Fixing Bitcoin's 2nd big issue..

[AlexGR]

Quantum computer are a problem for btc. thats true.
But it still need quite a lot of time until quantum computers are

made to scale.

Fixed that for you...


Btw, quantum mining is a tiny problem compared to being able to steal money from any address that's ever spent money,
by using Shor's algorithm to recover the private key from the public key...

What if they don't need to scale? What if they break down a 2000 qubit problem into emulated segments of 5 qubits, just like a 8-bit processor can do with 16-bit or 32-bit operations? They might take a speed penalty for doing so but still be lightning-fast.

I'm no expert on qubits or quantum cryptography but we have to rule this possibility out completely. And then we also have to rule out the possibility that there aren't any technologies deployed by governments which are way more advanced than the marketplace (say IBM's 5 qubit QC).

[tromp]

What if they don't need to scale? What if they break down a 2000 qubit problem into emulated segments of 5 qubits, just like a 8-bit processor can do with 16-bit or 32-bit operations?

Because those segments would not be quantum-entangled.

We can already emulate 5-qubit computations much faster on classical hardware
than on a real quantum compute, and we can combine 1000s of those emulations.
That does not a 200 qubit system make...

[spartacusrex]

With regard to Quantum Computers..

http://www.techworm.net/2016/05/ibm-launches-free-quantum-computing-for-everyone-to-use.html

So we are inching closer..

For signatures, it requires a change of the signature algo to a hash bashed/ quantum secure scheme, and if I'm not mistaken, segwit makes this 'easier' to do ?

As for mining, Grover's algo only halves the difficulty of a pre-image attack, which is what you need for mining, so a switch to SHA512 would seem to fix that..

Getting the current miners to switch to a different 'ASIC-Chip'.. (can you use old sha256 chips to mine sha512 ?) .. would be interesting.. As it could reset the current balance of mining power.. And we may get a second shot at getting mining 'right'.

There's hope yet, gentlemen.

[Cryddit]

There are solutions to this, but... 

They are very much in Altcoin territory.  If they were implemented then the result would not be Bitcoin.  And the transition to other solutions would not be accepted by the community.

I think you need to eliminate the distinction between mining and using. 

You wanna get your tx into the block chain?  You gotta provide your share of the hashing power needed to make a block.  But that's only the start.  To make all the economic interests line up, you'd have to change so many things about how blocks get put together and accepted into the block chain and how you decide one block chain is better than another and so on....  As I say, the result would not be Bitcoin.

[zimmah]

Regarding the quantum computers 'm fairly certain there's already existing algorithms that are quantum=proof, so we will just need to upgrade from double sha256 to quantum proof cryptography and we're done.

I don't think mining is too centralized though, I have seen much larger pools back in the day. Miners aren't stupid and as soon as pools become too large miners will switch to other pools to balance them out again.

Miners know that if one pool becomes too large, bitcoin will be sold in large numbers and they will lose profit, so they will make sure this doesn't happen.

It is in their own best interest to make sure the pools are at least somewhat balanced.

[Cryddit]

Regarding the quantum computers 'm fairly certain there's already existing algorithms that are quantum=proof, so we will just need to upgrade from double sha256 to quantum proof cryptography and we're done.

Miners aren't stupid and as soon as pools become too large miners will switch to other pools reconfigure the server farm so it looks like more pools to balance them out again.

Miners know that if it looks like one pool becomes too large, bitcoin will be sold in large numbers and they will lose profit, so they will make sure this doesn't happen.

It is not in their own best interest to make sure the pools are at least somewhat balanced.

FTFY.

[Oxylitl]

Any system that relies on specialist groups to supply a fundamental feature or infrastructure will always yield centralization coalescing around them.

To fix the centralization you need to remove miners as a group. Mining has to be a by-product of using the system - users are the miners. The more users there are, the more mining takes place, transaction throughput increases and security strengthens. Not as it is now - the more money you have, the more mining you can do and users are just an advertizing strategy for their service.

Unfortunately Satoshi designed the Bitcoin system to be centralized. He/she even spoke of centralization in countries where electricity was cheapest or could have been offset against the heat generated. Bitcoin as it stands is destined to be purely data-center driven and owned probably by government backed corporate interests (aka banks).

I don't have any answers to this. The system as it stands was not designed to resist centralization and economists will drive the design towards centralization so it can be monetized just as the internet has been.