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Reminder that I attempted to exhaustively game out the arguments for and against freezing quantum vulnerable bitcoin 9 months ago. The latest round of debate seems to just be rehashing the same arguments, but if I missed any novel points, please let me know!

Replies (21)

What if you can proof you could sign before a particular block height?
User's avatar npub1c0r3...qs7w
Question and idea: QC doesnt put bitcoins historical blockchain at risk right? So if someone creates an OTS proof they own the coins now (I.e. OTS stamping the hash of a signed txn that is never broadcasted), could there be a pathway for spending vulnerable coins post QC if they can produce an OTS proof that existed prior to QC?
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Think about this from the physical perspective. Some (even Satosi) have said that bitcoin is a bit like digital gold. Freezing quantum vulnerable coins basically means that, if you do the hard work and find a long time ago lost gold treasure, and then you don't get to keep it and it will be destroyed. That's quite insane. We should use effort to develop more quantum safety measures and teach people how to use them, but freezing other people's coins just to "protect' them is not the way to go imo.
How does stealing people's Bitcoin prevent a fake threat? A threat that if it was real would also destroy the entire financial industry anyway. If you're worried about quantum computing being a threat to Bitcoin maybe you should start gardening because there will be food shortages if that happens when farmers can't be paid dollars to buy fuel for their tractors etc.
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I read the article, I read the BIP. I am trying to think through this rationally and not jump to any conclusions one way or another. Can you elaborate on one thing for me? It looks, from my reading, that the biggest argument for freezing / burning / whatever the "vulnerable" coins is because if they come to market they will have a negative price impact. Am I interpreting this correctly?
That's one major issue. Other issues are incentivizing procrastinators to upgrade their security, plus protecting users from losing their coins to an attacker.
Matt Corallo's avatar Matt Corallo
I believe you missed that disallowing β€œQuantum Recovery” is required in order to allow a majority of coins to be recovered by their rightful owners! We can allow people to spend funds if they can prove that they were built using a seedphrase and they know the seedphrase, but this only works if vulnerable spend paths are prevented!
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Personally, I don't think price action is a valid reason to make these changes. Lots of people and institutions would get rekt if over leveredged and we'd come out stronger, no? From a game theory angle, let's look at me, an economic node. Albeit a small one, but probably somewhat indicative of other vendors around the world producing value and trading it for sats. If the at risk coins are stolen and flood the market then for the period of time while price is suppressed I trade my goods for more sats. I don't see the incentive to switch if it comes down to a hard fork. I think people like me are "sticky" to our current node implementations and individually we may seem insignificant we are definitely here in the world creating value and storing it in sats. Cumulatively we're worth something. So we would still be here, doing lots of small transactions which would generate fees. Lots of small sat transactions are more valuable to miners than a few big ones if everybody is paying the same fee rate. This, plus the incentive to mine the quantum stolen coins for what would likely be juicy fees makes me think that more miners would choose the original (non-frozen) chain.
I'm not saying you are. I'm saying I don't see the incentive for a small economic node, such as myself, to switch to the chain with frozen coins if it comes down to one. Wouldn't a hard fork be almost inevitable? I may be missing something but if some nodes and miners "switch off" old utxos while others don't how could the chain not split? Especially because these frozen utxos will be trying to become active and get into blocks.