Entries tagged with this topic. Spans across types and sources — explore connections between people, events, and themes.
25 entries / 1 thread
Which Bitcoin assets are at risk from a cryptographically relevant quantum computer, and what the timeline and migration debate around post-quantum cryptography looks like.
Blockstream CEO Adam Back stated Bitcoin faces no quantum computing threat for ~20–40 years, pointing to NIST post-quantum signatures like SLH-DSA that Bitcoin can adopt before threats materialize.
Adam Back's reply to a question about whether Bitcoin faces near-term risk from quantum computing, pointing at NIST-standardized SLH-DSA and a 20–40 year horizon.
Pay-to-Merkle-Root (P2MR), a quantum-resistant output type. Like Taproot without the quantum-vulnerable key path spend — commits only to the Merkle root of a script tree. SegWit v2, soft fork.
After the London High Court ordered bitcoin.org to remove the Bitcoin whitepaper, Cobra responded on Twitter with a critique declaring cryptographic rules superior to court-enforced ones.
Specifies Bech32m, a checksum variant of Bech32 that fixes an insertion-error weakness, and mandates its use for native SegWit v1+ (Taproot) addresses while v0 keeps Bech32.
Schnorr signatures replacing ECDSA for Taproot. Provably secure, non-malleable, with efficient multi-signature aggregation — complex scripts become on-chain indistinguishable from simple payments.
Taproot — Bitcoin's most significant protocol upgrade since SegWit. Combines Schnorr (BIP 340) with MAST so complex spending conditions look like simple payments on-chain.
Specifies tapscript — the taproot script-path validation rules: Schnorr signature checks via OP_CHECKSIG/OP_CHECKSIGADD, OP_SUCCESS upgrade opcodes, and a per-input sigops budget.
Defines the v2 P2P transport: unauthenticated opportunistic ChaCha20Poly1305 encryption over ElligatorSwift-encoded ECDH key exchange, producing a pseudorandom bytestream with v1 fallback.
Peter Todd participated in the Zcash trusted setup ceremony in October 2016 — driving across BC, shielding his laptop in a Faraday cage, and torching the hardware — then criticized the process.
Fixes ECDSA signature malleability with two consensus rules: LOW_S, requiring the lower-half S value, and NULLFAIL, requiring failing signatures be empty byte arrays.
On January 15, 2016, Bitcoin Core v0.12 replaced OpenSSL with libsecp256k1 — Wuille and Maxwell's custom elliptic-curve library — for consensus-critical ECDSA verification.
New SegWit v0 signature-hash algorithm: commits to the input's spent amount, fixes O(n^2) quadratic hashing, and changes OP_CODESEPARATOR/FindAndDelete handling.
Restricts ECDSA signatures in Bitcoin scripts to strict DER encoding, removing OpenSSL's implicit role in consensus validity and reducing transaction malleability.
Long-time Bitcoin Core contributor (gmaxwell), Blockstream co-founder, co-developer of libsecp256k1. Authored CoinJoin, co-designed Confidential Transactions. Known for deep technical write-ups.
Introduced hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallets — an entire tree of key pairs derived from a single master seed. Eliminated frequent-backup needs and enabled organized parent-child key derivation.
On November 21, 2011, Bitcoin v0.5 shipped with the Crypto++ SHA-256 subset removed and replaced by OpenSSL. Wei Dai's library, a direct codebase dependency since v0.1, was gone.
American cryptographer (1980-2011), Mixmaster lead developer, KU Leuven PhD candidate. Died by suicide 68 days after Satoshi's last message. Later named in a Satoshi-identity hypothesis.
Belgian software engineer (sipa), Bitcoin Core committer since 2011. Author/co-author of BIP-32, BIP-141 (SegWit), BIP-340/341 (Schnorr/Taproot). Initiator of libsecp256k1; Blockstream co-founder.
Mike Hearn points Satoshi to a forum discussion about the security of the secp256k1 curve, noting Hal Finney's concerns about its risk profile.
How Bitcoin uses elliptic-curve keys, digital signatures, hash functions, and deterministic derivation to secure ownership without trusted third parties.
Satoshi argues Bitcoin represents 'a major battle in the arms race' for financial freedom, citing Gnutella and Tor as decentralized P2P networks proven resilient against government shutdown.
May recalls three days of talk with Eric Hughes in May 1992 about how slowly academic cryptography became working code, and the aim to get actual running code for digital cash and mixes.