Cryptography behind the top cryptocurrencies
ethanfast.com
ethanfast.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic-curve_cryptography#Qu...
Not just Bitcoin, and not just all other popular cryptocurrencies, but all your web traffic and more are all susceptible to quantum attack.
Indicates the best known quantum speedup square roots the search space, and the search space in SHA256 is still too big to search exhaustively.
The thing with applied cryptography is that everyone is expecting the attacks to get better over time, sometimes in big and inconvenient bursts. There are several strategies to mitigate this, including oversizing security margins by a certain amount (so that an innovation that improves an attack by an order of magnitude or two isn't an instantaneous shattering of your whole security model), and having what's sometimes termed "algorithm agility" (which has somewhat fallen out of favor recently due to having its own class of bugs due to the implementations around, say, an optional NONE pluggable cipher type).
It's an awesome python library to create math animations, I would highly recommend it.
But it likely won't happen at all. Lots of work is being done on quantum proof cryptography[1]. IT systems and crypto can be upgraded to use it.
The real problem is going to be all the stashed encrypted data that US and China have stored on each other of a sensitive nature. The encryption on this information could be cracked by a quantum computer.
While there's no doubt they've stored lots of encrypted messages sent by each other, would it really be such a huge catastrophe if those messages were decrypted years after they were sent? Presumably neither side is sending the most sensitive information that has long-term value (like weapons designs) across a channel the other can read, encrypted or not. And the US and Chinese governments losing control of some of their secrets wouldn't necessarily be a net negative for the world anyway. Snowden "decrypted" some of the US's secrets and we are better off for it.
The bigger threat isn't both sides decrypting each other's stored messages, it's one side breaking the other's encryption without them knowing, like what happened with the Enigma in WWII.
https://youtu.be/I3BJVaioX_k at around the 10:30 mark should make the point.
There would probably be some competing chains as different communities tried to be "the one". Things might settle down at some point as it's really a "winner takes all" market.
That said, it would be such a feat of mathematics (if even possible) that it's highly unlikely a bad actor would be the first one to discover it.
The first thing to target would be the network operators, so that you have the technical ability to observe and inject packets into connections from leaf nodes. Then, you could redirect those connections to yourself, proxy their TLS undetected, or serve replies that contain (valid signature) updates or malware.
This is one of the many reasons that a defense in depth strategy (that is, not solely/blindly trusting TLS or digital signatures to ensure that your computer doesn't run unauthorized code) is a good idea.
It is also probably another reason why so many state-level intel agencies target telecoms first and foremost.
There are tens of billions of dollars worth of abandoned Bitcoins in addresses with exposed public keys. It would be trivial to get those if you can break ECDSA. Yes, there is much more outside of Bitcoin but I don't see why someone who had this capability wouldn't go after the easy targets first.
I was referring to if it was possible to break encryption using classical computers in polynomial time -- that would be a feat of mathematics, if it were even possible, and would likely have implications about P vs. NP.
Every bank account and every website will be able to be able to be hacked.
There are crypto punks on Binance / Tron but they are pretty worthless. Everyone knows which one is the real one
For most projects that go multi chain it’s all about wrapping. I.e the main item is on ETH but they are wrapped when on other chains.
https://cryptoinsider.media/venezuelan-developers-using-bitc...
The ecological footprint it important in the nft space. https://medium.com/tqtezos/proof-of-work-vs-proof-of-stake-t...
At the moment approximately 40 transactions per second
NFTs on Tezos: https://kalamint.io/ https://www.hicetnunc.xyz/ Minting a NFT costs about 1 cent
A collectible card game called emergents will be based on the chain. https://coa.se/
Further adoption: Recently the biggest retailer in france has announced to develop a stable coin on tezos. https://www.coindesk.com/french-firm-launches-euro-stablecoi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupe_Casino
Eth1 docking on Eth2 on the roadmap in the next 18 months. The https://beaconcha.in/ has more solo validators online right now than people aware of tezos existence.
Tezos feel like a French project like Minitel was. Ahead of it´s time, theoretically ok supported by short sided ego first French corporate (Casino project reads like multi airlines travel points from the mid 80´s)
Don't get me wrong It worth a lot in the research fundamentals. But so much could be done joining the nationless Ethereum project.
I'm completly with you about the awareness of tezos. There was no marketing. In April they will start, what that means, I don't know. It is not a French project, when you look up https://www.nomadic-labs.com/ you see it's also UK, Switzerland, Japan ... The foundation (audited by PwC) is based in Switzerland. "We sustainably deploy resources that support the long-term success of Tezos." https://tezos.foundation/about-us/ They have about 1B USD to back the project, which is spent sparsely.
I don't know where tezos is in 18 months, but it's surely not dead.
The one notable exception is NBA Top Shot, which is an NFT collection that uses the Flow blockchain.
https://wallet.tether.to/transparency
Also USDC is on several chains as well including Stellar.
https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2021/attorney-general-james-...
> “Bitfinex and Tether recklessly and unlawfully covered-up massive financial losses to keep their scheme going and protect their bottom lines,” said Attorney General James. “Tether’s claims that its virtual currency was fully backed by U.S. dollars at all times was a lie. These companies obscured the true risk investors faced and were operated by unlicensed and unregulated individuals and entities dealing in the darkest corners of the financial system.
Not sure what that means for anything, but it’s important to remember that what we consider the gold standard today, BTC, ETH, they may be tomorrow’s tin.
Edit: this is one of the reasons I’m optimistic about the future of ethereum. The stablecoins have become so critical for defi that it’s hard to imagine another platform (like polkadot) gaining critical traction needed to overtake it.
I was completely blown away with the design of the Anchor protocol that they just launched
I really hope that project continues its success.
And you can borrow stablecoins for your BTC without selling it.
Given it was successful despite being a cargo cult (the plane landed QED), by symmetry the ability to make money with cryptocurrency doesn’t make it not an economic cargo cult.
(One must do more that this to show that it is a cargo cult, rather than that it is still possible for it to be, which I say despite liking the cargo cult comparison and being generally very against cryptocurrency).
False premise. Some people are making money, but only at the expense of others. There is no value being created here.
Tron is growing ... USDC is multichain as well.
edit: Yeah I remember correctly
https://www.coindesk.com/tron-ethereum-tether-transaction-co...
The irony of most cryptocurrency market cap depending on mostly scam currency TRON is not lost upon me.
https://wallet.tether.to/transparency
Most Tether volume is also on Ethereum, as the article above notes:
>>Notably, the total value of tether transacted on Ethereum is still larger than Tron, signaling that primarily smaller transactors are migrating. Meanwhile, parties executing larger transactions who can presumably afford higher fees seem comfortable continuing to use Ethereum.
The big issue is that there's simply no space on Ethereum for smaller transactions. Hopefully some of this volume will migrate to Ethereum's zkRollups, namely Loopring and zkSync, which increase Ethereum's maximum throughput from 30 to 3,000 ERC20 token transfers per second.
In less PC-ridden times, this would just have been:
"Justin Sun is a bald-faced liar."