It is important to understand how bitcoin works and how quantum technology can potentially harm Bitcoin.

With quantum computers, you can:
1. Crack private keys with the corresponding ecdsa public key pair. This also means that most Bitcoins are not in danger as you only reveal public key when you spend bitcoins. SHA256 and RIPEMD-160, or HASH160 is revealed in a transaction that sends Bitcoin. You have to break both algorithms to get the public key.
2. Potentially hash faster than others. This is not of any danger. The faster they hash, the higher the difficulty increase and thus resulting in the quantum computers being useless.

To mitigate this, you have to stop reusing address. Quantum computers will reduce the time needed to get the private key from the public key exponentially but it will not mean that keys can be cracked instantly. If you can confirm the transactions before the quantum computers can crack the public key that you include in a signature, then you don't have to worry about it at all.

Thank you for the concise explanation!

Building your own instance on a raspberrypi may be cheaper, coming in at about $50 for the 2gb version here and add in SD card should be $60. A ledger costs about $150 around here before shipping fees. from the other thread, it seems that it could offer decent security for its price and its quite idiotproof to do. You cannot lose the private key unless you lose the seeds. I think destroying a raspberrypi computer when using it as a cold storage device is not a big deal.

I believe that either Bitcoins or milliBitcoins [1 X 10⁻³] should be the fundamental denomination of Bitcoin, it represents Bitcoin with the appropriate prefix in an unambiguous manner. I do not understand why bits are introduced in the first place and I had difficulties trying to visualise it when the website I'm using calls for it.

In my opinion, trying to divide Bitcoins down to too many decimals is counterproductive because it results in much more confusion as someone who is new to Bitcoin. Realistically, I do not think it would ever reach a point whereby 1 satoshi or 1 bits is equal to $1 so using that as a unit is fairly confusing as well.

Hello! My sincere apologies for creating so many topics on my queries but I figured it'll be best if I could clarify my doubts and leave it open to the others as well.

So here goes:

My understanding of Schnorr and Taproot is that it alleviates the problems associated with multisig like it's lack of privacy as well as space. They allow the signatures of the multiple keys to be congregated into a single signature. But if the several signatures can be congregated into one, why can't it be used to reduce transaction size by aggregating the multiple signatures of several unspent transaction outputs into a single one? Surely if it can combine signatures of multisig, it could combine the individual signatures used to sign a normal transaction with many inputs?

The raw size of segwit transactions isn't smaller right? The difference between a bech32 and a P2PKH is the way that the non witness portion of the script is calculated in terms of vbyte?

If it doesn't decrease the raw transaction size, this makes segwit effectively a block size increase as well right? Just one that does not need a hard fork to achieve.

I have taken the initiative to read up on the scripting of the standard Bitcoin transactions but I do not really understand how beneficial segwit is to bitcoin. For one, I understand that segwit is primarily a backwards compatible increment of the block space as it strips the signature data and put it into the witness.

I am aware of the new virtual bytes or the weight units that are associated with the transactions. However, I do not understand how there are some claims that segwit also helps to make the transaction smaller. As segwit transactions includes the witness as well as the scripts that are used for regular transactions, does it make the transaction bigger than P2PKH or P2SH transactions?

If so, it is less of an optimization and more of a block size increase right?

Understood. I will delve deeper into the topic. Thanks for the speedy response.

Thank you. I have amended the topic to reflect the error. Can you help me clarify some of my doubts as stated in the post? I still don't understand how it could be deterministic yet random at the same time. It sounds very much like a paradox.

Hello all!

I have read the whitepaper and some of the more indepth aspects of Bitcoin. I have come across the implementation of RFC 6979. As far as I can tell, the motivation behind it is to eliminate the randomness of the PRNG being a weak link and resulting in the 'r' values being reused in subsequent signatures.

I have a few questions :

How does RFC 6979 ensure that the generation of the initial seed(?) to be random? Is this being implemented during the generation of the hierarchical deterministic seed to ensure randomness of the seed? To what extent is it effective if, lets say the source of the randomness is weak? Does Bitcoin Core use this, and if it does, can someone point me to the segment which this is implemented?

Thank you in advance.