"Here's $400,000 sitting on the table, hope nobody takes it" which triggers an alarm telling us to replace all our old prequantum cryptography.
The $400,000 is an inducement for any participant in that engineering effort to break the conspiracy and take the bag. It's effective during the period between the time that a quantum Shor's solver has been achieved for a given algorithm in theory for 256 bits (and in practice for 66 bits), and the time that a practical solution at 256 bits has been implemented.
I don't know how plausible that timeline is either in spacing or accuracy.
Sometime in early 2029, a bunch of people suddenly find that they're eligible for a $400,000 cash prize if they manage to secretly steal a bit of time on a working quantum computer. In 2030, that group of people doubles, and incorporates a new agency with its own security weaknesses. By 2031 we're talking about four separate countries with their own engineers that have managed to achieve the capability to claim that cash prize. Private corporations are somewhere on the horizon. Very soon this becomes an urgent imperative to anyone inclined, because the prize, like cash, disappears the moment that somebody else seizes it.
It's hard to keep conspiracies, particularly with a verifiable open offer of large amounts of highly portable money on the table to the first person to reveal secrets, and a gradually widening circle of access. The gradually expanding circle of access is what ensures we get some kind of alarm LONG before 2038. Keeping that secret to even 2033 requires hundreds of people and four agencies with diverse motivation and values to consistently turn down cash money for years on end in the interest of keeping their quantum capabilities hidden from the world.
I just think maybe public key crypto is not broken so far because there is no motivation for enough people to work on that. What whould one get, without endangering himself, if he breaks integer factorization?
Or getting hacked. This is super common among people who are known to have high value wallets. Between physical attacks and zero days in everyday software, there's no chance to stay safe when you put that kind of target on your back.
Vitalik Buterin seems to be a counter example here, his net worth peaked around $1.46 billion. He has some interesting writing on how he stays secure. At one point the SHIBA token sent a huge amount of funds to his cold wallet and he details what he did to securely access those funds:
https://decrypt.co/91000/ethereum-founder-vitalik-buterin-du...
> The funds, he said, were initially in a cold wallet in the form of two numbers written on separate pieces of paper. Buterin said he had to combine the two numbers to get the private key. "One of those numbers was with me; the other number was with my family in Canada," he said. "So I had to call up my family in Canada and tell them to read their number to me."
> Buterin said that he entered the numbers into the computer he purchased from Target after putting the two numbers together. "I sent my ETH out by generating a transaction and then on a computer that I bought from Tarjay [Target] for about $300 bucks for just this purpose."
> Before disconnecting the laptop from the internet entirely, Buterin said he downloaded a program to generate QR codes. After generating the Ethereum transaction, he scanned the QR code with his phone, copied it to the laptop, and then put it into etherscan.io/push Tx. Finally, Buterin said he began sending out the tokens.
Maybe not the best example of cryptographic security.
the DAO hack happened, immutably, no one disputes it. the hashes and blocks and transactions are well-known. so there was a "schism", that explicitly validates the fact that without this large-scale cooperation, without the redefinition of what Ethereum is, it would be still be what is on that other branch. these both provide evidence for the immutably and decentralization.
The fact that there are far fewer users of Ethereum Classic (and the market cap is significantly lower) is a testament to how much people care about the community which chose to follow a different history of the Ethereum network.
But in one chain the whole community decided to disown the attacker by injecting hard coded transactions that would send the Ethers back to their original owners.
Vitalik (and all DAO ETH hodlers) luckboxed in that the ETHs locked in the DAO, although "stolen", couldn't be withdrawn by the attacker before a few weeks.
There has been zero pause and zero rollback. Most people don't understand that: by chance the stolen funds were inaccessible to the attacker for a few weeks.
What Vitalik did is he forked (soft fork) the ETH blockchain to modify the rules. That soft fork happened before the cooldown period expired, so the attacker never got to access his funds.
Some members of the community said "adding new rules is against the spirit of decentralization, so we keep using the old chain". The old chain was named "Ethereum classic" while the forked chain kept the name "Ethereum".
But there's been no rollback.
The proof of this is that some people didn't agree with undoing that transaction. They stayed on the old chain, which is now worthless.
