I stumbled upon a research calculating how big of quantum computer required to break bitcoin public key encryption. It will take them 300 million quantum bits to find the corresponding private key given a public key. That wasn’t really the most instructive thing really from that research. The interesting thing is how bitcoin design carefully hides information about the original owner which makes breaking it really challenging.

In this episode I discuss what does it take to break bitcoin encryption.

0:00 Intro

3:00 Public Key Cryptography

6:30 Bitcoin Keys ( Private key/public key and bitcoin address)

8:18 Why do we need a Bitcoin address

11:13 How minors verify transactions

17:30 When is the bitcoin public key visible?

19:12 The Wallet

20:47 What does it take to break bitcoin?

-find wallet.dat file which contain all the keys, some upload that online

-obtain public key from digital sign during a transaction posting. If someone used that public key , obtained the private key, then used it to generate a new ransaction to a different address before this transaction get posted.

-have a bitcoin address in mine satoshi, find out the public key not possible, then find out the private key from the public key, you can take all the time you need here. Because once you find those puppiest you are off to the races

25:20 Bits of security

28:00 My thoughts

Resources

https://avs.scitation.org/doi/10.1116/5.0073075