If elliptic curve cryptography is ever broken, I hope we don't lose too many people to suicide. It's one of those things where people not only could lose their life savings, but also their identity. Not as in their nym, but as someone who is a bitcoiner.
Even if that the cracks show slowly, and new key options are added, there are all those old UTXOs out there that's be ripe for the picking. Even setting aside the broken trust that the system is/will be secure, just think of what that'd do to the economics.
DES was also once thought to be secure. It fell. MD5 was once thought to be secure. It doesn't look so good now. SHA-1 is even showing collissions are easier than we thought.
It seems inevitable that, given a long enough timeline, that all the algorithms will eventually fall from grace.
#RandomMusings
Replies (6)
Do you think there's any kind of recovery for this? Say implement new ecc algos and restart mining on failure block n-1.
If an attacker were smart they would just pick off little bit of dormant coins at a time and try to cash out as much as possible
I think the system would self correct if a bunch of old UTXOs get stolen and then cashed out into the system. I'm of the mind that lost coins don't really help the network so maybe it's a plus after all.
Of course there's no concrete way to discern lost coins from ones still under control
In the event of a complete ECC break, I don't think there is any recovery.
The core problem is that all that old money would be controlled by keys that are indistinguishable from the attacker.
I don't see any way for the legit owner to be able to move them to a new wallet that would use new keys with some other signimg algorithm.
Do you think it's possible to start a bitcoin_v2 from scratch?
