These past couple of days, “Bitcoin is about to be cracked” has been dragged out to scare people again, with two news stories hyped up together. Look at them separately and they’re actually two different things.
The first is a paper published on October 28 by the Max Planck Institute and Ruhr University Bochum, claiming a subexponential algorithm for the elliptic-curve discrete logarithm problem. It sounds terrifying, but even the cryptographers themselves say the bar is astronomically high—on the order of 2^(2^17). The curves actually in use, like P-256 and Ed25519, are completely unaffected. Going from “exponential” to “subexponential” is a big deal in theory, not a matter of hackers getting into your wallet tomorrow. Even the person who reposted it most widely (with over 20,000 views) added “If true.”
The second story is Alice & Bob estimating that it would take around 29,600 physical qubits and about 62 minutes to crack a 256-bit elliptic curve. Bear in mind, this is a resource estimate for its own roadmap, made by a company that sells cat-state qubits. The company itself says these are theoretical figures and don’t mean today’s machines can crack it. Consider who stands to benefit from making the estimate.
Then look at the accounts reposting this stuff: half are selling post-quantum wallets, post-quantum chains, and post-quantum “alliances”; the other half are using it to call for shorting BTC. Fear is a business. It always has been.
There’s only one thing you really need to worry about: for the coins at old addresses whose public keys have already been exposed, there’s still no mechanism everyone can agree on to move them. That’s what deserves criticism—but these two news stories aren’t a reason to sell your coins today.
#BTC #QuantumComputing
The first is a paper published on October 28 by the Max Planck Institute and Ruhr University Bochum, claiming a subexponential algorithm for the elliptic-curve discrete logarithm problem. It sounds terrifying, but even the cryptographers themselves say the bar is astronomically high—on the order of 2^(2^17). The curves actually in use, like P-256 and Ed25519, are completely unaffected. Going from “exponential” to “subexponential” is a big deal in theory, not a matter of hackers getting into your wallet tomorrow. Even the person who reposted it most widely (with over 20,000 views) added “If true.”
The second story is Alice & Bob estimating that it would take around 29,600 physical qubits and about 62 minutes to crack a 256-bit elliptic curve. Bear in mind, this is a resource estimate for its own roadmap, made by a company that sells cat-state qubits. The company itself says these are theoretical figures and don’t mean today’s machines can crack it. Consider who stands to benefit from making the estimate.
Then look at the accounts reposting this stuff: half are selling post-quantum wallets, post-quantum chains, and post-quantum “alliances”; the other half are using it to call for shorting BTC. Fear is a business. It always has been.
There’s only one thing you really need to worry about: for the coins at old addresses whose public keys have already been exposed, there’s still no mechanism everyone can agree on to move them. That’s what deserves criticism—but these two news stories aren’t a reason to sell your coins today.
#BTC #QuantumComputing