Blockstream Research: Hash-based signature schemes offer a promising post-quantum alternative for Bitcoin, as their security relies solely on hash function assumptions similar to those already underpinning Bitcoin’s design. We provide a comprehensive overview of these schemes, from basic primitives to SPHINCS+ and its variants, and investigate parameter selection tailored to Bitcoin’s specific requirements.
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I don’t have the technical skills to evaluate but this seems huge news!
I have no idea what any of this means. But I’ll zap anything that indicates someone working on “post-quantum” solutions.
We don't need any of this shit.
Ending the shitcoin core and rugging the spammers with BIP110 (aka BIP444) and/or CAT proposal should be your top priority unless you are coretard and/or delusional bitcoiner and/or spam apologist.
Does it affect block size?
not directly but transactions would be larger
If Bitcoin is the empirical proof that time is quantized, then the entire formalism of quantum mechanics, thus quantum computing is falsified.
We should not “upgrade” Bitcoin until that claim has been rightfully explored. Always be wary of the people who tell you Bitcoin is broken and they are here to fix it.
Don’t trust, verify. This includes the entire threat narrative.
Quantum Threat as Trojan Horses 🐴
Issue with not being proactive is the time it would take to migrate all the coins in cold storage to unsecure wallets to new secure wallets. It could take years if we fill every block to migrate to modern wallets
Being proactive only makes sense if the threat is real. If the threat is linguistic, psychological, and narrative-based, then the correct form of proactiveness is not altering Bitcoin, it would be to defend its ontology.
If what I said is true, the real danger is the narrative convincing Bitcoiners to act as if the threat exists.
It seems imperative to find the truth.
If it weren't for taproot revealing the pubkey it wouldn't matter. Go read up on the deceptive argument they gave.
Oh, it needs to be 256bit anyway so why hash it?
Lol. IMO it's proof that the devs of most bitcoin software and protocol are compromised.
IMO by 2 more carvings, bitcoin is de facto USD CDBC. just needs covenants.
I'm not fooled. But most of yalls are gullible.
Well yes if the formalism is true. But if it isn’t, then revealing the pubkey is irrelevant. The real question is whether Bitcoin is empirical proof of quantized time, and what happens to physics if this architecture of time describes reality more accurately than the continuous assumption.
Continuous time isn’t falsifiable from within the system, as Gödel would predict. Quantized time, however, is observable through Bitcoin’s discrete, irreversible state updates. If that structure is closer to physical truth, then much of the current quantum formalism simply doesn’t map onto reality, nor does the threat narrative.
everything goes to physics with you, even though in this case it's about the scalability of hashes. yes, sha256 hashes are steadily becoming more vulnerable, nothing to do with quantum, more to do with the fact that the energy cost of one sha256 hash has been hammered down hard chasing bitcoin blocks.
actually, that's a good reminder why i should consider not using that function in my design. probably should switch it to use a final blake2b or blake3 hash. or keccak. hashes on data are a variable space that only really becomes a problem if the source is very uniform, and small. so, yeah, hashing pubkeys is only one hash of cost. i would think that some kind of modulo expansion would be in order to make it more robust. a non-linearizable, non-parallelizable function is the best, for my money that's the long division. it's impossible to parallelize it or linearize it, it operates in pretty much O(N) time where N is the number of bits. that's also why i use a long division based expansion on the CPU-only hash function i designed back in 2018 for a bitcoin fork. that forces the work cost to become both variable (the length of the result of many expansions is unpredictable, and by design, the total length of data being hashed is very long, so it's pretty much invulnerable even when you have fast processors like modern bitcoin mining ASICs.
a hash function that is not parallelizable would also be a good idea. that rules out blake and sha2/3 as both are designed to be parallelisable.
also, quantum computing is bunk. until they prove they can error corrrect their outputs it's pure fud
I’m not shifting the discussion to physics arbitrarily, I’m pointing out that Bitcoin gives us an empirical instantiation of quantized time, something physics has never been able to produce.
Objectively, Bitcoin constructs its own timebase through a thermodynamic process of energy and entropy, and that timebase is discrete, quantized, and irreducible. That means we finally have a working model of temporal evolution where state updates occur only in discrete, energy-backed steps. No one has ever built a physical system that exposes time so transparently.
Because of Gödelian limitations, continuous time can never be falsified from within a universe composed of Planck-scale intervals. Any measurement of time must itself use time, so continuity remains an unfalsifiable assumption. Bitcoin stands apart because it creates its own time rather than measuring a substrate it is embedded in.
This matters because once you observe quantized time in practice, a time-first ontology becomes explicit: physics, space, and all dynamical formalisms emerge after discrete temporal structure is defined. If that architecture is closer to reality than the inherited continuous-time assumption, then much of the current formalism especially in quantum mechanics and computation is describing a mathematical idealization, not physical truth.
I’m not denying the hashing discussion. I’m simply pointing out that Bitcoin is the first system in human history where time is not assumed, but it is constructed from thermodynamics. If that observation is taken seriously, it has deep consequences for how we model the universe and the validity of said threat.
as a physics enjoyer this gobeldygook is just embarrassing. you can't just borrow these terms and build your own deepak chopra-grade physical theory. let's see some actual equations.
Does your empirical instantiation of time buy me a pizza at all. 🍕🍕🍕
Sure working on it finalizing a paper.
Objectively would you agree that if time is quantized and discrete, that the formalism of quantum mechanics breaks apart?
