Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by drawkbox 964 days ago
Eventually with quantum computing or other advancements, someone will break the encryption and potentially swipe the part of Satoshi's coin.

Bitcoin, and other crypto in general even more with higher concentration of early owners, will always be precarious because of this concentration. Whoever has control of the early issued coins, holds a leverage that is dangerous and has extortion properties.

Satoshi owns 5% of bitcoin. Other crypto coins are more concentrated and more problematic. This isn't like a large institutional investor in a public stock, this is a large percentage of all currency.

The rug pull was set from the beginning.

1 comments

Eventually with quantum computing or other advancements, someone will break the encryption and potentially swipe the part of Satoshi's coin.

Based on what? The search space is large enough that if you used the smallest amount of energy possible to check keys, all the energy in the known universe would still give you an astronomically small chance of success.

Breaking the private keys to the concentrated wallet(s) targeted not the entire system. Easiest way is finding/stealing the keys but eventually over time compute does break encryption and keys made with those algos are no longer "secure". There may even be ways to target earlier keys easier than later. It could take decades but it will happen.

Are you suggesting as processing/compute increases, encryption doesn't get weaker from previous algorithms? 40-bit SSL certificates, Triple-DES encryption and MD5 + SHA-1 hashing would like a word. AES-256 could outlast the universe but that is based on our current knowledge, and sometimes encryption systems have doors, not only in the algorithm but the tooling that does the encrypting... the creators of bitcoin tools they used for keys may also be a weak link or even had doors they put in themselves as a failsafe, humans tend to do that due to game theory.

Encryption is a balance of compute/processing for encryption and decryption, too intense and the system is computationally too heavy. So with that, over time all encryption will be able to be broken at some point following, as history has show so far.

Even if that holds, the chance that someone finds the keys or tracks them down, might be faster and most likely will happen as time goes on.

The point being mainly that too much concentration in any financial system is a time bomb.

Breaking the private keys to the concentrated wallet(s) targeted not the entire system

This doesn't make sense. I was talking about what it takes to brute force a single key.

but eventually over time compute does break encryption and keys made with those algos are no longer "secure".

This is not true. You are misunderstanding the orders of magnitude differences in modern encryption from some weak schemes of the past.

Are you suggesting as processing/compute increases, encryption doesn't get weaker from previous algorithms?

I don't think you understand what it means to need an entire universe of energy with the smallest unit of energy for computation and still have an astronomically small chance or brute forcing the keys.

The fact that some of the first algorithms used for unrelated purposes were weak has nothing to do with what you are claiming. Your logic is basically "some encryption from 40 years ago was weak, therefore all encryption is weak."

Encryption is a balance of compute/processing for encryption and decryption, too intense and the system is computationally too heavy.

The encryption and decryption speed is not a factor here.

So with that, over time all encryption will be able to be broken at some point following, as history has show so far.

This is completely wrong. You are extrapolating off of something isn't a pattern in the first place. No one thought triple DES would last forever. This is like someone saying 'we moved on from 32 bits of RAM addresses so we will eventually move off of 64 bit and 128 bit to 256 bits'. Orders of magnitude don't work that way. 32 bits gives you 4 gigabytes, 64 bits gives you 18 exabytes and 128 bits is enough to give an address to every bit of data ever created.

Your comment seems more like someone reading headlines and news articles instead of actually understanding what they are claiming.

> I was talking about what it takes to brute force a single key.

If you have some insight to the tool that created the key you could, lots of systems have doors by design, typically by creators or regulation for export.

My main point though was that these keys will probably be found in the future. If they aren't broken then actually found, and that much concentration is too much. It creates a rug pull for an entire currency ecosystem. Other crypto coins are even worse in this aspect.

> You are misunderstanding the orders of magnitude differences in modern encryption from some weak schemes of the past.

You are basing this on modern tech. Making the same mistakes of people of the past. Right now I said AES-256 would take longer than the universe in existence, I get the orders of magnitude. I just think people base these ideas off of the present, not the future.

