DigiByte and Quantum Computing

It’s something a lot of people are asking more regularly, “What is DigiByte doing to protect against Quantum Computers?”.

It’s a fair question, and one we’ve even seen Vitalik Buterin touch on at his recent conversation at Techcrunch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=976Q2cu1_DE

It’s going to likely affect all blockchains, a super-fast quantum computer that in theory could find your private keys and use it to send your DigiByte (or Bitcoin etc) elsewhere.

There’s a bit on Wikipedia you can find about it, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor%27s_algorithm , however as the article mentions:

If a quantum computer with a sufficient number of qubits could operate without succumbing to noise and other quantum decoherencephenomena, Shor’s algorithm could be used to break public-key cryptography schemes such as the widely used RSA scheme

That’s just it though, those two prohibiting factors are quite an issue at present, not to mention the need for a powerful enough quantum computer.

So what’s being done about it?

Well, right now, nothing.

It’s on the back of a lot of very intelligent peoples minds though, and there will be something done about it one day. However, there are other more pressing things at the moment that people are working on.

As Ricardo “Fluffypony” Spagni mentioned in his interview with Doug Polk, “We’ll know what Quantum Computers look like when they get here”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TATpQ7KogBc

Funds are safu?

Yes, your funds are safe!

It’s going to affect everything from Bitcoin to DigiByte to Ethereum to Monero, and collectively when the time is right we’ll see more preventative work done in the area across all the blockchains.

But for now, it’s not priority #1. Rest assured further work will be done, all in good time. DigiByte has consistently been forward-thinking, with DigiShield, MultiAlgo, the earliest major blockchain to implement SegWit, and this will no doubt be something more to add to the list, all in good time.