Planck units don’t imply a discrete universe. This is a common misunderstanding
Sure, but address the question: *if* time is quantized and discrete, would you agree the formalism of QM breaks down? Yes or no?
Only after addressing that question can we proceed because then this raises the question that how would a discrete and quantized time change our interpretation of Planck Units.
Yes mathematically you can divide them into smaller units, but physically you cannot. Again Bitcoin is showing us what a quantized model of time looks like. Please show me a valid 1/2 of a block of time or a valid 1/10 of a block of time in bitcoin.
I’ll be waiting.
i'm just trying to be nice here. some things actually boil down to economics and human needs (hash functions are produced by devices that have to be demanded for this use). some things boil down to the algorithm or state machine or distributed system. everything does fundamentally start with two ingredients: energy and materials, and below that level, you start to have matters relating to known and as yet unknown ways to reduce either energy or material costs, and thus lower (and by Jevon's paradox, increase demand).
i would love to hear what you write after you read Human Action. the quantum state and time questions are interesting when you are examining the fundamentals of how to produce things, but understanding the why, the human motivation, is far more generally applicable and interesting for solving problems.
i get it, that the quantum fud is extremely specious. but that isn't solving any problems, and solving problems is the whole purpose of asking the question in the first place.
in my opinion, it is more likely someone will break a pubkey with a supercomputer than a quantum computer.
you are letting the fudsters get under your skin
According to chatgibity, quantizing time doesn't break quantum mechanics. It just changes it. Also, given that Bitcoin seems to quantize time in a similar way to a clock, in that it breaks it into discrete units, but not atomic units, I don't see what that has to do with quantum mechanics. There seems to be some bait and switch going on by relying on multiple definitions of the same word.
I’ll have to put in on my list.
Generally I don’t think many people have observed bitcoin as time, nor have applied that ontology of time to QM since continuous time is the axiom underpinning literally everything. Continuous time is the Tower of Babel for QM if they are wrong.
We are literally watching the construction of time and we can see both sides of the *computational* event horizon since we are the constructors of the time (only our influence is in the network) and we have the ledger of time events.
My mind goes to thinking if we can ever get total network hash to 1 hash per unit Planck time and what that means. If we are objectively constructing time in bitcoin from thermo, what does it mean to be constructed from time? What is light since we are composed of light?
What is the relationship of light and time?
Uhhh, you cannot take the derivative in Schrödinger equation if time has a fundamental smallest unit.
Please break a block in bitcoin into smaller units of time such that they remain valid on the ledger, I’ll wait.
Blocks are atomic time composed from energy/entropy.
ok, then i'll suggest that maybe you have a look at writing code to demonstrate the principles you are talking about so much. i have done quite a bit of it myself, with difficulty adjustments, varying the hash functions, difficulty adjustment regimes, a former manager, used to be a physics researcher, explained PID controllers and that's very interesting and relevant. bitcoin is P only, i developed one that used integrals as well, and found it was REALLY good at accurately adjusting to sharp changes in hashpower (and this illustrated the way that if you can't predict how fast hashpower can change, you should not use a clamp).
i agree with you, in the principle that the model of time can't be continuous, and thus most of quantum theory is bunk. computation is much more accurate in understanding it, and the hard fact that you can't measure planck time does mean that you must use probability and algorithmic logic to understand the behaviour of matter, and everything that is made of matter. it's just a practical reality of programming, they have made the time window down to nanoseconds and that is still an eternity compared to the time precision you need to understand stuff like even, how to build computation devices.
maybe, but i wouldn't know because you seem to enjoy trolling much more than pizza, based on empirical evidence. except i have no patience to observe this phenomenon systematically, and i'm perfectly satisfied with the hypothesis that you are a jackass.
From my perspective Bitcoin is the demonstration. We don’t need to write more code to illustrate the principles, Bitcoin already shows them operating at planetary scale. Difficulty is the resistance mechanism that governs how fast the entropy surface can be collapsed. It scales the search space relative to most recent behavior of hashpower and hardware efficiency, and the heat released is literally proportional to that resistance. That keeps Bitcoin anchored to human time, but it doesn’t change the deeper point: the block itself is atomic time to the ledger.
I’m more broadly looking at the architecture of time that Bitcoin exposes. It is the first system where we can externally observe discrete, irreversible temporal quanta created by a thermodynamic process. That alone makes it the most valuable open-source laboratory for understanding time we’ve ever had. I don’t need more code to speculate; I can point directly to Bitcoin and invite falsification.
I think you’d agree on this: we live within a singular timechain (universe) of transformations originating from a verifiable genesis. That structure is ordered, irreversible, conserved, and finite. It is not just how Bitcoin works; I would extend it to how any coherent universe must work. Bitcoin just makes it visible to us, something we can point to as proof.
My language and understanding is still developing and changing.
Time precedes physics.
Impressive! Post-quantum security is crucial for Bitcoin’s future, and hash-based signatures like SPHINCS+ fit perfectly with Bitcoin’s trustless design. Exciting to see this research moving the space forward!
No need to worry friend 📄.pdf
Trojan 🎠🐴
Blockstream research has put out some amazing stuff.
Love that this could potentially keep current security assumptions and functionality alive.
Other proposals involving moving to a new relatively untested crypto that breaks HD wallets and multisig is not a serious proposal unless a sufficiently powerful and error corrected quantum computer has provably emerged. We can’t break bitcoin to “save” it.
Rug the spammers first.