201–210 of 281 posts
I would be quite worried about advances in quantum computers if I had any Bitcoin after watching this DEFCON talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkVYJx1iLNs
What I would start worrying about is the security of things like messages sent via end-to-end encrypted services like WhatsApp and Signal. Intercepted messages can be saved now and decrypted any time in the future, so it's better to switch to more robust cryptography sooner rather than later. Signal has taken steps in this direction recently: https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/10/why-signals-post-qu....
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Why though? Who is to decide which point of the blockchain is the good one and which blocks to “reject”?
Think twice. Everyone who hosts the blockchain would decide to stop because he invested in crypto, at least with some hardware costs. Beside of the small group of people that owns a quantum computer. I don't expect that this group is >50% of the people that hosts the blockchain.
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I think that’s backwards: most of the stuff you mentioned is using TLS and can switch to post-quantum algorithms with a config change, and do so incrementally with no user-visible impact - e.g. right now I’m already using PQC for many sites and about half of the traffic Cloudflare sees is using PQC: https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage In contrast, cryptocurrencies have to upgrade the entire network all at…
Is this a purely server side migration? Do browsers/OSs need updating too?
Stragglers are a problem, of course, but that's why I thought this would be a harder problem for Bitcoin: for me to use PQC for HTTPS, only my browser and the server need to support it and past connections don't matter, whereas for a blockchain you need to upgrade the entire network to support it for new transactions _and_ have some kind of data migration for all of the existing data. I don't think that's insurmountable – Bitcoin is rather famously not as decentralized as the marketing would have you believe — but it seems like a harder level of coordination.
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Aaronson isn't a cartoonist, it was an AI cartoon from ChatGPT that an antisemite sent Aaronson in the mail which he then seemingly maliciously misattributed to Woit making people assume Aaronson went batshit. https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9098 Aaronson did work at OpenAI but not on image generation, maybe you could argue the OpenAI safety team he worked on should be involved here but I'm pretty sure image generation…
I meant Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert. The joke is just that they have similar names, and Adams does a lot of political/topical commentary in both his comics and podcast but isn't a good source since a lot of his work is comedy focused. I am unaware of any comics Aaronson made and I don't blame him for anything he did make or was loosely associated with. It is incredible to the extend people are willing to go t…
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I think that’s backwards: most of the stuff you mentioned is using TLS and can switch to post-quantum algorithms with a config change, and do so incrementally with no user-visible impact - e.g. right now I’m already using PQC for many sites and about half of the traffic Cloudflare sees is using PQC: https://radar.cloudflare.com/adoption-and-usage In contrast, cryptocurrencies have to upgrade the entire network all at…
> In contrast, cryptocurrencies have to upgrade the entire network all at once or it’s effectively a painful fork Bitcoin is much more centralized than the popular imagination would have you believe, both in terms of the small number of controlling interests behind the majority of the transaction capacity, and just as importantly the shared open source software running those nodes. Moreover, the economic incentives f…
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There's also the fact that the road to useful is littered with useless, because how else would you make progress?
You could do what evolution does, and require that every version be useful. But evolution seems to require an awful lot of trial and error.
I would be quite worried about advances in quantum computers if I had any Bitcoin after watching this DEFCON talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkVYJx1iLNs
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The world has already migrated through so many past now-insecure cryptography setups. If quantum computers start breaking things, people will transition to more secure systems. In HTTPS for example, the server and client must agree on how to communicate, and we’ve already had to deprecate older, now-insecure cryptography standards. More options get added, and old ones will have to be deprecated. This isn’t a new thin…
> If quantum computers start breaking things, people will transition to more secure systems. that's not really the issue, the real interesting part is existing encrypted information that three letter agencies likely have dutifully stored in a vault and that's going to become readable. A lot of that communication was made under the assumption that it's secure.
Its actually something we will notice. Arrests will be announced.