Entries tagged with this topic. Spans across types and sources — explore connections between people, events, and themes.
14 entries
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.
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.
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.
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.
Schnorr signatures replacing ECDSA for Taproot. Provably secure, non-malleable, with efficient multi-signature aggregation — complex scripts become on-chain indistinguishable from simple payments.
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.
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.
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 20, 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.
Mike Hearn points Satoshi to a forum discussion about the security of the secp256k1 curve, noting Hal Finney's concerns about its risk profile.
Satoshi explains why SHA-256 collisions are not a practical concern for Bitcoin, describing the immense computational difficulty involved.
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.