency by disclosing quantum vulnerabilities responsibly

#18

> [...] including transitioning blockchains to post-quantum cryptography (PQC), which is resistant to quantum attacks. PQC is not defined as "being resistant to quantum attacks" nor does it necessarily have this property: PQC is just cryptography for which no quantum attack is known yet (for example even when no one has tried to design a quantum computation to break the cryptography). One can not demonstrate that a s…

I think that "having no known quantum attack" is a reasonable interpretation of "quantum resistant". If there were no possible "quantum attack" (under appropriate complexity assumptions, such as EC-DLP not being in P), then we could call it "quantum proof" instead of quantum resistant.

Re: Safeguarding cryptocurrency by disclosing quantum vulnerabilities responsibly

#19
post #9
post #5

Why do they care about cryptocurrencies but not about the entire world's infrastructures that are based on RSA and elliptic curve algorithms, such as HTTPS and many other electronic signature solutions? Is this a case of cryptocurrency market manipulation? And why do they think that the US government would care about securing cryptocurrencies? Aren't they designed to circumvent the government regulation?

> Is this market manipulation? No > why do they think that the US government would care about securing cryptocurrencies? Our largest institutions manage tens of billions of dollars in cryptocurrency and the US government has designated currencies appropriate for the strategic crypto reserve > Why do they [not care] about the entire world's infrastructures that are based on RSA and elliptic curve algorithms, such as H…

[dead]

Re: Safeguarding cryptocurrency by disclosing quantum vulnerabilities responsibly

#20
post #7

If I find a cryptocurrency vulnerability I am reallocating (the blockchain never lies) as much of it as I can and cashing it out. Its the only responsible thing to do.

If someone else finds a cryptocurrency vulnerability, they too will reallocate as much of your allocation as they can and cash it out.

A fool and their money are easily parted.
Post reply on HN