> "some encryption from 40 years ago was weak, therefore all encryption is weak."

Do you believe in 40 years we won't have advancements that may make this statement look silly? Right now they are secure, we don't know what is to come.

That is besides the point though, the keys are dangerous as they are concentration of leverage/power of not just a stock, but a currency...

> You are extrapolating off of something isn't a pattern in the first place. No one thought triple DES would last forever.

You are making the same mistakes of time, you don't know what is to come and the past has shown previous algorithms actually last LESS time than they expected. It does play into it.

Let's simplify this because you are lost in the weeds and resorting to ad hominems.

Do you think it is a good idea that a currency has keys out there, that can be found either directly or with time, that have heavy concentration?

Is concentrated unknown wealth of a currency, the root of all financial systems and power, a good idea?

My main point though was that these keys will probably be found in the future.

That's not at all what you said at first. You didn't say the keys would probably be found, you said with quantum computing someone will break the encryption, which is based on nothing. Here it is verbatim:

Eventually with quantum computing or other advancements, someone will break the encryption and potentially swipe the part of Satoshi's coin.

You are basing this on modern tech. Making the same mistakes of people of the past.

You aren't getting this. This isn't a "what if computers are faster in the future" scenario. You aren't going to brute force a search space of this size with all the energy from all the stars in the universe.

You are making the same mistakes of time, you don't know what is to come and the past has shown previous algorithms actually last LESS time than they expected. It does play into it.

No, I actually understand the search space of large key lengths instead of hallucinating a fantasy future. Even when DES was created people debated it being too weak.

You can go back a generation and read articles about cars so big they have their own wood shop, future cities full of flying cars and robot servants. That stuff was all more practical than what you are talking about.

This would not be a conversation if you understood what you are saying.

Let's simplify this because you are lost in the weeds and resorting to ad hominems.

Pointing out that you have huge misunderstandings is not 'ad hominem'.

Do you think it is a good idea that a currency has keys out there, that can be found either directly or with time, that have heavy concentration?

Is concentrated unknown wealth of a currency, the root of all financial systems and power, a good idea?

This has nothing to do with what I'm trying to tell you.

You originally said that "quantum computers will be able to break satoshi's keys" and I'm trying to explain to you why that is naive and uninformed.

If you assume powerful quantum computers then Bitcoin is dead, that is a straightforward result.

The digital signatures that prevent others from spending your bitcoins are based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). The security of elliptic curve cryptography is based on the hardness of the discrete logarithm problem (DLP). A sufficiently powerful quantum computer can use a variant of Shor’s algorithm to solve the DLP in runtime polynomial in the key size (my research indicates O(n^3) in key size more or less), giving you the private key behind a bitcoin wallet in a very tractable amount of time.

Though everything else they are saying about backdoors or design issues are wild speculation, a powerful quantum computer absolutely would allow you to spend anybody’s, including Satoshi Nakamoto’s, bitcoins.

> You originally said that "quantum computers will be able to break satoshi's keys"

I said "Eventually with quantum computing or other advancements, someone will break the encryption and potentially swipe the part of Satoshi's coin."

As one part of my message. Now read the second, longer part.

Summary: "Whoever has control of the early issued coins, holds a leverage that is dangerous and has extortion properties." Not just for Bitcoin either.

What I was getting as we the concentration part and because of the amount, the desire to find Satoshi's (and other early crypto) keys will be immense whether that comes from technology or physically located.

Those keys are locked in earlier encryption algorithms and will be easier over time, maybe a long time, but still.

The longer the time actually the more concentration it may have depending on many factors but still.

The other concentration problems have also been seen in other areas like hosted wallets and shared mining sites/services. Situations for control of large amounts would be some hosted wallet sites being compromised and collecting keys or even using exploits/holes without the keys then issuing a broad push of many accounts at once, or even slowly.

Concentration in wealth, currently and banking is always a problem. In newer financial markets with less regulation there are always more gaps from many facets to technology to processes and tools.