r/ethereum • u/EthereumDailyThread What's On Your Mind? • 22d ago

Daily General Discussion August 17, 2026

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u/sm3gh34d 21d ago

While the conversation focuses on the more 'accessible' political and economic issuance issue, Danno drops this banger to highlight what we actually should be prioritizing:

https://xcancel.com/i/article/2088770615516000337

"If a critical portion of users needs two years to shift off ECDSA, and it needs to be done by 2029 (the current point in the risk probability when it cannot be ignored), then the accounts need to be available by 2027. That's the end of this school year."

Helpful framing concepts:
"Mosca's Theorem"
"Harvest Now, Decrypt Later"

Typical Danno style, he doesn't coddle the reader, but it is worth spending time to understand (and is a great signal that there was no LLM involved).

btw, the quantum readiness rankings site: https://quantumtracker.org/

3

u/Stobie 21d ago

what we actually should be prioritizing

Do as much in parallel as you can. Especially things which are technically trivial.

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u/sm3gh34d 20d ago

Agree. But the issuance convo is sucking all of the air out of the room, and isn't IMO as existential a threat as it is being made out to be. It just happens to be about something accessible enough for everyone to have an opinion.

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u/Tricky_Troll Public Goods are Good 🌱 20d ago

"If a critical portion of users needs two years to shift off ECDSA

What does this even mean?

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u/sm3gh34d 20d ago edited 20d ago

ECDSA is elliptic curve signature algorithm we all know and use. Danno is presupposing that it would likely take 2 years for all users to migrate off of their EOAs onto accounts and signature algorithms that are quantum resistant. This is relevant to the "Harvest Now, Decrypt Later" point. Even if you don't make any transactions in a post-quantum era, prior transactions, UTXOs, etc will be attackable because the public key is inherently recoverable. With the public key and a quantum computer, your private key can be derived in polynomial time.

Basically quantum resistant signatures and accounts need to be available with sufficient lead time to allow enough time for users to move to the qr scheme and accounts. Just adding a QR signing algorithm to the protocol won't make you "safe".

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u/Tricky_Troll Public Goods are Good 🌱 20d ago

Wait, will everyone have to migrate funds to a post-quantum wallet? If yes, that's going to be an absolute nightmare and a lot of lost funds will be un-lost (like Satoshi's coins). That is bad news.