Debate on Bitcoin and Quantum Threats

Are you one of those who believes that quantum computing poses a real danger to the Bitcoin network? If so, you might want to check this out. There's been a lot of talk lately about Bitcoin's vulnerability to quantum attacks. Some people argue that it's overblown and that quantum computing won't really threaten Bitcoin. They point out that comparing the two is just a distraction for those who want to see Bitcoin adopted without the fear of missing out. I just stumbled upon some info online that explains why Bitcoin isn't likely to be harmed by quantum advancements, despite its unique features. If you've got more insights or reasons why you think Bitcoin is safe from quantum threats, feel free to share your thoughts.

But people want bitcoin developers to upgrade and make bitcoin not susceptible to quantum computers. The image you have up there look old to me because Google and many other developers are saying we are 4 or 5 years close to quantum computers time. It is on the image that bitcoin can still be affected by quantum computers, some people do not want that to happen.

Let's look at it at this angle. It is either this big firms and companies are afraid of the total adoption of bitcoin that's why all this noise of them coming out with stories that will scare people away from using Bitcoin. There's no threat to Bitcoin and they will never be. Except the whole internet shuts down. And I don't see that happening. This quantum threat has become a tool used to create fear among people. Funny enough, it is not working.

I'm not expert, it might be a threat to Bitcoin, only when you reuses your address as your public key is exposed as quantum computer can break the encryption. But the question is how many years it will be publicly available? And perhaps by the time it is available, Bitcoin might be quantum proof already as there are some BIP in the pipeline.

They are manipulating the market for their own profit. The very same people who try to spook you away from Bitcoin will be the ones buying up all your coins that you sold on a loss during the panic. It is indeed a disgusting strategy but this only goes to show why we need Bitcoin. And not only that, it shows that Bitcoin remains strong long term, no matter how many short term fud spreaders there are.

If I could find one word that describes the state of affairs in Bitcointalk since last year is just one; quantum. Seriously, there may be more than 30 threads created about quantum last year. Bitcoin experiences its final FUD before becoming the global reserve asset. That's what the quantum is. We've gone through so much worse since genesis. Climate-hysteria, China bans, rat poisons, Pyramid-Ponzi, gambler's and drug dealer's money, pump 'n dump scheme, bubble, whatever. Just STFU, stack sats and live life.

It would have been better if this was added to already created threads And yes Quantum can pose a risk but not now And before it does we might have come to a conclusion on what to do with lost coins Especially satoshi Though I would prefer indifference over freezing them. You underestimate it It's more than just 30 this year.

All of these threads about quantum computers breaking BTC does more in spreading this fud than some of you who start them think. It is understandable when the mainstream media pushes this agenda in order to get people to sell their BTC's out of fear, but when users in bitcointalk help promote that agenda, then it is on another level of crazy. It's not bad to have a couple of QC-BTC threads, but to get a couple every week is spreading fud.

Spot on! Folks, just take a few secs to look for an existing QC vs BTC thread and add to it or even God forbid, read it to learn the facts vs FUD. Flooding the forum with new ones makes us  have to constantly repeat the same debunking facts over and over,..,. A good one highlighting what a current QC can do is https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5581229.msg66667733#msg66667733 It needs to be pointed out that QC's are terrible at doing 'math' - CPU/GPU farms are far better suited for that - but even the current rather limited ones excel with very difficult geometry & topology problems which are the primary applications that QC research is focused on. Think logistics planning and routing, protein folding and such. Aside from work done by various 3-letter gov agencies, cracking current encryption algorithms is very far down the list. Spoiler alerts: Yes, someday a QC will be able to crack sha256. IMHO, it will be long after the oft-quoted 2030 date QC-resistant cryptography algorithms already exist and are already being applied in many financial and other sectors because they have the very centralized infra and deep pockets to do it. Thing is, those applications do not rely on block chain nodes being ran by private citizens who have to look for workable solutions that do not cost an arm and a leg to run (mainly cost of increased storage requirements) ergo, BTC devs are rightly waiting to see which of the several competing solutions will fit our needs best. Point is, there is NO need to apply disruptive I fixes now that would no doubt have to be amended as more efficient algorithms and solutions are found before QC actually becomes a real threat.

Some people might call it FUD, while others call it information. Yes, discussing advances in technology is not prohibited and is actually good. The wrong thing is that we always panic and make wrong decisions. Actually, it is natural that as technology advances, there will be vulnerabilities that might occur in an object, including Bitcoin and all computing technologies. But from all of that, we must understand that with quantum computers we also have the tools to make it more secure and controllable. So don’t think too negatively; I’m sure developers will continue to make improvements and make Bitcoin even better.

I do agree on a whole with that slide, but I think there is an error in the "green" part that makes it easy to be attacked by the Quantum FUDsters: the sentence it requires millions of logical qubits. AFAIK it requires millions of physical qubits (or a bit less - around 500,000 - according to the last Google report), but the number of logical qubits is much lower (depending on the investigation it can be as low as 1,200 logical qubits, see for example: this article). However (also afaik) a quantum computer with 1,200 logical qubits would take a lot of time to attack a single key. It however depends also on the number of Toffoli gates (these seem to be configurations of 3 qubits each), and the designs of the Google papers that "could break Bitcoin" require millions of them. So the system must be so stable that these millions of operations to re-configure the qubits can be performed without a single error. And that seems to be the main challenge and quite far away, even if "a computer with 1200 qubits already exists".

Looks like Giancarlo Lelli failed to read that, broke "15‑bit elliptic‑curve key on a publicly accessible quantum computer", and received a prize of 1 BTC for it. Sure, the strength of a 15‑bit key against this kind of attack is nowhere near that of real 256‑bit secp256k1 keys, so the current state of quantum computers doesn’t pose an immediate threat. But the field is developing rapidly, and who knows what the situation will look like by 2030. At the very least, Google researchers believe the community should be prepared for the worst.

Lelli's "attack" could have been performed with a standard desktop computer in less than a millisecond. The attack was not sophisticated, instead seems to have involved brute-forcing and could have even been done with a random number generator according to Adam Back. Nevertheless I'm pro BIP-360 (the BIP to enable quantum safe taproot outputs, we *should* be prepared), but against BIP-361 (the "freeze BIP").

Don't you guys think that threads on Quantum computing are increasing day by day in this section, and this makes me feel like a FUD that users are spreading here? As for now, it is just a speculation that Quantum computers can damage Bitcoin. As we haven't faced that technology and most importantly, this technology is not very intelligent as of now. But one thing I can say is that everything has two sides, evil or good, and it all depends on the person who is using it. Why don't you guys think that quantum computing can also help to make Bitcoin more secure and stronger? For example for the current AI technology both kind of people are using it like good and evil they are using vedios, images text etc and resultant of all this depends on its users like if the user is positive then surely the usage of it will be postive and if the user is bad then the usage of it will surely the bad. And same thing here Quantum computing can also be used to make the bitcoin a more secure technology if it will be used in a good way. So, we need to stop spreading such kind of FUD for now.