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by ozim 83 days ago
Your bank doesn’t depend only on cryptography. It would be still a lot of effort to simply make transfer from a bank account. Quantum computer will not magically give an answer for a password of a hash you don’t have. TLS is moving to post quantum as we speak.

For crypto currency you have all the data you need to break whole system ready in your hands as you will be able to produce private key from public keys of wallets. Cryptocurrency depends only on cryptography.

1 comments

In Bitcoin's case, public keys are only revealed during a transaction.

And every transaction completely spends the source keypairs' funds.

So the only attack vector a quantum computer could use is:

1. Observing newly broadcast/unconfirmed transactions

2. Deriving the private key(s) from the public key(s)

3. Creating and broadcasting its own transaction using the stolen keypairs before the original transaction confirms (presumably with a higher fee to win the confirmation race).

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

EDIT: correction: every transaction completely spends any selected UTXO of an associated keypair, not all of the "source keypairs' funds". Thus the attack vector also includes being able to steal from any keypair that has ever made a transaction and also has UTXOs.

The newest transaction mechanism (taproot; P2TR) exposes the public key of the receiver as part of the transaction. If it becomes more commonly used, the supply of bitcoins with exposed public keys would start going up again. See figure 5 of https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.28846#page=14 .
So everything basically.