Critque my solutions for quantum computers and EDCSA

[Macadonian]

Quantum computers have become something of a supernatural being within the cryptocurrency with several major news outlets reporting that it will break Bitcoin and will be the end of cryptocurrency. This is complete speculation and for a large part of it false. The news outlets are trying to scare potential investors away from Bitcoin as always. I have also read a few threads on the forum with a few members being unclear what quantum computers mean to Bitcoin. The general consensus of these threads are the users creating them are greatly misinformed and are panicking about the effects it might have rather than looking at the facts themselves. Firstly the biggest misconception when talking about quantum computers is the hashing will be compromised. This is completely false and the hashing will be fine. However ECDSA will have the possibility of being compromised in its current state. What's ECDSA? Eliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm is what it stands for. Basically without going into technical details its the cryptographic algorithm behind Bitcoin to ensure funds are only spent by those who own the key to the address. You might of heard about signing an address before or maybe you have already done it.  That's what thhe ECDSA is. The private key, Public key and signature. When sending a transaction the transaction is verified through ECDSA so assure that its a legitiamte spend. Of course ECDSA is also related to the generation of the private key of a public key. The issue with quantum computers and ECDSA is that they have the potential qubits to brute force a private key from a public address. Basically if a public key is known then you can retrieve the private key from this information alone using a bit of computing power. Currently this isn't possible due to the limitations of modern computers. However theoretically if a quantum computer was ever developed with enough computing power then this could be entirely possible. The private key part of the ECDSA is basically a secret number that is generated at the time of creating an address. Private keys should only be known by those who generated the address and never shared or stored digitally. However whenever you spend a transaction the public key is recorded on the publicly available Blockchain which could be problematic if a quantum computer is ever capable of defeating ECDSA. Anyone who has a quantum computer will be able to scan the blockchain for spent transactions with funds in the address and hash away until they get the private key to the address.

1. Quantum computers are capable of using rules in quantum mechanics that traditional computers cannot.

2. Very efficient at solving mathematical problems such as integer factoring.

3. They use Qubits instead of bits. I like to imagine this as squeezing more power into a small molecule.

Another concern of quantum computers is the effect it would have on Bitcoin difficulty and rising it so much that it would price out "normal" every day users out of the market causing a price crash in Bitcoin. To accommodate for quantum computers and their immense hashing rate the difficulty would have to be raised. Otherwise a quantum computer would be able to rapidly mine Bitcoins way faster than traditional mining equipment. Take for example when ASIC's were first introduced on the market. They made the difficulty increase so much that it was no longer profitable to mine on a laptop or standard computer. Now days even with a strong graphics card its probably not worth mining anything on the Bitcoin network. Imagine what the capabilities of a quantum computer would have and the increase of difficulty it would impose. Probably pricing out the vast majority of the public because if quantum computers were even made publicly available they would probably be very expensive. However the development of quantum computers is being made by leading quantum engineers and government bodies. Mainly for research purposes and simulating data in quantum mechanics. But what if the government turned their newly found computing resources to the Bitcoin network in an attempt to remove something which is completely anti government? Well nothing is stopping them. They could even perform a majority attack but probably wouldn't have to if they could raise the mining difficulty so much that no one would be able to afford to mine. How possible this is remains to be seen once a quantum computer capable of doing this is made because it might require a few hundred of the machines and these machines aren't going to be cheap to make. However considering the threat that Bitcoin imposes to the government and banks they could turn to sabotaging the bitcoin market via this route.

My proposal to the solution of difficulty increase is that we impose a hard restriction of the maximum amount of hashing rate per device. This would then prevent any device including quantum computers from using all their power and prevent them from raising the difficulty too much to keep the mining market stable. Whether this is possible is beyond my understanding and I would like to have a little feedback on whether it is or not and what the pros and cons of this would be.

