r/ethereum • u/NimbleNido • 5d ago
EF researcher Justin Drake posted today about post-AI and the importance of hash-based cryptography. Is the short-term answer to this self-custody?
Seems there's not much more that the average person can do besides generating a new account through self-custody & storing funds there, to an address that never signs, but only receives.
Safety isn't guaranteed by storing a large sum of funds on a centralized exchange for instance, as we don't know what they're doing with the wallets holding our funds behind the scenes.
Is there anything else we can do now to best protect our coins? Any insight to crypto post-quantum? My understanding is Ethereum is far ahead of the rest of the space on this -- thanks!
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u/pinkvoltage90 5d ago
not much you can do besides what you already said, a fresh receive-only address and just sit tight til the protocol-level stuff catches up
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u/r2002 5d ago
Dumb person question here.
Once you put your crypto into a wallet that can never sign for transactions, how do you get the money out to buy or invest in stuff?
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u/fergarrui 5d ago
he doesn't mean to have it in a wallet that can never sign, he means that you should move everything to a brand new wallet and do NOT sign anything or send any funds. His assumption is that AI could accelerate maths research to a point where elliptic curves could be broken.
But tbh if that happens, in reality, most people won't move anything so we'll go to 0 or we'll hard fork everything to a point before the "hack"
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u/r2002 5d ago
Thank you. A few follow ups if you please.
Can you have two wallets A and B. A never interacts with anything except Wallet B. So Wallet A is like your savings account where you put all your crypto. And when you need to use it IRL then you transfer a bit to wallet B, like it's your checking account.
When you say do NOT sign for anything do you mean forever or just until quantum proof solutions are created? I assume the latter but just want to make sure.
How do you think this will affect Eth price and adoption? On one hand calling for Bunker mode sounds bad, on the other hand will this accelerate Eth flipping BTC? How come tradfi isn't panicked about their systems? Should they be?
Would SBET and BMNR be affected by this or are their systems way more secure?
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u/teedeepee 5d ago
- It’s the other way around. The bulk of your funds should stay in a savings account A that only ever receives funds, but never sends. Sending signs a tx that reveals your public key, from which your private key could be derived if ECDSA was to break.
- Not forever, just until ECDSA is superseded by a PQ mechanism. The assumption that being quantum resistant makes it also resistant to a superintelligent math AI.
- PQ has been on the Ethereum roadmap for a while. Ethereum will be fine. But yeah, if EDCSA breaks unexpectedly soon to either advances in math or Shor’s algorithm running on quantum computers, then Ethereum will be the least of the financial world’s worries. It’d be like the Y2K bug all over again, except the bug happens for real, and it happens 36 months sooner than expected such that nobody is prepared.
- SBET and BMNR mirror the ETH price, give or take. If the sentiment toward ETH (and other crypto assets that also rely on ECDSA, which is almost all of them) is negatively affected, then obviously SBET and BMNR will suffer. If Ethereum is among the first to transition to PQ, it could create an upside opportunity.
NFA / DYOR / caveat emptor / etc.
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u/fergarrui 4d ago
- If A sends funds to B, it publishes a pub key to the chain. If A just receives funds and never sends anything out, it should be fine (assuming Justing is right)
- Yeah, the latter. After quantum and after post-AI research.
- I don't think bunker mode will be taken seriously, I am not even sure it makes sense. Most people/companies won't do anything, so if there is an issue, the assets could go to zero, because only a few people/companies will do it. But as I said above we can always rollback to a previous block, it would be a bit a disaster though.
- Their systems use the same baseline than all of us, if there are issues with the cryptography behind ethereum, BTC, etc, everyone will be affected.
But honestly, I think nothing will happen, we'll see!
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u/Xosoltani 4d ago
Honestly, I think self-custody is probably one of the best things users can do right now. But it’s not just about where we keep our funds , the bigger question is how quickly networks and wallets can actually prepare for the post-quantum era, 🙌
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u/NimbleNido 4d ago
100%! & fortunately, the Ethereum Foundation has been having these discussions for years, so I'm hopeful we'll be prepared for the all that Justin's outlined here.
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u/franciscoanconia 5d ago
So if you have funds on a hardware wallet, and you've signed transactions, sent crypto etc from that wallet, you're at risk?
What is the proposed solution here? Moving funds from the existing hardware wallet to a brand new one?
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u/NimbleNido 5d ago
That's my understanding, though, you can always create a new account / address under the same seed -- you won't need a new device as you don't need a new seed, in this case.
When you create that new account, yeah, you'd move the bulk of your funds to it & only sign with a wallet you're not storing substantial amounts of funds in.
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u/definoob01 5d ago
Why is an address that has only received but never sent funds safe from a quantum attack?
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u/teedeepee 5d ago
Because it’s signing a transaction that reveals your public key, and from there a broken EDCSA could derive your private key. Receiving doesn’t disclose your public key (only its hash, which is your wallet address).
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u/NimbleNido 5d ago
I believe it's the public key (that's only generated once an address sends a transaction) that quantum computing poses a threat & has visibility to.
Once your public key is available, your private key would, in theory, be possible for a quantum computer to brute force & attack, by what Justin is claiming here.
An address that has only ever received is more or less 'hiding' behind the hash, something only available one-way (receive) until it's made otherwise, meaning there's nothing for a quantum computer to detect or attack.
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u/Iarguewithretards 4d ago
Good luck with self custody. I prefer large custodians like Fidelity or IBIT whose day job is to keep assets safe. I don’t invest in crypto to make it a full time hobby keeping up with all the hacks and attack vectors etc. I only keep a small amount in a self custody wallet for actual day to day payments
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u/confusedguy1212 5d ago
Does this apply to Ethereum that doesn’t publish the pub key on transaction?
Do all current accounts with coins in them need to be moved to fresh addresses that have no movements in them?
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u/epic_trader 🐬🐬🐬 4d ago
Any account you've used to sign or send from will have exposed pubkey. Receiving coins doesn't expose your pubkey.
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u/theTalkingMartlet 3d ago
How about if we provide the pubkey to a 3rd party syncing service as a "read only" form of sharing, say a tax software that categorizes transactions. Presumably one is at risk in that case as well since you've provided your pub key to an entity out in the wild?
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u/Alphaboy323 4d ago
fresh receive-only addresses help with exposed pubkeys under that threat model, but that feels like a temporary measure, not a full post-quantum migration. i work on starknet, so biased, but the chain-level side is what caught my attention: starknet’s STARK proving layer is hash-based and its accounts can adopt new signature schemes. as an L2 it still inherits some ethereum-facing dependencies. if the goal is bunker mode for a whole chain, does owning the L1 become necessary?
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u/wikidemic 5d ago
Why are smart people using the term ‘superintelligence’?!? Highly suspect that they would buy into BOPOS love of new names so quickly!
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