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Bitcoin and quantum computing
101–110 of 147 posts
Re: Bitcoin and quantum computing
#102[dead]
Is this an LLM comment. Why is the A*B framing so useful? It’s just two factors… Why would ppl underestimate B? There’s money at stake.
Re: Bitcoin and quantum computing
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cryptocurrency gains are taxable in many (most?) countries. Clearly the governments see cryptocurrency as something more than just random numbers without meaning. Likewise, when government agencies shut down dark net markets (DNMs), they will seize the cryptocurrency funds that the DNM had (from market fees etc., or even funds that belonged to customers and were in escrow etc. by the DNM) if they can (i.e. if they ge…
> Cryptocurrency gains are taxable in many (most?) countries. So? > Clearly the governments see cryptocurrency as something more than just random numbers without meaning. Not really? It's the realized gains that get taxed. That's a completely generic feature of the tax system, the government doesn't give a shit (and shouldn't) what people decide has value in any given transaction. The only thing they care about is wh…
> It's the realized gains that get taxed. That's a completely generic feature of the tax system, the government doesn't give a shit (and shouldn't) what people decide has value in any given transaction
If I buy a vintage computer second hand for $1500 and then manage to sell it to someone else for $2000, I don’t owe taxes on that.
But if I buy $1500 worth of bitcoin and then sell those bitcoins for $2000, I owe taxes on that.
So yes, the government does “give a shit” what people decide has value in any given transaction.
Re: Bitcoin and quantum computing
#104The mostly likely quantum attack on Bitcoin will be a catastrophic transfer of large wallets to burn addresses along with a massive short position. No need to worry about washing stolen coins when you can just enjoy your "well timed" legal short position's windfall.
This would be the case if many people get the quantum “crack” at the same time. Since it would enable a pre-image attack, one actor could selectively mine blocks for a considerable time until others catch up. This could be going on now.
Yeah, sway better strategy than dowing the world bitcoin is bust while holding it short would be to just mine blocks here and there, to steal from inactive wallets, etc.
I'd drain as much wealth from the network without being detected instead of going guns blazing.
Re: Bitcoin and quantum computing
#105The mostly likely quantum attack on Bitcoin will be a catastrophic transfer of large wallets to burn addresses along with a massive short position. No need to worry about washing stolen coins when you can just enjoy your "well timed" legal short position's windfall.
Does anyone happen to know if it is settled law in the United States that transferring bitcoins using a cracked key is a criminal act? It’s not immediately obvious to me that it would be covered by the CFAA.
It's easy to argue that anyone can operate any wallet without restrictions but just pulling the right key to it.
Every participant knows and accepts it the moment they pull a random key and start operating the corresponding wallet.
Re: Bitcoin and quantum computing
#106One thing that is not addressed: say this quantum attack happens tomorrow and everyone agrees it was an attack, what would prevent the community (miners, node operators, and users) to hard fork the chain at a snapshot before the attack, patch the protocol, and call that Bitcoin? There would be loss of value of course, but it is not unrecoverable. It’s worth remembering that Ethereum forked for much less (not even a b…
> fork the chain at a snapshot before the attack, patch the protocol, and call that Bitcoin? It won't work. The only way to authenticate who ones what coins is with signatures. If the signature algorithm is broken, you can't tell who the original owner is to move the coins to a safe signature algorithm. You need to more to safer signature algorithm before the break, after the break it is game over. > It’s worth remem…
In practice, what you really need is consensus. As long as enough of the important participants agree, that's how it will be.
And since there are millions of identical copies of the entire pre-attack ledger out there, this should not be that difficult.
Potential future buyers might reevaluate whether this whole thing has any monetary value, but that's a separate concern. Bitcoin's market value was never about the technical details.
Re: Bitcoin and quantum computing
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> fork the chain at a snapshot before the attack, patch the protocol, and call that Bitcoin? It won't work. The only way to authenticate who ones what coins is with signatures. If the signature algorithm is broken, you can't tell who the original owner is to move the coins to a safe signature algorithm. You need to more to safer signature algorithm before the break, after the break it is game over. > It’s worth remem…
In practice, what you really need is consensus. As long as enough of the important participants agree, that's how it will be. And since there are millions of identical copies of the entire pre-attack ledger out there, this should not be that difficult. Potential future buyers might reevaluate whether this whole thing has any monetary value, but that's a separate concern. Bitcoin's market value was never about the tec…
I'm not sure you fully grasped what was said in the parent comment. It literally does not matter anymore if we can all agree on the previous blocks, it would be impossible to identify who owns which wallet anymore. The seed phrase would be useless.
Re: Bitcoin and quantum computing
#108"A CRQC is an existential threat to Bitcoin (you might believe this is very low-likehood). Your measurement of this threat should literally be: (A) How likely you think it is a CRQC appears by a given time, multiplied by (B) How likely it is you think Bitcoin will not successfully upgrade by that time." It would interesting to survey people about their answers. My off the cuff answer is: 2030: A=0.05, B=0.01 2035: A=…
I'm skeptical that B is fully possible. You can create a PQ fork of bitcoin but you cannot automatically bring vulnerable wallets along - and there are a lot of vulnerable wallets, especially from the early days. There's a catastrophe ahead for bitcoin with an apparent probability of 1.0. That's hard to account for in this scheme.
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Re: Bitcoin and quantum computing
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
In practice, what you really need is consensus. As long as enough of the important participants agree, that's how it will be. And since there are millions of identical copies of the entire pre-attack ledger out there, this should not be that difficult. Potential future buyers might reevaluate whether this whole thing has any monetary value, but that's a separate concern. Bitcoin's market value was never about the tec…
I'm not sure you fully grasped what was said in the parent comment. It literally does not matter anymore if we can all agree on the previous blocks, it would be impossible to identify who owns which wallet anymore. The seed phrase would be useless.
Ah, then yeah, in that case, it'd be basically over.
Maybe large exchanges would try to step in to make a fresh chain based on their combined account data, and just drop the people relying on self-custody. But I doubt the market would go for it - the uncertainty would crash it hard enough that it would never recover.
Re: Bitcoin and quantum computing
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The only way to authenticate who owns what coins is with signatures Maybe the only fully cryptographic absolutely zero-trust way? In practice there are very few bitcoin outputs that aren't linked to an offline identity and most users could easily produce a proof of ownership. Of course, this is not ideal and everyone would prefer not to go down that route. But even if we prepare in time and Bitcoin provides a quant…
> In practice there are very few bitcoin outputs that aren't linked to an offline identity and most users could easily produce a proof of ownership. Any who is going to in charge of reading that proof of identity and moving the coins? A trusted centralized party? The point of Bitcoin is to avoid exactly that sort of trust relationship, otherwise use the banking system. > Satoshi's wallet alone could crash Bitcoin's v…
>The point of Bitcoin is to avoid exactly that sort of trust relationship, otherwise use the banking system.
Most participants don't care about this. For almost everyone, the point of Bitcoin is to go up. As long as they can find enough buyers that also believe it will go up, the rest is optional. Especially if it's temporary, for a one-time migration.