Quantum computing bombshells that are not April Fools

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9665

Quantum computing bombshells that are not April Fools

For those of you who haven’t seen, there were actually two “bombshell” QC announcements this week. One, from Caltech, including friend-of-the-blog John Preskill, showed how to do quantum faul…

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One thing I find rather amazing about all of this is the degree to which the Bitcoin community has tried, for years, to claim that quantum computers will be another other than a complete break.

Sure, it takes a pretty nice quantum computer or a pretty good algorithm or a degree of malice on the part of miners to break pay-to-script-hash if your wallet has the right properties, but that seems like a pretty weak excuse for the fact that the entire scheme is broken, completely, by QC.

Does there even exist a credible post-quantum proof protocol that could be used to “rescue” P2SH wallets?

The best proposal I have heard for rescuing P2SH wallets after cryptographically relevant quantum computers exist is to require vulnerable wallets to precommit to transactions a day ahead of time. The precommitment doesn't reveal the public key. When the public key must be exposed as part of the actual transaction, an attacker cannot redirect the transaction for at least one day because they don't have a valid precommitment to point to yet.
24-hour latency to make a payment? What is this, the 20th century?

This is for rescue, not for payment. Once you've moved the coins to quantum-secure wallet, the delay would no longer be needed.

...probably some people would be very inconvenienced by this. But not as inconvenienced as having the coins stolen or declared forever inaccessible.