Quantum computers can't break Bitcoin's signatures today. That isn't the date that matters. The real deadline is the break date minus your migration time, a simple form of Mosca's inequality. New signatures, wallet support, and moving every coin take years. How long would your chain need?
Alice & Bob's new estimate: ~30,000 cat qubits could break Bitcoin's curve in about an hour, under stated assumptions. Ethereum uses the same curve. Solana and Sui also sign with elliptic curves, all vulnerable to Shor's algorithm. Which chain moves off elliptic curves first?
In 2004, Joseph Liu, Victor Wei and Duncan Wong presented linkable ring signatures at ACISP. Monero’s ring signatures sit in that scheme family. Here’s how that line of work landed inside Abelian. 🧵 (1/4) https://t.co/LU1sM5NB0Z
Gold is scarce because of physics. Now it can be made in a lab. Bitcoin is scarce because of cryptography. Quantum computers can break its signatures. abelian:native is hard-capped at 225.18 million, with issuance halving era by era. You could call it the next version of digital gold (after Bitcoin), but with post-quantum security since its first block in 2022, and privacy built in. Just saying.
Before Abelian, @DrDuncanWong was a computer science professor at City University of Hong Kong, researching cryptography. 📚 In 2017, he organized AsiaCrypt in Hong Kong, where he met the researchers who'd later become his co-founders. The question they couldn't stop asking: what happens to Bitcoin when quantum computers mature? Abelian co-founder on how Abelian started.
Two ways Bitcoin could move to quantum-resistant wallets. One: the community agrees on a deadline, and coins that don't migrate lose their value. Two: no consensus, and it's up to each holder to migrate. Abelian co-founder @DrDuncanWong on why the community needs to align before Q-Day.
Vitalik's 2030 outlook lists quantum-safe signatures, possibly several at once, as part of how transactions get authorized. Abelian already works this way. Blanc Fork lets multiple post-quantum algorithms run simultaneously at both wallet and transaction level.
Abelian App v9.0.1 is now live Not having enough gas token when you need to make a transaction is frustrating. Understanding that, Abelian now adds the option to pay gas fees in USDT. In this update: • Pay gas in USDT on TRON, BNB Chain, and Ethereum • Multiple stability and performance fixes If you're still on v9.0.0, we encourage you to upgrade to the new version now. 📲
NIST's draft transition roadmap would deprecate elliptic-curve signatures after 2030 and disallow them after 2035. Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana all sign with elliptic curves. Replacing a signature scheme is not a patch. Spending from a Bitcoin address publishes its public key, so every address that has ever sent a transaction is already exposed, as are the 2009 coins paid to public keys directly. Protecting those requires someone to still hold the keys and actively move the funds. Nobody moves the lost ones. The rest has to happen in one window: every exchange, custodian, wallet, miner and bridge on new keys at once. Anything left behind becomes a target the day the old scheme falls. For scale, SegWit took two years and nearly split the network, and it never touched what makes a signature secure.
Born for the wave.🏄 Thanks @NaoXprotocol for making this wonderful conversation happen!
