Transcript
Sponsor/Announcer (0:00)
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Laura Shin (0:04)
Welcome to Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Thanks for joining this live stream. Before we get started, a quick reminder, nothing you hear on Unchained is investment advice. This show is for informational and entertainment purposes only and my guests and I may hold assets discussed in the show. For more disclosures, visit unchained crypto.com introducing
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Laura Shin (0:44)
Today's topic is the threat that quantum computing poses to crypto and why it may arrive a lot more quickly than people have been expecting. Here to discuss are Alex Pruden, Co founder and CEO of Project 11, and and Delev Bleufstein, CEO of Oratomic. Welcome Alex and Delev.
Alex Pruden (1:02)
It's a pleasure to be here.
Delev Bleufstein (1:04)
It's a great pleasure.
Laura Shin (1:06)
The two big news stories this morning, they are about breakthroughs in quantum computing and these likely change the timeline for when crypto and blockchains need to have post quantum technology. And that deadline is now three years away, at least according to this Google paper. So that's 2029. Google announced it had published this white paper showing that future quantum computers could break elliptic curve cryptography, which secures certain crypto assets, for example, the public keys and Bitcoin and Ethereum. They actually didn't fully describe the vulnerabilities and how they did this. What they did was they provided a zero knowledge proof that they had done this to keep bad actors from using the information. Alex, can you start by telling us more about this news and what it means for the cryptocurrency currency community?
Alex Pruden (1:59)
Yeah, absolutely. I, I think so. There's a couple notable pieces. First off, what, first thing that was notable was Google, right? So Google and not just Google. Right. But a member of the Ethereum foundation. Actually Justin Drake, who leads the Ethereum foundation, was a co author as well as Dan Bonet, who's a prominent Stanford professor. So I think the, you know, that lends some credibility to, I think what some have been saying about this problem for a while. So that's, that's, that's thing one. Thing two, you already mentioned it was a zero knowledge proof that kind of described the circuit or the rough approach. And they did that explicitly because they believed that, hey, they didn't want a bad Actor to use this. The third thing that I would say is the analysis that they did was very comprehensive. And I think I would encourage everyone to at least read the abstract or even skim the paper, because if you're, if you're in digital assets, because they covered quite a breadth of potential attack vectors that is not often discussed. So in addition to Bitcoin, Satoshi's Bitcoin, that's kind of always what comes up in the quantum conversation. They talk about things like stable coins, some people mention, but even systems like zero knowledge proof systems or data availability systems for layer twos, all of those are covered. And explicitly the vulnerabilities to a quantum computer are described. And so I would say the totality of kind of the vulnerability was a key takeaway. And I think it makes sense if you think about it. Right. You said elliptic curve cryptography. Elliptic curve cryptography is the foundation of pretty much all digital assets, and it's the foundation of all digital assets because it's been proven to be secure classically and it's generally really performance. And so everyone's gotten really used to the elliptic curve cryptography and it's gotten built into all of these things. And I think the Google paper just kind of by saying, hey, all of these things are broken. But it really is saying elliptic curve cryptography might be broken. But this is like it was describing the implications, which I think has been good. I don't think there's anyone who's done quite as good of a job of describing all the ways in which it has an impact.
