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Comment by fonosip | Hacker News Reader

The definitive test for Quantum computer arrival is the claim of Satoshi's 1 million bitcoins. Those coins were mined and paid paid to the pubkey, not the pubkey-hash. Thus they are quantum computer vulnerable.

So there is a $500 million price ready for the first operational Quantum computer. http://ba.net/util/bitcoin/design1.html#quantum

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I don't know about that; the moment those coins are suspected to be compromised, you'd get a near-immediate run on BTC. So yes, there are a lot of Bitcoins available, but stealing them would undermine the entire system their value is based on, rendering them worthless.

They wouldn't be rendered worthless, but the security would take a hit for sure. Any coins mined (and not moved) before 2012 would be at risk, in addition to any address that has been reused since then (revealing the pubkey, instead of just the pubkey hash). Addresses created post-2012 that have not been spent from (spending reveals the pubkey) would still be 100% secure.

Eh -- "secure-ish" at best. Spending those utxo's requires revealing the pubkey, at which point someone with a quantum computer can just break your pubkey and offer a new transaction with a higher fee while your transaction is still in the mempool.

Or an even bigger prize for keeping it secret. If you could break asymmetric encryption at will you could plunder much bigger prizes than Satoshi's coins.

Like what exactly? We know many things are secured that way, but few are secured in only that way. I only know of things that take more effort to generate profit (and generally less profit).

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