Here’s How Quantum Computers Will Really Affect Cryptocurrencies
+ There’s been a lot of focus recently on encryption within the context of cryptocurrencies. Taproot being implemented in bitcoin has led to more cryptographic primitives that make the bitcoin network more secure and private. Its major upgrade from a privacy standpoint is to make it impossible to distinguish between multi-signature and single-signature transactions.
+ This will, for example, make it impossible to tell which transactions involve the opening of Lightning Network channels versus regular base layer transactions. The shift from ECDSA signatures to Schnorr signatures involves changes and upgrades in cryptography.
Cryptocurrencies are co-evolving with other technologies. As computers develop into different forms, there are grand opportunities, from space-based cryptocurrency exchange to distributed devices that make running nodes accessible to everybody.
+ Yet these cryptographic primitives might need to shift or transition in the face of new computers such as quantum computers. If you go all the way back down to how these technologies work, they are built from unsolved mathematical problems — something humans haven’t found a way to reduce down to our brain’s capacity for creativity yet limited memory retrieval, or a computer’s way of programmed memory retrieval. Solving those problems can create dramatic breaks in current technologies.
+ Yet, in this era, there will also be new technologies that force cryptocurrencies to adapt to changing realities. Quantum computing and the possibility that it might eventually break the cryptographic primitives cryptocurrencies are built on is one such technology.
+ Yet, it’s in the new governance principles cryptocurrencies embody that might help them adapt.
Source: Forbes. Roger Huang, Here’s How Quantum Computers Will Really Affect Cryptocurrencies…
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