Comment by Salgat
1 day ago
BTC has occasionally obtained community driven patches by distributed consensus rather than a centralized approach (as recently as 2021 with the Taproot soft fork). When Quantum Computing finally becomes a threat to BTC, there will almost certainly be a distributed consensus to update the protocol again. Now what happened with Ethereum could be argued as not so decentralized since the organization (Ethereum Foundation) has extremely strong political influence over the corporations that support it.
I really hate the “someone will certainly solve this problem!” mentality.
You can’t just magically update the protocol to work around the ability of someone to break elliptic curve cryptography. That not how this works. It’s not how any of this works.
> You can’t [...] update the protocol to work around the ability of someone to break elliptic curve cryptography
Have you reviewed any of the proposals to do exactly that? https://bitcoinops.org/en/topics/quantum-resistance/
Isn’t that exactly how it works?
You agree on a post-quantum algorithm…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-quantum_cryptography
Then you update the protocol…
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/qth9ii/how_does_bi...
Right?
How would you protect all the old stuck or stale BTC wallets that used the original crypto? An awful lot of cold-stored or presumed-lost BTC would be hard or impossible to migrate to post-quantum protection, no? A quarter of mined BTC? Half?
More of an economic than technical puzzle these days. But wouldn't you need users to protect their wallets post-fork?
1 reply →
You… can.
Once people catch wind of bitcoin being moved from secure places, nodes will cease processing transactions, quantum capable thieves will be frozen
Network will upgrade if it hasnt already, nodes will only process transactions on the network with the most other nodes
They might even resume from a few block back. No different than branching from an old commit
If this doesnt match your philosophy of legitimacy, you can try continuing in the orphanage chain and get other nodes to join you. May the longest chain win!
This has all been theorized before and has subsequently happened before and the resolution has given confidence to attract more capital.