Is there any field with as big of gap between theory and experiment than QC? You read papers like this and think they will be harvesting all Satoshi's coins in a couple years and then you remember that nobody has even factored 21 yet on a real quantum computer.
Oh wait: thousands of programmers started working on this in the early 90s so that there would be so few failures people thought it was a scam.
The entire financial and government infrastructure was based on ecdsa until the shift to pqc. The consequences of not preparing are literal threats to global economy. That can’t be understated. The cost to switch to (hybrid) pqc is essentially zero when compared to the costs for not doing it.
It's interesting, solar panels were in this category in the 1980s and self-driving cars were in the 2010s, and both have had the gap between theory and practice significantly narrowed since.
Here's an interesting discussion from Section 8 - Dormant Wallets:
If a nation state develops a sufficiently powerful quantum computer. Seizure of the Satoshi-era bitcoin wallets without post quantum protections would fund either rogue actors or nation states.
> Indeed, some governments will have the option of using CRQCs (or paying a bounty to companies) to acquire these assets (possibly to burn them by sending them to the unspendable OP RETURN address [321]) as a national security matter. As before, blockchain’s loss of the
ability to reliably identify asset owners combined with the laches doctrine [319] enables governments to argue that
the original owners, through years of inaction, have failed to assert their property rights
Is there any field with as big of gap between theory and experiment than QC? You read papers like this and think they will be harvesting all Satoshi's coins in a couple years and then you remember that nobody has even factored 21 yet on a real quantum computer.
Y2K
Oh wait: thousands of programmers started working on this in the early 90s so that there would be so few failures people thought it was a scam.
The entire financial and government infrastructure was based on ecdsa until the shift to pqc. The consequences of not preparing are literal threats to global economy. That can’t be understated. The cost to switch to (hybrid) pqc is essentially zero when compared to the costs for not doing it.
Fusion power comes to mind.
It's interesting, solar panels were in this category in the 1980s and self-driving cars were in the 2010s, and both have had the gap between theory and practice significantly narrowed since.
Here's an interesting discussion from Section 8 - Dormant Wallets:
If a nation state develops a sufficiently powerful quantum computer. Seizure of the Satoshi-era bitcoin wallets without post quantum protections would fund either rogue actors or nation states.
> Indeed, some governments will have the option of using CRQCs (or paying a bounty to companies) to acquire these assets (possibly to burn them by sending them to the unspendable OP RETURN address [321]) as a national security matter. As before, blockchain’s loss of the ability to reliably identify asset owners combined with the laches doctrine [319] enables governments to argue that the original owners, through years of inaction, have failed to assert their property rights
As soon as activity is detected and reasonably atributable to sha256 being broken, bitcoin goes to zero.
Dup? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47582418
I can't think of a less useful avenue of research in cryptography right now.
'Code is law' doesn't exclude quantum code.
Call me when they have broken ECC with a real quantum computer.
Why is your use case interesting?
There is a $2T dollar use-case.