Less than a week after the quantum terrorism spread by Google Quantum AI's paper, Avihu Levy discovered that the solution is already inside #Bitcoin.
The Chief Product Officer of StarkWare published a research paper on GitHub called QSB - Quantum Safe Bitcoin. The thesis: it is possible to sign Bitcoin transactions resistant to quantum computers using already existing consensus rules. No soft fork. No protocol changes.
The mechanism works in 3 phases
- Transaction pinning: uses public keys and RIPEMD-160 hashes to create computational constraints with a probability of a random string satisfying them of roughly 1 in 70 trillion.
- Digest rounds: searches for subsets among dummy signatures to generate a collision-resistant digest, effectively building a Lamport signature.
- Final transaction assembly.
The numbers
Against Shor's algorithm, the one that should break ECDSA, the system offers approximately 118 bits of security. Standard ECDSA, with a sufficiently powerful quantum computer, would offer 0. Against Grover, 59-69 bits.
The underlying technology is called Binohash, developed by Robin Linus.
Practical limitations
Each QSB transaction costs $75-$200 in GPU power and requires 6-8 hours of computation. Transactions are non-standard and must be sent directly to miners. It is obviously not a solution for everyday use today, but the protocol designed in 2008 already contains the antibodies for a threat that is still closer to science fiction than to physical reality.
I discuss it in detail in Bitcoin Train’s Stop #294.
naddr1qqjk...
The Chief Product Officer of StarkWare published a research paper on GitHub called QSB - Quantum Safe Bitcoin. The thesis: it is possible to sign Bitcoin transactions resistant to quantum computers using already existing consensus rules. No soft fork. No protocol changes.
The mechanism works in 3 phases
- Transaction pinning: uses public keys and RIPEMD-160 hashes to create computational constraints with a probability of a random string satisfying them of roughly 1 in 70 trillion.
- Digest rounds: searches for subsets among dummy signatures to generate a collision-resistant digest, effectively building a Lamport signature.
- Final transaction assembly.
The numbers
Against Shor's algorithm, the one that should break ECDSA, the system offers approximately 118 bits of security. Standard ECDSA, with a sufficiently powerful quantum computer, would offer 0. Against Grover, 59-69 bits.
The underlying technology is called Binohash, developed by Robin Linus.
Practical limitations
Each QSB transaction costs $75-$200 in GPU power and requires 6-8 hours of computation. Transactions are non-standard and must be sent directly to miners. It is obviously not a solution for everyday use today, but the protocol designed in 2008 already contains the antibodies for a threat that is still closer to science fiction than to physical reality.
I discuss it in detail in Bitcoin Train’s Stop #294.
naddr1qqjk...
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