There is always one person, anti-Bitcoin And blockchain, that will fall back to the ultimate debate ender – ‘What happens to all the blockchains once Quantum Computing is realized?’ Well, according to E-cash inventor David Chaum and his newest cryptocurrency, Praxxis, this won’t be a problem.
Firstly, Quantum computing, without sounding like a physics and tech lecture, is a supercomputer that will be able to solve incredibly complex problems that we have yet even to fathom yet. One of these problems it will be able to crack? A blockchain private key.
The concern for Bitcoin is that currently, it would take roughly 0.65 billion billion years to calculate someone’s private key by solving something called an “elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem,” but with Quantum computing? This takes 10 minutes.
This has led to the creation of Praxxis, allegedly Quantum-computer proof, and this allegation coming from Chaum is nothing to be sniffed at as he is considered a pioneer in cryptography and privacy-preserving technologies.
“Praxxis uses distinctive cryptography which is fundamentally different from that promulgated by government and which is strongly resistant even to quantum-level attack,which avoids the rarely discussed yet fundamental security weaknesses of current widely-used cryptographic tools,” it was said in the release.
The question to be asked: should we really start worrying about quantum threats for blockchain? According to Fact Based Insights, the earliest threat we could see to Bitcoin from quantum computing is probably just over seven years away.
But, this threat is still very theoretical, as well as debatable. One of the biggest believers in Bitcoin, Andreas Antonopoulos, has stated simply that quantum computers cannot break Bitcoin.
“It is certain that the NSA has already built quantum computers. Google has one in their data center, and if they have one, the NSA has one that’s ten times better,” he said in a Q&A session in 2017.
Still, as this debate rages on, there are people at work trying to build up quantum computing resistant cryptography. Chaum claims of being resistant currently are hard to verify, as there is nothing really out there to test them against.
But, in the US, there is a meet where some of the world’s best cryptographers are getting together for a US-sponsored challenge to create a quantum-resistant standard. It is this standard, should they be able to find it, that will be blockchain’s best hope against quantum computing, it is said.
