[clysm]

I really hate the “someone will certainly solve this problem!” mentality.

You can’t just magically update the protocol to work around the ability of someone to break elliptic curve cryptography. That not how this works. It’s not how any of this works.

[yieldcrv]

You… can.

Once people catch wind of bitcoin being moved from secure places, nodes will cease processing transactions, quantum capable thieves will be frozen

Network will upgrade if it hasnt already, nodes will only process transactions on the network with the most other nodes

They might even resume from a few block back. No different than branching from an old commit

If this doesnt match your philosophy of legitimacy, you can try continuing in the orphanage chain and get other nodes to join you. May the longest chain win!

This has all been theorized before and has subsequently happened before and the resolution has given confidence to attract more capital.

[clysm]

And what happens to all those cold wallets where people can recover the secret key or forge signatures for it? They money is just gone, either by thieves or the network disallowing them to be spent.

[greyface-]

> You can’t [...] update the protocol to work around the ability of someone to break elliptic curve cryptography

Have you reviewed any of the proposals to do exactly that? https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/quantum-resistance/

[clysm]

It helps build a new system, but all existing wallets would be hackable until they migrate. And we expect everyone to have the time and resources to do that? For a “store of value” system?

All of my hardware wallets are now worthless? All of the hardware security modules used for wallets managed by corporations no longer work?

It's an absolute mess for so many reasons that a "protocol fix" just doesn't cover.

[greyface-]

> all existing wallets would be hackable until they migrate

Not necessarily. See "Discussion of Guy Fawkes signatures to protect some current bitcoins against quantum theft" and "Commit/reveal function for post-quantum recovery of insecure bitcoins" sections of the Optech page.

[alwa]

Isn’t that exactly how it works?

You agree on a post-quantum algorithm…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography

Then you update the protocol…

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/qth9ii/how_does_bi...

Right?

[unyttigfjelltol]

How would you protect all the old stuck or stale BTC wallets that used the original crypto? An awful lot of cold-stored or presumed-lost BTC would be hard or impossible to migrate to post-quantum protection, no? A quarter of mined BTC? Half?

More of an economic than technical puzzle these days. But wouldn't you need users to protect their wallets post-fork?

[KetoManx64]

You tell people that value their bitcoin to migrate to new wallets. Bitcoin is self sovereignty and self-ownership. You are responsible for securing your own wallet.

The bitcoin that has been lost doesn't matter, because it's lost. That becomes fair game to whoever can find the computational resources to crack the cryptography of the wallets to get to it. At that point BTC will probably be $500k-$1M in price, and it might just be the driving force behind mainstream adoption of quantum computing.

[clysm]

A forced migration is basically just making a brand new system. It’s not a “protocol fix”.