Comment by spottedmarley
3 hours ago
It may be a plausible concern at some point in the future but, once it's possible, it would manifest as an extremely expensive and time consuming attack against a targeted address, it would require an enormous amount of compute. So, I suppose the first line of defense would be to never keep more funds locked under one key than it would cost an attacker to decrypt it.
Which leaves Bitcoin between a rock and a hard place. The Satoshi funds are probably worth an attack. At the same time they cannot move to post quantum cryptography, because that would also require to move funds.
Yeah the Satoshi treasure would be a prime target. Maybe we see those funds get mysteriously split up at some point? But we wouldn't know if they were hacked or protected..
There are exchanges, custodians, etc that hold insane amounts of BTC or ETH in a single address.
We are talking billion dollars+ worth in a single address. So if either chainskey security is compromised in a way that it is conceivable to brute force it, there will definitely be plenty of targets.
Stealing a billion dollar address is kind of worthless. Try cashing it out. Even if you are NK.
Yes, it would require those exchanges to move their funds around. I'm pretty sure they can manage it.
Cost of running an attack is super cheap if one buys botted computers (it is/used to be $25/1000 machines).