[TheSocialAndrew]

If hypothetically this would happen, wouldn't gaining access to everyone's wallets render it useless since BTC would no longer have value? If so, the goal would just be to disrupt the financial markets, not necessarily to gain directly.

Also, wouldn't we be able to restore everyone's wallets from the latest snapshot on a new blockchain?

[tsimionescu]

The idea is that for the Bitcoin network "knowing the private key" is 1:1 entriely equivale to "being the legitimate owner of the wallet". Onve someone has found out the private key of a wallet, they have the exact same access to that wallet as anyone else who knows the private key.

This is different from finding out someone's password or even password + MFA on a centralized service, say Gmail. There, Google and/or the court systems step in, ascertain the legitimate owner, reset the credentials to the account, and give only the legitimate owner access.

There is no way to do this in Bitcoin, by design. Even if the US Supreme Court decided that you are the only legitimate owner of this wallet, there would be no way to prevent someone else who knows the private key from moving "your" Bitcoin. Of course, they could be punished for this, in principle, but it would be impossible to prevent it from happening.

[yanmaani]

> wouldn't gaining access to everyone's wallets render it useless since BTC would no longer have value

It would only be useful for the wallets with known public keys. That's mainly old bitcoins, new ones only have its hash written to the chain.

This would certainly crash the price, but not to zero.

> Also, wouldn't we be able to restore everyone's wallets from the latest snapshot on a new blockchain?

Yes, but what good will it do you if the private key is leaked?

[zenlikethat]

I gotta imagine you could probably sneak a good chunk of selling in before people noticed or the thing went to zero. You'll likely have time to plan after breaking it, so you could move quick, and there are many long inactive wallets with tons of BTC in them. Some have keys lost in landfills, some have dead or jailed owners, and so on.

So I can see how you could pull it off before the price tanked, and even then, it's not a given that it'd go to zero. Just because a powerful actor can compromise your Bitcoin wallet doesn't _necessarily_ make it completely worthless -- just look at all the chains that are trivial to 51% attack which are still chugging along with small valuations. The price probably would collapse though.

[Klinky]

Likely the crypto methods would evolve well before the hardware caught up. It's unlikely that suddenly out of the blue someone would show up with a 13M qubit quantum computer that could crack all wallets.

[mNovak]

Still they could extract a fair amount of value before everyone catches on. Especially if you don't know the exact day/month/year that became possible; when would you take the snapshot? No one would accept transactions after that snapshot date either, if they worry it'll all get rolled back.

Of course the market would just sink in the years leading up to that threshold, in anticipation of this (assuming no mitigation in this case).

[sharkster711]

Yes to the first question.

For the second, it would depend on easy/hard it is to mine to get to the point where you can replicate a snapshot, and how easy/hard it is to continue mining on from that point. It is very unlikely the new protocol will hold the same value as BTC would have had.

[handmodel]

If I had ability to gain access to everyone's wallet I'd probably attempt to siphon off a few million dollars a day worth of bitcoin. If people catch on that all is lost after awhile oh well - I've already cashed out significantly.

[tims33]

The Office Space approach

[rndphs]

I think it's more that if someone builds a sufficiently large quantum computer for other purposes then it would also break bitcoin as a side effect.

[bubblecheck]

Indeed, a viable QC that can break existing widespread asymmetric crypto is worth far more than the total mkt cap of all "crypto" at their combined peak.

Most likely this will be wielded by USA or China in secret (if not being done already)