You should read previous page to understand, but it's technical, sha256 proven to be strong enough at least so far, many experts work on breaking it, if one of them finds a weakness, the whole world will know about it and will have time to use a stronger hash function.
If a weakness is found in EC, it should be revealed for everyone, then if everyone wants to continue using crypto, they will have to use another type of curve, a different and stronger one. If it happens gradually bitcoin can survive, if it gets exploited in mass and suddenly, it would be difficult to restore things back to normal. These are speculations, not expert's opinions.
If a weakness is found in EC, it should be revealed for everyone, then if everyone wants to continue using crypto, they will have to use another type of curve, a different and stronger one. If it happens gradually bitcoin can survive, if it gets exploited in mass and suddenly, it would be difficult to restore things back to normal. These are speculations, not expert's opinions.
my question is less about how likely it is or if it would be fast. It's more about a possbile transition.
Lets say it get broken some distant time in the future (sha256 and EC), but slowly and the public is aware of it:
Now people would start migrating to stronger encryption all over the internet and also bitcoin would introduce an update with a more secure algorithm.
Now all coins on old addresses would possibly be in danger, because over time people could get access to it. At first it would take really long to do but it will get faster.
How could a possible transition look like? Or would it be the end of bitcoin.
Normally if you want your coins safe you would send them to a new wallet that has its sk/pk generated by the new algorithm. But everybody would need to do that and that would flood the mempool if every living owner of btc would suddenly try to move his coins.
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About wallet tracking, it is unrelated to this topic, but if you don't want anyone to connect your wallets to certain transactions, use a mixer.
right now you can have multiple addresses on one wallet without any connection between them. My question was if breaking sha256 would make it possible to connect them.