IS QUANTUM COMPUTING AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT TO BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY? - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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IS QUANTUM COMPUTING AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT TO BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY?

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There is a lot of euphoria surrounding Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies at the moment, and this has translated to exponential rises in prices over the last year. A lot of the hype surrounding cryptocurrencies is justified as nearly every industry in the world can benefit from blockchain technology in one form or another. – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: IS QUANTUM COMPUTING AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT TO BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY?


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Is Quantum computing an existential threat to
Blockchain Technology?
  • There is a lot of euphoria surrounding Bitcoin
    and other cryptocurrencies at the moment, and
    this has translated to exponential rises in
    prices over the last year. A lot of the hype
    surrounding cryptocurrencies is justified as
    nearly every industry in the world can benefit
    from blockchain technology in one form or
    another. But amidst all of the excitement, it is
    essential to evaluate whether the underlying
    technology is resistant to other emerging
    technologies, namely quantum computing.

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  • Since the fundamental of blockchain technology is
    focused on ensuring security in a decentralized
    fashion, lets take a look at how quantum
    technology changes the equation when it comes to
    security.

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How Blockchains work Public Key Cryptography
  • Public key cryptography relies on a pair of
    public and private keys to ensure secure,
    encrypted communication on an unsecured channel.
    Public key cryptography ensures that the message
    received by the receiver is untampered and also
    that the actual sender created it. For example,
    if two users Alice and Bob want to communicate
    with each other using public key cryptography,
    they both can generate public and private keys.

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  • As the name suggests, public keys are
    broadcasted to the entire network while private
    keys are kept secure. Now, if Alice wants to send
    Bob an encrypted message, she can encrypt the
    message using Bobs private key and digitally
    sign the message using her private key. This
    ensures that the message received by Bob can only
    be decrypted by him and the digital signature
    proves that Alice was the creator of that
    message.

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  • The security aspect of this cryptography scheme
    comes from the fact that given the public key, it
    is practically impossible to come up with the
    corresponding private key. In other words, there
    is no way other than guessing and checking
    different private keys. With the current
    computing resources we have, it would take an
    extraordinarily long time to find the correct
    private key.

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  • . In other words, there is no way other than
    guessing and checking different private keys.
    With the current computing resources we have, it
    would take an extraordinarily long time to find
    the correct private key. Assuming that a
    classical computer tested a trillion keys a
    second, it would take up to 1.09 x 1019 years to
    guess the correct answer. To put numbers into
    perspective that is roughly about 785 million
    times longer than the age of the universe
    (approximately 14 billion years) because public
    key cryptography relies on prime numbers for key
    generation.

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The Quantum Threat
  • As it exists, the current paradigm for digital
    security relies heavily on the sanctity of the
    assumptions underlying in the previous section.
    If quantum computers were to make our current
    security framework obsolete, it would also be a
    disaster not only for public key cryptography but
    for all other financial and banking systems as
    they exist today.

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  • The quantum computing threat comes from the fact
    that quantum computing takes advantage of quantum
    bits or qubits that can exist in any
    superposition of values between 0 and 1 and can,
    therefore, process much more information than
    just 0 or 1, which is the limit of classical
    computing systems. As a result, quantum computers
    can handle many orders of magnitude more than
    traditional computers.

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  • Currently, however, quantum computers can only
    work on a limited number of highly specific
    applications. Companies like Google and IBM are
    working on their implementations of quantum
    computers which are said to be a 100 million
    times faster than classical modes of computation.

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How Blockchain will keep up -
  • If in the future, the threat of quantum computers
    becomes more pronounced to public key
    cryptography, there are many changes that
    blockchains can implement to become quantum
    resistant. Already, projects like the Quantum
    Resistant Ledger (QRL) have their implementation
    of a blockchain that will not be affected by the
    exponential increase in computational power of
    quantum computers.

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  • QRL ensures quantum resistance by making sure
    that private keys are generated in a very
    complicated way that relies on hash-based
    cryptography compared to current public key
    cryptography. So far as the consensus algorithm
    of Bitcoin, Proof of Work is concerned, it could
    easily be upgraded using a hard fork that has
    been used several times in the past. Since
    quantum computers can make many hash functions
    obsolete, the underlying Blockchain of many
    tokens would have to change their architecture
    fundamentally.

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Blockchain Council Certifications
  • You can check out our certifications, and kick
    start your career in the Blockchain space today.
  • Certified Blockchain Expert
  • Certified Blockchain Expertv2
  • Certified Blockchain Developer
  • Certified Smart Contract Developer
  • Certified Solidity Developer
  • Certified Ethereum Developer

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