This is such a boring and widely known story now, but it has to come up literally any time someone wants to play crypto tribalisim.
The reason why people got confused with your comment is because ex. you purport it was fine, it can never happen again, and everyone who didn't agree went to 0.
Lot of tensions between those things.
We also understand how one person could have those views and even steelman it into something intellectually consistent. But then the post seems really off because it's sort of a rushed, poor, justification for why you believe something, coupled to bemoaning some sort of unrelated group none of us are privy to.
How exactly was Vitalik "indirectly pwned"?
I think pretty much all stores still accept cash, but most people here just never withdraw any. It's pretty much just old people and people buing illegal stuff
So this is why cash IS a good thing. Sex workers want to do their thing and Johns want to not be instantly called out for using sex workers. The people who long ago realized magic mushrooms work to cure depression want to be be able to get it without being jailed. Now, here in Canada, sex work is protected and magic mushrooms will not get you thrown in jail.
So even though you may deem things illegal, I ask you think of a greater good that cash allows as everything being digital reveals a lot of information that not all people are comfortable their government knowing. Be it homosexuals, depressed people trying illicit treatments, or extremely lonely discarded individuals reaching out to sex workers verses suicide.
Lastly according to a quick google search and a few spots I looked at, most only showing 2022 as latest information, most point of sale transactions in Europe are made with cash not card [1]. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/786680/share-of-cash-tra...
And in northern Europe, pretty much nobody uses cash. In the rest of Europe, at least the places I've been, pretty much every store accepts card and often other digital payment methods.
I don't doubt your statistics, just stating my experience. I just think it's strange that people prefer cash for legitimate purchases. I definitely want cash to stay around, but these days we can use crypto for illegal stuff anyway do it's not really a big deal.
Then he didn't have to worry about the Shiba related transactions affecting his ETH?
The basic problem was that they transferred into his "cold wallet" https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/investing/hot-wallet-vs-c...
He didn't want to have the signal be that he was happy holding SHIBA and was uncomfortable with that much power & control over SHIBA. So he wanted to be able to transfer his SHIBA out to a hot wallet and then burn most of it and donate the rest, given the amount of money involved he took extra steps like buying a new computer to generate the new keys, airgapping it from the internet while it held the cold wallet keys etc
This problem is harder if you want to pass on your crypto after you can't use them anymore.
If you want to enable recovery, you should give ownership of things to smart contracts, which enable things like succession rules and a heatbeat checkin etc.
Public/private keys are not designed to solve that kind of governance problem.
If someone had a quantum-supreme solution they would go after the sitoshi wallets. Some addresses have like $1B+ and combined represent ~$200B.
I would not be shocked if trying to sell $200B in bitcoin gets you far less than half.
Granted, moving a sitoshi era wallet to a coinbase wallet would raise red flags, but those sized deals are done otc.
The reason that we use elliptic curves these days, or if we must then something like 8k bit keys to get 128 bits of security over finite fields, is that for the old Z^*_q/Z_p setup, such a faster algorithm exists (index calculus).
Someone could in theory find a better calculus that works only for groups with some specific characteristics of Curve25519, for example. No quantum computers needed.
EDIT: we know that no _generic_ faster algorithm exists, that is one independent of the representation of the group involved, for the traditional computing model. But that doesn't exclude algorithms, as I said above, that work for very particular cases.
You can get a brief introduction at https://soatok.blog/2020/04/26/a-furrys-guide-to-digital-sig... (your own choice if you want that open in a tab at work or not, but there's nothing NSFW in the usual sense in there), and then read the details of each scheme in the RFCs. Some of the RFCs even talk about security implications.
"djb" as he is known in the crypto world has a good paper at https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1265 , it's 68 pages so "almost a book". He also has a lot of resources on his page https://cr.yp.to . Be aware that he is sometimes ... controversial (not racist or anything, just has strong opinions on FIPS and the NSA and has actually taken the US government to court in the past over this). He's the author of Curve25519.
You don't even need to travel far. A second or so is enough to break all cryptography, even the post-quantum one.
(disclaimer, I don't know statistics, cryptography, bitcoin or chances)