💣 Quantum time bomb

We don’t know much about Satoshi’s worldview, beyond the obvious desire to overhaul how money and value move between people.

Still, we can infer that they clearly understood the benefit of long-term thinking. And it will still take vigilance for Bitcoin to thrive until the last coins are mined and beyond.

On today’s Supply Shock podcast episode, Jameson Lopp relays his experience at the recent Quantum Bitcoin Summit in San Francisco.

Bitcoin developers mixed with builders in the quantum computing space to gauge the imminence of the threat.

“Technology continues to progress and this is one of the main theses behind Bitcoin itself, right? That governments can't stop technology,” Lopp told host Pete Rizzo. “They can do things to try to slow it down, but ultimately it will route around any form or attempt at censorship.”

“So, I think the best thing to do is to expect that we will continue seeing progress being made and do whatever we can to be proactive and put plans in place so that we don't have a catastrophic issue that just comes out of left field.”

Lopp, alongside Christian Papathanasiou — the founder of quantum-safe Bitcoin layer-2 BitcoinQs — and a number of other developers recently drafted a proposal to sunset Bitcoin’s ECDSA and Schnorr signatures before quantum computers undermine them altogether.

“Fail to upgrade and you will be unable to spend your funds, creating a certainty where none previously existed,” per the proposal, which is yet to be assigned a BIP number. A separate quantum-safe proposal, BIP360, was pitched by Hunter Beast last June and detailed on Supply Shock earlier this year.

Lopp explained that the computing power of quantum computers is still “several orders of magnitude away” from cracking Bitcoin signatures in a realistic timeframe.

But the threat is real. “All of the current locking scripts and signature schemes that are used in Bitcoin for people to protect their funds are going to become at risk. And there's a number of different vectors, whether it's long-range attacks or short-range attacks,” Lopp said.

“Ultimately assuming that a ‘cryptographically relevant quantum computer’ ends up being built — that basically means a quantum computer that has enough…power to be able to run this algorithm in a human timeframe, hours, days, weeks, what have you, then that's when we would expect…the economic incentive for people to try to start scooping up vulnerable coins.”

Catch the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and X.

— David

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