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Bip 360

All articles tagged with #bip 360

Google's 2029 Quantum Upgrade Sparks Bitcoin Security Questions
technology16 days ago

Google's 2029 Quantum Upgrade Sparks Bitcoin Security Questions

Google has announced a 2029 deadline to migrate its systems to post-quantum cryptography, citing growing quantum hardware capabilities that could undermine current encryption and digital signatures. While Bitcoin faces long-term cryptographic risk from quantum attacks like Shor’s algorithm, upgrading Bitcoin is a decentralized, multi-stakeholder effort that won’t happen overnight. Initiatives such as BIP 360 introducing Pay-to-Merkle-Root are beginning to prepare for quantum-resistant signatures, and some estimates suggest a sizable portion of Bitcoin addresses could be vulnerable in a future quantum era—though exact timelines for practical quantum attacks remain uncertain.

Bitcoin Edges Toward Quantum-Resistant Upgrades as Experts Split on Urgency
technology1 month ago

Bitcoin Edges Toward Quantum-Resistant Upgrades as Experts Split on Urgency

Bitcoin developers merged BIP-360 into the GitHub repository to establish a post-quantum framework, introducing Pay-to-Merkle-Root to disable the quantum-exposed key-path spend and laying groundwork for future quantum-safe signatures; the change is not yet activated and would require broad consensus to deploy. Within the community, experts are divided on how soon a quantum threat could matter: some, like Caltech’s president, project fault-tolerant quantum systems in 5–7 years, while others including NIST guidance and researchers like CoinShares and Jameson Lopp say practical quantum risks are still years or even decades away, underscoring ongoing debates about timing and the challenges of upgrading a ossified decentralized network.