Also I would like to have a discussion about this solution I have to make EDCSA quantum resistant without changing to a different algorithm. How about making it a requirement in the Bitcoin code that public addresses can only be used once? For quantum computers to impose a threat to EDCSA they need to know the public address. By not reusing public addresses we will be effectively making EDCSA quantum resistant. Users could be trusted to do this themselves but honestly I think people aren't security conscious enough to do it every single time. Therefore implementing it into the existing code would probably be a better choice.

[1714764269]

1714764269

[1714764269]

1714764269

[mikeywith]

Another concern of quantum computers is the effect it would have on Bitcoin difficulty and rising it so much that it would price out "normal" every day users out of the market causing a price crash in Bitcoin.

My proposal to the solution of difficulty increase is that we impose a hard restriction of the maximum amount of hashing rate per device.

what does price crash have to do difficulty rising? you do understand the most investors never bothered understand the meaning of mining in general and price is only driven by supply and demand? they could careless who mines bitcoin or how btc is being mined in the first place, so this statement is pretty wrong.

and how does a quantum based miner differ from a huge mining farm in China that cause spike in difficulty? there has never been a rule that says mining has to profitable or doable by everyone, it has always been a game where people with less power cost and more hash power dominate the mining industry, and this will always be case.

technically there is no way for us to have anything on the blokchain that will limit the hashrate for a certain device, the blockchain does not know where the hash comes from, this is how mining pools operate, everyone mining to that pool basically appears as single large miner on the blockchain. so such rule has no way to implemented neither is important.


this quantum computer fud is highly exaggerated when to comes to bitcoin, the media is fooling the people by presenting quantum as a deadly weapon to bitcoin when it really is not, i suggest you spend more time reading about what quantum is actually capable of doing.

[odolvlobo]

My proposal to the solution of difficulty increase is that we impose a hard restriction of the maximum amount of hashing rate per device. This would then prevent any device including quantum computers from using all their power and prevent them from raising the difficulty too much to keep the mining market stable. Whether this is possible is beyond my understanding and I would like to have a little feedback on whether it is or not and what the pros and cons of this would be.

That won't work unless you can come up with a way to identify individual "devices". Read this for more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack

[ABCbits]

Also I would like to have a discussion about this solution I have to make EDCSA quantum resistant without changing to a different algorithm.

Why so persistent not to change ECDSA signature when there are asymmetric quantum-resistance signature such as Lattice-based Cryptography and Multivariate-based cryptography?

How about making it a requirement in the Bitcoin code that public addresses can only be used once? For quantum computers to impose a threat to EDCSA they need to know the public address. By not reusing public addresses we will be effectively making EDCSA quantum resistant. Users could be trusted to do this themselves but honestly I think people aren't security conscious enough to do it every single time. Therefore implementing it into the existing code would probably be a better choice.

Not bad idea, but this requiring every wallet not to reuse Bitcoin address or hard-fork. Additionally, if quantum computer is fast enough to brute-force private key in matter on minutes (which means transaction hasn't been confirmed) then miners with quantum computer can steal anyone's bitcoin.

[BurtW]

I work in the storage industry designing solid state drives.  In order for us to sell our drives into the government market for the storage of top secret information the NSA has told us that our next generation of drives will have to either move from our current 2048 bit RSA keys to 3072 bit RSA keys or switch from our current 2048 bit RSA keys to 384 bit EC keys.  Also, all our hashes and HMACs have to be upgraded from 256 bits to 384 bits.

It is interesting to me that at one point the NSA was leaning toward forcing everyone to switch from RSA 2K to EC 384 across the board as EC 384 was thought to be slightly more quantum resistant and would give them some breathing room for the time being.

However, more recently they have told everyone that if we have not switched over to EC yet to not bother because they will be requiring everyone to move everything over to quantum resistant algorithms instead of switching to EC sooner than expected.

So my suggestion would be to follow the NSA lead and move Bitcoin off of EC on to a quantum resistant algorithm instead of trying to make our EC crypto less vulnerable by change to a larger key size etc.

I realize that may be seen as too big of a step but the "backup plan" would be to move Bitcoin to a 384 bit curve and upgrade all the hashes to 384 bits - breaking all ASIC mining hardware.

Since the miners will not allow that we are back to square one.