17 Comments
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Bob Dewey's avatar

This is an excellent walk-through of the mathematical basis of why Bitcoin ownership has been secure to date. It also provides analogies that make it simple to conceptualize for those who neither have the time nor the inclination to handle the math. Really looking forward to the connection to the quantum risk. Thank you Nic.

Frank T. Young's avatar

The card shuffling analogy was very helpful. "Leave them wanting more" achieved!

Jackson Sardello's avatar

What a prologue! Looking forward to our "Y2K but actually everything is going to break" future crisis!

ARGUments🇺🇦misrepresented🇺🇸's avatar

A very great layterm blog about quantum threatening bitcoin! Nic! very easy to understand.

A plain suggestion from my side is that if you don't mind to add how many barriers for bitcoin to migrate to quantum-resistance? how many years? and what will be left?

Thanks! and great job!

HW's avatar

Stop writing stuff that's out of your depth ... you're not a crytographer nor a QC guy

Anantdeep Parihar's avatar

But you're an authority on knowing when people should stop doing things? Pretty lame even if that is true :)

Brandon Collins's avatar

Thanks for this, great work

BTC Stance Memo's avatar

Great “from-first-principles” refresher: Bitcoin ownership rests on the asymmetry of ECC—easy to go private→public, infeasible to invert (discrete log). The subtle point many miss: spending reveals the public key, which is why any future break in that one-way assumption matters at the UTXO level. Clean setup for the quantum discussion.

Anantdeep Parihar's avatar

Well done! Half way thru and noticed something off here: "multiplying set starting point G by itself k times."

"Multiply by itself" would mean G^k.

What it should be: "multiplying it to G."

Brady Dale's avatar

So okay

The private key is the first number. The public key is the second.

The field of potential related numbers occurs on a crazy curve that is not at all a curve. It's an array of seeminly random points. there is a way of charting a sync between them but it's not a thing you could ever picture.

Something something...

if you have an output that was generated with the private you can use the public to verify that it does relate to that still unknown private, without revealing it.

Maybe due to that crazy shortcut algorithm you mentioned. Tho I'm not sure about that part.

The world of bitcoin is all somewhat clearer but in that way I can't quite explain and I probably won't be able to hold onto.

Gokul Rangarajan's avatar

Great writing there is nothing available in the interet which explains the problem so well

We had taken inspiration from

This and extended a bit

https://open.substack.com/pub/pitchworks/p/vitalik-says-theres-a-20-chance-quantum?r=h4ykk&utm_medium=ios

We are backing Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computers we think that’s the way ahead

Let’s see how the technology unfold in next 2 years

Angel GC's avatar

Incredible work Nic. Really came together in the intuitive section for me. Excited to read part 2!

PerfHodl's avatar

When do we get part 2? It’s nearly been a month.