Bitcoin's decentralization is its quantum Achilles heel
“You hit it on the head. I mean, that's been in its entire value proposition today, right? Which is that it's actually quite a slow moving machine. If you try to push an upgrade through Bitcoin, you're not going to see that happen overnight. Like you might see that happen in Solana, for example. Bitcoin's whole engineering apparatus is designed around stable and high guarantees that something will work. When it comes to quantum risk, that's the last thing that we get.”
“So sort of the best sort of or maybe not the best, but one approach there would be, okay, well, why don't I just sort of hedge my risks and whatever 1% to whatever hold in Bitcoin, diversify into quantum safe assets so that if Bitcoin doesn't get its stuff together and the value is ever adversely affected, you have basically a quantum hedge in order to offset that risk.”
Signatures are vulnerable, not Bitcoin's mining algorithm
“There's been two conflated ideas of quantum risk. One is to the signatures, the other one is to the mining of Bitcoin. Something that our team had done last month was show that the mining algorithm, the Shaw 256 proof of work that secures Bitcoin is actually very secure. We anticipate it will be secure long into the future, long into the quantum era. But it's really the signatures that are at risk.”
Quantum threat to Bitcoin likely arrives around 2030
“Where does quantum stand? I mean, this is the position that we take, which is that it will be around 2030, I think is a decent benchmark. If you're looking at where quantum resources are at right now, we've seen the progress that they've gone through the past three to five years. And if you follow that trajectory onto the curve, it seems relatively plausible that it could happen in or around 2030”
Upgrading cryptography is like replacing every pipe under a city
“I analogize upgrading cryptography to thinking about it like a set of pipes underneath the city, like a plumbing system where if you need to upgrade the pipes, you need to dig up the roads, and these pipes feed into different buildings, you need to upgrade, you need to go into different people's homes, into the bathrooms, and upgrade all of the infrastructure there. It's actually a very deep and non-trivial task at hand.”
Satoshi's coins should be assumed lost to quantum hackers
“So, when it comes to Satoshi's coins, you know, optimist, I mean, there's been some recent VIP 361, which talks about, you know, perhaps sort of shaving it off, severing it from the existing supply. Some people have been talking about, you know, to shave it, do we sever it off? Do we print new tokens into existence? I mean, I don't think either of those are very plausible, just because it breaks sort of first principles in Bitcoin, which is a fixed supply of 21 million. So I think sort of the best way to think about it for now, the one that will likely prevail is just assuming that those will be lost forever and will be sort of susceptible to quantum attacks.”
BTQ runs a 'canary network' to battle-test quantum solutions
“What we're building is, we call it a quantum canary network for Bitcoin, sort of alluding to the old canary in the coal mine, where these coal miners would send out a little bird into these caves and figure out which parts of the coal mines would contain toxic gases, and it would essentially serve as a future warning, future indication of risks to come. The same thing can be said about solutions. You deploy a solution, but you think is a good solution and you actually battle-test it in a live network, and you realize that it has some problems. How often is it that we get a solution perfect right on day one?”
