Problem includes far more than bitcoin.. Your bank for example
For Bitcoin this is much harder.
The community will just do a blockchain snapshot of balances at an agreed upon block and start a new distributed ledger with quantum resistant encryption
Snapshots have been done hundreds of times
What do you do with old coins? Satoshi's one for example? Or lost coins that nobody has the key for?
Do you set a threshold day, after which all unclaimed coins are just marked destroyed forever? If not, how do you know someone claiming some coins didn't use a quantum computer to get the key?
yeah pretty much.
>What do you do with old coins? Satoshi's one for example? Or lost coins that nobody has the key for?
If those coins hasn't been touched for decades, despite widespread announcements of pre-quantum cryptography (presumably it wouldn't happen overnight), it's safe to say that nobody is going to claim them.
So we have moved from concluding that bitcoin use is an irreparably flawed concept to a method of maintaining viability of the concept
This is the funny thing about decentralized services. They require centralized action. Not saying it is good or bad, but it is... different.
Anyone can make a snapshot, assigning value to it is not centralized
I don’t imagine this is other settings... “I only do breaking changes on my api so let’s have everyone change their client at midnight”.
Imagine if we all changed implementations of SQL at once!
Actually, we changed the meaning of the $() function inside the devtools console across all browsers at the same time. That was fun. :)
People just add flags in their mining protocol that only trigger when a threshold is reached. The last Segwit changes needed a percent change of closer to 90% just to trigger the next change.
We are only assuming that consensus would be reached quickly given the scenario presented. It would be irresponsible to design it to need simultaneous action. People would have to considering to stop using the bitcoin network for X,000 blocks while consensus is being reached, and only until it is reached.