Nick Szabo ⚡️

Look predictions are difficult especially if they are about the future. We don’t have a QC now and we are not close to having one. If you assume that research will on it will advance exponentially then they will of course come at some point.

That’s why we should of course work on post quantum computation but currently all of the cryptography that is being used is not quantum secure and we don’t have computationally feasible alternatives yet.

Not adding another crypto tool because you are woried about QC is akin to not remodeling in SF because there might be a big earthquake coming. Please don’t use quantum as a blanket argument. There are important tradeoffs but you have to be precise about what they are.

Let's assume I agree with you not to immaturely worry about QC and I propose CT+BP to Bitcoin. As long as Schor breaks this, I have no chance of reaching consensus. Thus using QC as a blanket argument is quite reasonable, don't you think?

A) you were talking about Monero which already has CT. CT would of course be deployed as an extension block and be opt in only. If you don’t want to use it you are not affected by it. If you use it you are at risk. Very similar to the Schnorr signature fork.

Also if someone has a quantum computer they can steel your money when you are trying to transact or steal the money at the large number of addresses that have a public key online (all multiuse addresses). What is even worse is you can’t use the internet anymore.

Online banking: gone end2end encryption: gone https: gone. To put it bluntly if we have QC tomorrow we would be fucked. So if you are worried about QC you probably shouldn’t be using cryptocurrencies at all. So I don’t get the consensus argument.